Kurt Edelbrock

The carrots and sticks that underlie acquiring a new skill can make learning miserable. Learning for the sake of getting a better grade, earning a raise, or getting a new job is pressure-filled and unnatural. It ignores our need to use our knowledge to connect with others, have autonomy over our lives, and truly master a subject.

This is why we should collectively turn learning into a game. Foursquare got more than 750 million checkins merely by creating a game out of going to the places you would normally go to. Steve Kamb over at Nerd Fitness does an incredible job of turning diet and fitness into “leveling up,” making it much more fun. (Also, you have to check out his awesome Nerd Fitness shirts. You can probably level up just by wearing one.)

We should take advice from Nerd Fitness and Foursquare and turn learning a new skill into a game. There’s good research that if-then rewards, such as getting a cookie for going for a run, kill instrinic motivation. But can we create a game that would actually bolster motivation, all while making the task more fun and more meaningful.

I think the answer is yes.

Let’s create a game where we award ourselves points for any public display of our mastery. We want to be experts, to be in a state of flow, so let’s measure it. Every time you contribute to Wikipedia or leave a comment with new information or write a tweet or commit some code to GitHub, you get a point.

But mastery isn’t the only thing. I also want to know my contributions are useful and help people. So let’s add that in, too: every time you send your creation or representation of knowledge to someone who would enjoy it, you get a point.

Play with your friends. Display your points on your social media profiles. Use the game to learn something incredible. With any luck, it will change how you learn.

Achieving remarkable things is often overwhelming. Whether it’s starting a new diet or learning a new language or skill, sometimes you can’t help but look at all of the time and effort required and feel like giving up.

I’ve tried to start a blog five different times now. Each time, I start to receive moderate success but then I give up due to how overwhelming the work can feel on a daily basis. There’s always more content to write, more search keywords to optimize for, and more bloggers to network with. Every time I would promote an article and it didn’t take off, I would too disappointed to keep working at it. The same thing happened when I started my new diet and workout plan: having to run on a daily basis and fundamentally change everything that I ate was too overwhelming, and would leave me up at night stressed out and ruminating about each of the changes I needed to make.

For me, the best way to achieve remarkable goals is to do only the most effective things and ruthlessly cut everything else. By looking at the smallest change necessary to get what I want, I can do incredible things with minimal effort. There’s a ton of information online that outline exactly what the most effective steps are.

But that’s sometimes the problem: there’s too many different paths and strategies, and if one path gets too hard or starts to achieve less, it’s way too easy to read a blog and switch to an entire plan entirely, losing weeks of progress, discipline, and focus. The better option is to make a small tweak to what you’re doing to ensure success, but when there’s so much information, the paradox of choice is in full swing.

Do Less. And then even less.

Big changes are hard and overwhelming. Therefore, the best way to start is to identify the smallest effective step you can do to get to where you want. It can be as trivial as you want it to be. If you’re starting a running program, maybe you put your running shoes on as soon as you get up every morning. In order to build this blog, I open up my text editor and set in front of it for 45 minutes each day.

When you do this small thing, you might feel unsatisfied. You know you can do more. People who write about setting goals note that you should make goals that are challenging to achieve, and opening WordPress and putting on running shoes are by no means difficult tasks.

Here’s the thing, though: these tasks might be easy to achieve as a single event, but they can be incredibly difficult to achieve on a consistent basis. It is easy to put on your running shoes and step outside today, but tomorrow you may be so overwhelmed at the thought that you don’t even want to try.

Still, you’ll feel like you can achieve more, but it is really important to hold back. I have the time in my schedule to write as much as three hours a day, but if I did that, I would be burned out in no time and it would be really hard for me to write for 45 minutes the next day. Over time, I’ll extend my writing time to an hour and then to ninety minutes and even eventually three hours, but for now, I need to finish the task knowing that I can do much more. This confidence, this ease in completing what would be a hard task, makes it really easy to stick with a fundamental change in my life.

Doing less is more than just a motivation hack or a trick for those of us who get easily overwhelmed. Small things have the power to set off chain reactions that can cause dramatic, unexpected improvement. The power of the 80/20 rule suggests that relatively small actions that make up 20 percent of the effort are responsible for 80 percent of the results. In practice, that ratio can be as imbalanced as 90/11 or even 99/1.

