Category Archives: Figure Stuff Out

You are four years old, recently having discovered the perfect cream-white texture, the chewiness, the delicious fulfillment that is the sweet goodness of a marshmallow.

Then you are in a room, and there is just you and a single marshmallow resting silently on a plate.  You gaze intensely at it, pondering whether to reach out for gratification.  It stares back at you, quietly reading your thoughts, watching your watering mouth.  Smirking.  

You look around.  You are alone.  You want the marshmallow, and there is no one to stop you.

But there is one catch – If you can wait 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows instead.  Two!

It is often easier to promise ourselves productivity in the future than to get something done now. Economists call this common phenomenon present bias — a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow; losses in the future is better than losses now.

But we are not always so characteristically myopic.  Many scientists agree that humans are the only animals capable of envisioning a “future self,” performing behaviors seemingly counter-intuitive.  Earning a living is generally less pleasurable than spending money, but most of us accept the investment necessary for a better future.

So if you were among the group of children who managed to fend off temptation for 15 minutes, research data show that you may become more successful as an adult.

Yes, there is evidence-based correlation between a child’s ability to postpone the pleasure of eating a marshmallows and future success.

In today’s world, marshmallows are among the less common objects of temptation for children and adults alike.  Instead, we are driven by the intense desire to check text messages even when driving, the need to reduce news to sound bites, following microblogs lasting 140 characters or less.

There are established implausibility and flaws in the marshmallow study, but one underlying lesson is still valid – the skills that enables one to balance between immediate gratification and long-term reward is a component of success.  (In marginally-related news, napping – a strategy used by some children in the original study – is later thought to actually improve productivity.)

Pull out a hip new mobile device and people will ask you about Twitter, Vine, Pinterest (social network, 6-second videos, social scrapbook).

Spend four years in medical school, and people will approach you with aches and pains.

Put on a nice suit for a job interview, and people will be more likely to hire you over the next guy in T-shirts, even if no one ever wears suits to work at that company.

Our personal decisions have a way of exuding information – intended or otherwise – to those around us. At the same time, we constantly take in cues from body language, facial expressions, even outfit, and make subconscious preliminary assumptions about others. It’s part of our evolutionary advantage – to see danger before it pulls out a giant wooden sign saying so in bold letters.

It means being human.

Finding a niche is a common advice for young professionals and new start-up companies alike.  How do you become the world expert in something?  Easy – Just make sure that “something” is so specific that few people in the world knows anything about it.

But maybe the phrase “finding your niche” is a misnomer – maybe the ideal niche career doesn’t sit in the heart of a trigger-laden cave waiting for the clever paleontologist with a famously clingy hat to discover it.

Innovation guru and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen applies his life’s work on how innovative startups defeat business giants by finding a niche market (described in Innovator’s Dilemma).  Most successful companies switched “jobs” over its career.  Mini-mills in the steel industry were not revolutionarily powerful innovations; the initial concept was to make it cheaper to make scrap metal – the throw-away market in steel operation.  But through hard work and willingness to adapt, mini-mills finally began to enter the lucrative sheet steel market.

Netflix began with the bottom of the market, holding customers only in areas that had no Blockbuster stores; today Netflix’s popularity is not so much in the initial niche concept of mail order DVDs as much as in its ability to move to the internet with the rest of the world.  Apple is best known today by its mobile devices, but as recent as 10 years ago it made money mostly on personal computers.

People are similar to businesses in one respect – our careers will take frequent turns before they settle.

For people and businesses alike, there are few truly brilliant niches in which to grab and ride into the sunset.  Instead, success is a good idea that take on additional features and become its own niche overtime.

A career is not found; it is built.  So may be it doesn’t matter too much where we start.  The key is keeping an eye on the road and be willing to make a few corners – even if a few of them are U-turns.

I was lucky enough to have some time to kill this past weekend.  I was in the mood for a comedy, so I turned to NetFlix and Amazon Prime.

Online on-demand video services are the Pantheon of small screen entertainment, housing tens of thousands of options.  Television show or movie?  What kind of comedy?  Romantic comedy, regular comedy, serious movies with comedic moments, comedies with a political message, sitcoms, sitcoms all about hooking up, sitcoms about absolutely nothing, comedies about being a doctor.  The list goes on.

The decision was difficult to make as I simply kept scrolling down to see the next page of choices – why settle for the second best choice you could find when the first might be on the next page?

Finally, I got frustrated and ended up turning on the TV and surfed between The Godfather, Harry Potter, and Chopped – none of which were comedies but did the trick of providing thinking-optional entertainment.

I knew the choice is almost trivial. In fact, I was fully aware that making the choice was creating unnecessary frustration relative to the marginal “better experience” it would create.  I knew what mattered was not the precise category, or the cast, or even the type of show/movie.  But there is something about having all these choices that made the decision difficult to make.

Yes, choosing a TV show is a trivial, first-world problem, but that is precisely the point.  We now live in a country where almost every decision is complicated not by the lack but by the abundance of choices.  We are taught to decide by placing these choices side by side and pick the better one.  Although logical, this approach sometimes leads to unnecessary agony as the mental angst in differentiating outweighs the marginal improvement that the better choice provides.

Sometimes we might be better off not having thousands of choices to choose from and just going with whatever happens to work.  Just turn on the TV, watch whatever happens to be on, and chill out.