Goals vs. resolutions

For the last couple of years, sometime around New Year’s Day, I have written down goals for the coming year. I’m calling them goals, not resolutions, because I think that there’s a difference, and that goals work better, at least for me.

Here’s an example of what I don’t like in a resolution. Let’s say that for any number of reasons (health, life-experience, eco-guilt), you’ve decided that riding your bike is to be encouraged over driving. And so you make the following resolution:

“I will bike to work every Wednesday, without fail!”

Now, what’s wrong with this resolution?

1) It’s very very likely to fail. Rain, vacation, illness – any of those could blow it for you.
2) It’s binary – you either fail or you don’t.
3) On M, T, Th, Fr, Sa, Su, there is absolutely nothing you can do to work on this.

A very likely outcome is that one rainy Wednesday in February you have blown your resolution, and now what’s your guide for the rest of the year, other than feeling vaguely crappy about having blown it?

Here’s a goal I like better:

“I will bike to work 50 times this year!”

How is this different from the resolution version?

1) It’s hard to blow completely until very late in the year. All you can do is fall behind.
2) It’s actually possible to exceed the goal. You could end up doing it 55 times, and feel especially good.
3) You can actually do something about this almost any workday.
4) You can get ahead, temporarily
5) You can get partial credit. Biking 40 times is better than biking 0 times, even if it’s not hitting the target.

Sure, there’s the “danger” that you will bike twice a week in the first half of the year, and then be done, and stop biking, and get fat. But let’s be real here – what are the chances? And as downsides go, how bad is that one?

Even better, I think, is

“I will put N miles on the bike this year!”

Now, you can’t goalize every resolution like this. There are things you have to resolve always to do, or never to do. You can’t say “I will be not-mean to my family on at least 200 days this year!”, or set very low targets for the numbers of murders you will commit per month. But for active, intermittent, achievement-oriented activities I think goals are better.

I wish I could close by saying that when I switched to listing goals rather resolutions I started to nail them all, but looking back on 06, hmm, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. This year, though, I resolve that I’ll hit _every_ goal.

Goodbye 2006

OK 2006, see ya later. I can’t say that I’m sorry, or that I’ll miss you too much.

Professionally it was actually challenging, fun, and (at the end) tumultuous in not a bad way, and 2006 sends me out somewhat crisply, with me wrapping up my former job in December and starting a new one in January. (I’ll post about that tomorrow. ) Personally, though, 2006 was pure disaster area. Maybe I’ll see it differently someday, and maybe I’ll appreciate it for the belated personal growth it forced on me, but I’m not feeling that yet.

I think, though, that I start 2007 with one real advantage compared to previous years. This year I *know* that I don’t know what’s going to happen(!).

Smiley on a stick

In her interview with me, Sugarrae said “He is definitely a witty guy, but has a stern way of saying things sometimes that leaves you wondering if he was being serious or simply having fun with you. “.

She’s right – although I make jokes _all_ the time, I never smile when I do, for some reason (shyness? introversion? the long shadow of my Puritan ancestry?). I’ve known about this deadpan-humor problem of mine for a while, but it was sharp of Rae to notice it like within five minutes of meeting me. Usually people just think I am prone to say very serious yet very odd things, and are baffled and uneasy until they they get to know me.

J. came up with a brilliant solution to my meatspace problem – physical emoticons! That’s right, all I need to do is carry around a smiley sticker on top of, like, a popsicle stick and hold it up whenever I’m not serious. That’s the signal to laugh (if it’s funny), or not laugh (if it’s not funny) or (more likely) to begin backing away slowly, saying calming things. The Internet has taught us _so_ much.

Leaving Yahoo!

I’ve been mulling this one for a while, but finally had to pull the trigger. I’ll be leaving Yahoo! Search at the end of the month, and going to a small startup.

The decision was hard, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with my Yahoo! job. The people in Engineering, Research and Applied Research (the last of those being where I currently work) are both top-flight and really nice. The company has been good to me, and kept giving me more scope and new interesting problems to work on. And I am proud of the team that I’ve put together over the last couple of years.

I’m also optimistic about Yahoo! Search itself. The search-ad quality and monetization problems are real, and have been well-publicized, but seem to be getting fixed (although I hasten to say that I don’t have inside info on that part of the org, and get my news about it once a quarter just like everyone else). And I think anyone who makes a serious study of organic web search quality (you know, those listings down below the ads ) knows that that the top two players (Y and G) are neck-and-neck. Who is going to have the highest-quality general web search a year from now? I think it’s still going to be a brutal battle between the current top three (including MSN), and the winner will be whoever can innovate and execute the fastest. I’m sorry I’m going to watch that particular game from the sidelines, because it’s definitely not even halftime yet.

As to the broader company …. it’s honestly hard for me to come away with a single opinion. Companies as large as Yahoo! are inevitably mosaics of technologies and subcultures, and even more so when (as with Y!) much of their growth has been by acquisition. Some of Y!’s strategic planning has been brilliant IMHO (including locking up Overture, Inktomi, and Altavista a few years ago); some plays haven’t been well thought through; some have been perfectly well thought through, but just didn’t happen to work. Yahoo! to its credit, is willing to experiment, and seems to be heading in a direction that will let it experiment even more aggressively. The efforts to kickstart a culture of experimentation (through Hack Days, Developer APIs) have been more successful than anyone could have predicted.