The reason why small things can accomplish so much is because they create a series of feedback loops that reinforce and strengthen the change you’re trying to make. If you’re a runner, making a change as small as putting on athletic shoes and going outside overcomes every barrier that came between you and running. The very act of being ready to run changes the perspective of yourself. You think of yourself as a runner, and interestingly enough, now it is easier to run.

This works even better for mental and intellectual changes. If you are trying to learn a new skill or start a writing habit, merely putting yourself in the place to do that skill activates latent cycles in your brain. Basically, you think about what you’re going to write next or repeat Spanish vocab words to yourself even when you aren’t practicing. This makes it easier when you come back to the activity, and you’ll achieve more. That fast achievement incentivizes more practice, and before long, you’ve created a feedback loop that will create dramatic results.

When you’re looking to make a small change, look for something that will not only move you closer to your goal but will set off a series of processes that will keep you motivated and leverage other forces. For more ideas on how to use the 80/20 principle in your life and set up devastatingly effective feedback loops, check out The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success By Achieving More With Less.

One Change at a Time.

Trying to change too many areas of your life at once can be incredibly overwhelming and difficult. You’re too likely to stop doing one of your new habits, and then it won’t make it into the long term. For instance, if you’re trying to eat healthy food, start running, write a book, and learn a language at a same time, you may be forcing yourself to do too much, and you’re likely to lose focus.

All of the changes may become so overwhelming that you may not make any changes at all. One reason why it took me so long to change my eating habits was because there was too many changes to make and too many foods to worry about. By focusing on one thing at a time (cutting out grains, for instance), it was much easier.

There’s psychological research suggesting that doing less is necessary for our brains to retain behavioral changes into the long term. Daniel Kahneman, in his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, splits the brain’s functionality into two parts: fast, automatic thinking that we aren’t conscious of, and slow, manual thinking often represented by the voice in our head. The ability to stick to a new behavior like running or dieting comes from slow, manual thinking. The problem is that manual thinking is hard, and we get lazy and slip back to automatic thinking ruled by biases and bad habits. Doing too many changes wears out our slow thinking’s will power, and we slip back to our old ways. The best way to handle this is to do changes in small, concentrated doses so you can build a new habit before you run out of will power.

Focus on your plan and nothing else.

There are many different ways to achieve something in life. Dieting is a good example. You can restrict calories and go for daily hour bike rides, you can do intermittent fasting, or you can follow a paleo or primal diet. I opted for the paleo diet, but on the weeks where I don’t see any progress, the first thing I want to do is eat ten donuts and then start intermittent fasting in the morning, followed by a long bike ride the next day.

This is counterproductive. What I should really be doing is keeping a list of everything I eat, and find out if there’s a food in there that I’m having a bad reaction too. Or, look at the other areas of my life like sleep and exercise and make sure everything is in order. It’s too easy to throw everything away instead of making focused tweaks.

When you start a new plan, limit the amount of new information and new strategies you receive. This doesn’t always make intuitive sense, because it’s a natural reaction to read up as much as you can about your goal. Instead, stick with the change you made until it’s something that is easy for you to do and doesn’t require willpower. Assess whether or not your change made a positive impact on your life. Then, you can expose yourself to new information and look for another strategy to add to the one you’re already doing.

That’s the important distinction. You never want to throw out what you’re currently doing to start on an entirely new path. You don’t want to switch completely from a paleo diet to a soup diet. You want to add slowly over time instead, assessing new behaviors by comparing them only to the status quo (and not to other people’s reported results) and incorporating new changes only when you cement in your current change or decide it isn’t working.

This is the most effective way to achieve great things. I used this plan to lose almost 50 pounds, completely remove grain and sugar from my diet, and start a weight training plan. I’m now using this strategy to write on a daily basis until I have a blog with tens of thousands of subscribers.

What are you going to change? Let me know on Twitter.

A Public Service Announcement

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One Saturday last year my fiancée and I met a friend at the mall. When the two of us shop, we charge past neatly folded shelves and go to the disheveled clearance racks in the back of the store. We work as a team, focusing on the women’s section first before moving to the men’s. We call out sizes, prices, and model numbers to each other like a secret code. As soon as we find something that fits our criteria of at least 75% off, we check our smartphones for coupon codes and better deals. We’ll try on our bounty, head to the cash register, and leave without even glancing at the full price merchandise.

