Up until recently, I’d read books cover to cover without a thought of making note of anything. I’d tell myself if there was an important concept covered, I’d remember it somehow. And then I found myself reading dozens of books a year, barely remember any of them along the way. The worst example was when I read halfway through Robert Greene’s Mastery, without realizing I had already it read less than a year prior.

I realized this was an issue when I started getting requests for recommendations, and I couldn’t even form an opinion about most books, let alone summarize the key points.

I recently made a conscious effort to incorporate note taking back into my reading, and  I’ve come to love the process. Bookmarks, notes and marginalia make reading an active experience. If your goal is to simply read and enjoy, you may not need this. But if your goal is to understand. To absorb the knowledge. Then it may be worth a try.

It’s more work. It’s slower, but for me at least, it’s helped me ensure I never  squander an opportunity to learn a new concept.

This is why things in commercials don’t look like they do in real life pic.twitter.com/sH2vrLAm7g #HowThingsWork

— Farbod Saraf (@farbodsaraf) November 25, 2018

This is expectation vs reality in .gif form, and shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever ordered a hamburger from a fast food restaurant.

Of course, the practice of fooling the senses and building up the expectations vs reality is not limited to food. It happens with the worker who has a puffed up resume and LinkedIn profile, but can’t do the analysis work that the job requires. Or the tech product that promises to reinvent how our company communicates, but once implemented, turns out to be more trouble than its worth.

It’s unpopular to show the truth, but this is slowly changing: In food there’s a big focus on organic, “real” food, which, combined with the the popularity of instagramming meals has made messy food popular again.  But the good news is nearly every other area of culture and business is changing too—giving more visibility to the buyer, and less opportunity for the seller to hide behind smoke and mirrors.

What if we got out ahead of this change, and started to show up with the truth from the beginning? Admitting we’re strong in X but not in Y. Making it clear what’s the vision for the product vs what’s a tangible feature today. It might make for a less photogenic hamburger, but it sends a clear signal:  we’re not hiding something behind the guise of “perfection”.

When I was a kid on Thanksgiving, I’d always feel bad for my mom who had to cook all the dishes, mostly alone. On the outside it looks like a chore. And in some ways it is, but having been the Thanksgiving chef a few times now, there’s some satisfaction to coordinating it all.

I  recently read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and it only just dawned on me the scope of the chef’s true job in the kitchen. They’re not just figuring out the recipes – they’re coordinating the flow of the kitchen, ensuring ingredients are on hand, putting out fires. There’s satisfaction (and stress) to running a kitchen, just like there is to leading any team or operation.

But perhaps the biggest lesson is that a kitchen is not an assembly line operation. It’s a balance of independent vs interdependent processes. There’s not enough prep space, and certainly not enough oven space to build dishes one after another. Instead, to make sure you’ve got everything plated on time, you’ve got to piece dishes along side one another, each their own independent process happening in parallel.

We tend to idealize efficient work in the opposite though: Team 1 must complete task A before team 2 can complete task B. How much more time and headache could be spared by keeping these processes as independent as possible. What’s the maximum amount of work that can be done independently, and how much can you minimize the waiting game?

In Cal Newport’s superb “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, he introduces this idea of the “Second Control Trap”: once you have the skills and talent to grow to the next level in your career, your employer will often try to prevent you from making the change. You’ve grown too valuable in their eyes. The trap is in listening to them, taking the deal to overstay your welcome and hold back your potential. Richard Branson says “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough that they won’t want to”. It’s a nice idea, but the reality is many employers are perfectly happy keeping their best talent from recognizing their value for themselves.

I think a lot of workers often fail to recognize just how much leverage they really have. It’s tempting to feel as if your employer is doing you the favor by giving you a job and opportunity, but once you achieve even a modest degree of skill, you have more power in that relationship than you realize.

It is absolutely a trap to stay in a role you’re ready to grow beyond. Learn to recognize the motivations of those you work with, and you can start to recognize the power dynamics, and see where your leverage lies.

I fly a few times a year for work and for pleasure, and I’ve noticed the lines have grown for airport security, and it seems that more and more resources are being dedicated towards TSA Pre Check-dedicated checkpoints.

Pre Check is already faster by design, but why it requires more staff, and more checkpoints than standard security is beyond me. I think the problems start to arise when the non-paid, unwashed masses are forced to divert to smaller and smaller checkpoints staffed by a skeleton crew.

This government-controlled security measure is starting to look a lot like a poorly conceived freemium software offering—designed to be intentionally poor to force an upgrade to the paid plan.

I spent the weekend down at my cousin’s wedding. He recently finished fire academy, and has wanted to be a firefighter since he could walk and talk. His sister has the same singular focus, except for animals. She’s starting graduate school to become a zoologist. It’s easy to look at that kind of focus with envy – I know I certainly wasn’t that sure of myself when I was younger – and I suspect most of us weren’t either. It’s easy to look back and think about what could have been, if we had just followed our passion.

But I never had a crystal clear vision of what that was when I was younger.