But anyway, blogs are supposed to be an exercise in narcissism, so enough about Yahoo! – back to me! Why am I leaving? Well, it’s mostly just that I’ve never worked for a startup before (well, except for a couple of very unfunded and _very_ small ones ), and have always wanted to mix it up a little betwen startups and bigcorps. I’ll blog more about the particular startup later, but suffice it to say that there’s an odd convergence of both people and subject matter from a couple of different phases of my life (i.e. both AI grad school and the web search era). And I have tasted the secret sauce, and I have drunk some of the kool-aid, and found them to be tasty and refreshing. All of which left me thinking: “OK, so you want to work at a startup at some point – if not this one, then what? and when?” I couldn’t come up with an answer.

It’s particularly hard to leave friends that you have worked with for so long. I joined Inktomi in April 2002, so in some sense I’ve been at the same job for close to five years, which as we know is an eon in internet time units. I’ve had to remind myself that my friends will remain my friends, regardless of where I’m working, and that I can’t make career decisions based on my desire to continue playing foosball and billiards in the same place.

The convention

“Are you here for the convention, sir?”, the taxi driver says brightly as we pull away from the Las Vegas airport. I love the “the” in that question. I wonder how many visitors to the thousands of of tradeshows that Vegas hosts every year are momentarily cheered to realize that their yearly meeting is so important that even the cabbies know about it….

A concise counter-argument to the idea of confidence as a desirable personality trait

There’s a pop-psychotherapeutic idea floating around out there to the effect that confidence is a good thing. Confident people are to be emulated; less confident people are to be encouraged to be more confident.

I’ve felt for a while that this idea is wrong and dangerous – that confidence (in yourself) is like trust (in others), in that it’s a good thing when warranted and a terrible thing when unwarranted (kind of like its sister concept “self-esteem”).

So I set out to write a little essay about this. Now I am a wordy guy by nature (and prolix), and so my first draft was 75,000 words (including footnotes, end notes, and of course the occasional lengthy and tangential parenthetical comment). After a month or two of editing with Strunk&White by my side, though, I’ve managed to reduce the length by 74,998 needless words, and am now ready to present my revised essay to you in its entirety. Are you ready?

Donald Rumsfeld.

Thank you for your attention.

Rocketbelts

Here’s a cool article on rocketbelts in Slate. Clearly the next big thing after we all get our flying cars.

The big problem (and, no doubt, the main barrier to serious consumer adoption) seems to be maintaining stability. (Check the quote about a bad flight: “I felt like I was a balloon someone blew up and let go.”) Staying pointed in the right direction (which seems usually to be: upright) requires fine-grained manual control of the thrusting rockets.

Now, doesn’t this balance-and-orientation thing seem like something that should really be controlled by the machine, a la Segway, rather than by hand? Dean Kamen, are you listening? Mailmen, foot-patrol cops, and warehouse restockers are limited to a miserable top speed of 12 miles/hr right now, not to mention the embarrassing limitation to the 2D surface world. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the future *I* want to be living in.

On a horse right now. ttyl.

A couple of weeks ago I took a four-day weekend to visit my long-time friend Jeff in Denver. Back in the day, this was a drinking-buddy friendship, with much time spent fruitfully in the taverns and pool halls of Chicago. Lately, though, we spend more time fine-dining (Jeff’s a serious foodie), doing stuff outdoors, and playing stupid games (a constant).

Most of the trip was spent around Breckenridge, a ski resort in its low-key off-season, checking out the sights, doing some cautious high-altitude hiking (with me acclimated to sea level, Jeff acclimated to one mile up), and competing with ferocious intensity at mini-golf and alpine slide races. (The alpine slide is a luge-like affair on a track, which seems to be the latest clever idea about how to monetize a chair-lift in the summer. By the way, it would be very hurtful to point out to me that all these amusements were really designed for kids, so please don’t do it.)

On that Saturday, we figured that we had time for one more outdoorsy activity before heading back to Denver to hang with Jeff’s family (where I enjoyed dancing with the kids and telling Jeff’s wife T all my troubles). Biking, white-water rafting, hot-air ballooning – all considered and rejected. And this is how it came to be that when JP sent me a text message that afternoon, she got back: “On a horse right now. ttyl.” She must have found this puzzling, and must have looked for a metaphorical interpretation, because the literal interpretation would be that I was … on a horse, which was not consistent with any previous experience. And yeah, I found it amusingly yuppie and SiliconValley to bother texting someone on my Treo while trying to ride for the first time. Here’s a picture, which Jeff’s wife described as “a little Brokebacky, but cute” (I’m the one on the right.)

So how bad is my luck going to be _now_?

Due to a fateful domestic-adoption decision several months back, a black cat now crosses my path about 20 times a day (and maybe hundred times a day on the weekend). I guess if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all (and if it wasn’t for disappointments I wouldn’t have any appointments…).

Airport security lines

Yesterday (Friday 8/11) I was scheduled for a noon flight from Seattle back from San Jose. Mindful of liquid security risks, I first of all threw away all the moistizurers, lotions, conditioners, exfoliants, depilatory creams, oxidizing potions, anti-wrinkle solutions, whitening pastes, and sculpting gels that make up my 2-hour beautification regime each morning. (Just kidding. But my toothpaste did have to go, because I only had one bag and was not about to subject my Powerbook to checked luggage.)

Then I left the hotel at about 9am (for a noon flight), got there in 25 minutes, got my boarding pass, and waited in the security line for … about five minutes, getting me to the gate about 9:45. Aside from one TSA person shouting loudly and completely unintelligibly about what could and could not be taken on board, it seemed to be business as usual.

Good thing I like to read. In fact, getting to the airport early never seems like that much of a bummer to me – get some coffee, find a seat, tune out the world, and read a book. What’s so bad about that?