But that day, we watched in disbelief at how our friend shopped. She was like a lackadaisical ping pong ball, bouncing slowly between each display. She would see a skirt, nod approvingly, and stick it under her arm without checking the price. Then she would float to the next display, squealing about a CUTE! tank top before getting distracted by a pretty dress at the front of the store. Price didn’t matter: her shopping was an emotional reaction instead of an economic decision.

My fiancée and I left with three large bags of clothing each for about $100. Our friend bought one skirt for $125, and complained she couldn’t afford to spend like we do.

If you want to score the latest fashions at a fraction of the price, you have to be focused and meticulous.

Set Your Value Point

Most people set a maximum price point. This is wrong. It leads to wasting money on poorly made clothes from places like Old Navy and Forever 21. A $10 shirt from a place that that is not a bargain.

Instead, think about the things that you actually value. Are you looking for quality? The latest fashion? Fit?

As soon as you can answer that, find the store that best suits your needs and set the minimum discount you need to buy something. For instance, I used to shop at J.Crew before their clothing became cheap and hipster. Most people agree that full-priced items from there are expensive. Therefore, my minimum discount required is 80 percent.

One common problem is playing it safe. Start at an extreme number like 70 or 80 percent, and work your way down if needed. If you miss a deal in the process of learning how aggressive you can be, it’s not that bad.

Focus on the clearance racks

By definition, full-priced items will never meet the discount requirement. Walk through the front section of the store and focus on the clearance section.

Everything goes on clearance. The only question is when. There’s no need to buy it until then. And thankfully, the sales calendar is shorter than most fashion trends, so you can still buy the newest styles without spending too much.

Lifehacker has a calendar that lists when things are discounted the most. I think it’s good at giving you a sense of how often things become deeply discounted, but the problem is that the calendars are not accurate enough to be predictive. The sales fluctuate too much each year depending on the economy and competition from other retailers.

Shop all the time

The best way to get a remarkable deal is to shop all of the time. Ironically, most people assume that the more time you spend at the mall, the more you’ll spend.

Not for an extreme deal hunter. As long as you stay focused on deal hunting, you won’t break your budget.

You want to hit the mall early and often in order to know when your favorite pieces hit the clearance rack. If the discount is deep enough, other people might beat you to it, and then you may have to go to the same store at a different mall to get what you want.

Going to the mall all the time can be time consuming. Therefore, you can use a deal forum like Slickdeals or Fatwallet to monitor when a large sale is happening at your favorite store. This can save gas and time.

Don’t get cheated

Don’t buy something that sounds cheap but really isn’t. Stores will trick you into thinking you’re getting a steep discount when you’re still paying full price. The sample sales sites like Ideeli and Gilt are the worst at this, though T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s can be bad as well.

When you find a deal, check Amazon or Google Shopping to see what it normally sells for. Often, you’ll see that the 75 percent off price is more like 10 percent off. While you’re at it, check Slickdeals for a coupon code and to make sure you’re getting the best deal. If not, ask the store to price match.

Fully Automate Your Deal Hunting

Try subscribing to the blog by email, and you’ll be one of the first to receive exclusive info on how you can automate deal hunting to save tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to set up deal alerts so you never miss a deal again
• Use historical data to figure out when price markdowns are most likely to occur
• Use arbitrage to ensure you’re getting the best price
• Earn more than 25 percent cashback when you pull the trigger on an awesome deal

You can also follow me on Twitter, and I’ll let you know as soon as it’s posted. This is the exact strategy I use to wear nice clothes while saving as much as 50 percent of my income.

My favorite building in Detroit. Exactly like Grand Central Station, but abandoned.

A woman stands in front of a blighted house crying as crews tear it down. For many, the abandoned property is a symbol of suffocating poverty. But not for her.

“This house has been part of the community since before I was born,” she said. “I know generations of families who have lived there.”

“Now the house is nothing.”

A lot has been said about Detroit. Failure. Poverty. Blight. Misery. Corruption. Most of it is true.

But it isn’t the whole truth. The words permeating the Detroit porn that obscenely splashes the covers of the New York Times and the Washington Post are shallow and incomplete. They ignore the continuous blossoming of life, community, restaurants, and culture.

An ethnic grocery store in Detroit's Mexicantown.