That’s the problem with the “Follow your passion” advice – it’s great for those of us who already have a passion suitable to make a career out of, but I suspect that’s rare indeed. Instead, we’ve got to find passion and purpose along the way. I just finished reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You and his central argument is to focus on doing remarkable, memorable work, and you’ll find (or build) a dream career along the way.

It’s easy to get distracted by the outliers like my two cousins who seemingly had it all figured out from the start, But for most of us, and for most of the careers worth doing, we have to find our way to them.

There seems to be a lot of confusion in use of terms like data warehouse, customer data platform (CDP) and data management platform (DMP). It’s been endlessly confusing for me, so I spent a little time researching what all these terms really mean, and how they differ from one another. I’m probably painting with too broad of a brush here, but here’s what I came up with:

Data Warehouses

The nature of a data warehouse implies structure. It’s built to answer specific business questions. It likely doesn’t contain all your data, but a filtered selection structured and joined with other tables to answer, say, marketing attribution, return on investment, etc.

The structure of a data warehouse is both an an advantage and disadvantage – as the moment you have a question whose scope is beyond that of your current data warehouse, database-level changes are usually required to insert and transform the data required to answer it. In short – a data warehouse is  as good as the questions that have already been asked.

Data Management Platforms

A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a bit more specific in function. DMPs tend to be more use-case specific around digital advertising. They’re about unifying your known, first party data with second and third party data sources from across the web to better target advertising audiences, market across devices and platforms, and run more efficient advertising programs.

Customer Data Platforms

A customer data platform CDP shares some similarity with a DMP in that it’s an aggregator of data, but it tends to rely more on first party data and the unique identifiers that join them (name, email, etc). The advantage of a CDP is that you connect the disparate system data from your CRM, marketing automation, and other analytics tools into a stitched together view of the customer. One you can use for analysis, or for feeding back into the end-use systems.

But a CDP seems to differ from both data warehouses and DMPs in terms of scope and structure. The CDP is in theory a complete view of the customer. It’s all the data you know, configured more in a data-lake style configuration. With a CDP you’re trading the up-front structure of a data warehouse for deeper access to data to answer future questions. Most of all, since a CDP is something that is ingesting all of your data, you can start making novel connections back to the end use tools, to, say pass a key customer interaction within your product back to your marketing automation system to send a targeted message to the key user on the account. A big pitch of the CDP is its ease of use – the pitch, anyway, is that you’re not forced to leverage an IT team to make simple changes to it.

The question then is – which do you need? a DMP seems much more of a specific use case – and probably only applicable for advertising-heavy teams. The real distinction seems to be whether a data warehouse or a CDP is necessary. To me, it feels like a CDP (or CDP-like systems) will increasingly replace the needs for a conventional marketing data warehouse. The complexity and scale of marketing data needs will always be at odds with an IT or analytics team’s ability to customize it. The more accessible these systems can be for changes, new data sources, and new insights, the greater value of the system to the organization.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hanson’s Rework just set my world on fire when I first read it. My whole outlook on work changed, and it continues to be a book I return to, and the one I most recommend to others.

Naturally, I’m a regular reader of their blog and all their other books, including their latest It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. It too is a great read – arguably a better, more complete, and certainly more updated collection of their business outlook and opinions. But I had a hard time getting through it.

It’s just too familiar – too similar to what I’ve already read. It’s like I could predict their points before they were made. I had been reading too much of these guys.

This isn’t to say I got nothing from their latest book, nor that you shouldn’t read writing from your favorite authors. Simply to be aware when you’re reading something to simply validate & support your existing opinions, versus trying to enter unfamiliar territory.

The moment you feel like the writing is just telling you what you want to know, it may be worth branching out to something new for awhile. Embracing the unfamiliar won’t be as easy, but it’s probably the only way you’ll come across your next life-changing book.

When you build something with a lot of angles like a picture frame, precision matters.

If one angle is off, the whole frame is out of alignment. The glass doesn’t fit. The mat is off center. Mistakes compound, and it isn’t until you assemble all the pieces that you even notice the flaws.

You could try measuring things more carefully, but the best solution is marking instead of measuring.

Making your cuts based on the size of the other pieces of the work. Your plan may call for a 20″ board, but really it needs to be the length that fits with the first board. Starting with a plan, but grounding it in reality.

A plan helps you figure out where to start, just like a cut list helps a woodworker orient their project, but once you get started you need to be willing to adapt the plan to fit the current situation. Otherwise you may very well find you’ve got some gaps in the final product.

November is national novel writing month, or NaNoWriMo. I’ve always wanted to try it, but I always end up a bit too busy, a bit too unprepared for the work required. It’s not like I have some great dream of becoming an author. I think I’m more interested in building a stronger habit for regular writing.

It occurred to me that writing here can fill that purpose too. Nothing too ambitious – just an attempt to say something of value each day. I started arbitrarily on October 31. So since I’m already on a streak in November, I figure why not keep it going. In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I’ll keep posting every weekday this month, and let’s see if this habit sticks.