Inside the city, plates are starting to shift. Blight gives way to art studios and taco trucks, and historic markets buzz.

Most people don’t know that. The Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune definitely doesn’t.

I believe in good journalism. And I also believe that a city as great and as transformative as this needs to shake a decades-old image based on ignorance and corruption.

Eastern Market is the bread basket for Southeastern Michigan. Most suburbanites have never been here.

If I had one million dollars and six months, I would start a marketing campaign to rebuild the image of Detroit. Here’s how I would do it.

1. Move journalists to the city

Writers are the artists who can best bring the city to the rest of the world. With one million dollars, I could fly in 25 journalists and install them into the neighborhoods.

At first, they would opportunitistically write stories of harrowing poverty and shocking crime. Thankfully, misery gets boring. Then they might bring us the truth.

2. Encourage them to capture dreams

We need to capture the voice of the city and bring it to the rest of the world. Conversations matter, and it’s time to talk to Detroit. Cities can’t talk, so we’ll record the stories of its citizens instead.

3. Build a dreamcatcher

There will be a receptacle online for the voices of Detroit. Visitors will come and feel the interwoven narrative of the city wash over them from the comfort of their browser or phone. This will be a resource for the world, acting as a central hub for people to share the stories they find most interesting with their friends and family.

4. Talk back

The best social media campaigns put a remarkable idea online. Remarkability begs to be responded to. I’m incredibly excited to facilitate those reactions, to hear the conversation and the buzz and the awe and the trying sound of difficulty inherent in confronting a city that is instantly both a phoenix and a pariah.

There will be no need for a like button. Like so epically doesn’t say enough.

Image credit: moriza

There is a revolution happening on the cyberlaw blogs. And it’s happening one blog at a time.

There is a shift in paradigm away from the model of creating overly technical and bland analysis that lawyers are known for and toward truly engaging content. Cyberlaw blogs are connecting with each other and with new media in unprecedented ways.

This is a list of the most interesting cyberlaw blogs you will ever read, in no specific order. In fact, I doubt that you will be able to stop reading them.

See the list!

According to Eric Eldon, Facebook is projected to earn $600 million from performance advertising in 2010. What is performance advertising? In short, it’s the ability for advertisers to target ads based on the personal information you provide to Facebook. As Wired explains, previously not enough companies were willing to walk the fine line between “targeted and useful” and “creepy and stalkerish.”

Unfortunately, this seems to be changing. Facebook is continuing to kill more of your privacy for cash.

As renowned security analyst Bruce Schneier proclaims: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product.”

Of course, many users are aware that Facebook actively uses behavioral information to target ads and product placements, much like sites such as Amazon do. However, Facebook hasn’t done the best job of making the privacy settings easy to understand, and has a track record of increasing the number of options set to the least private setting by default.

Facebook is quickly becoming the centralized hub for user identity online — the place that most models our real-world social circle and behavior. Interestingly enough, though, as Facebook is becoming more brazen about privacy, users’ privacy preferences are also shifting. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg notes, maybe privacy isn’t that important to people anymore. But if it is, non-binding FTC recommendations on privacy may no longer be enough.

Most statistical research regarding consumer attitudes toward online privacy were completed before the beginning of the new millennium. The results are what you might expect: the Federal Trade Commission in 1999 reports that 92 percent of consumers are concerned about the misuse of their personal information online, and 76 percent fear privacy intrusions on the Internet. Data further suggested that there would be $18 billion in lost e-commerce revenue by 2002 because of privacy concerns. However, this research was conducted during a different era of online privacy. The main concern then was tracking cookies embedded deep into the code of a webpage; they acted like a sponge on the sea floor, passively but completely absorbing intimate details from oblivious users. The user information was then complied and usually sold to the highest bidder. Today, however, the issue is control over information that is voluntarily and actively shared by users. See, for instance, the recent uptick in news and commentary about the evolution of Facebook privacy controls. Consumers increasingly expect fine-tuned and nuanced control over the information they share online, and that expectation should factor into any privacy policy analysis as an overarching principle.

Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission has held a series of forums, roundtables, and hearings on the topic of consumer privacy online. In 1998, the Commission released a key report that highlighted four guiding principles in crafting privacy policies: notice, choice, access, and security. These principles are not new to government policy; instead, they stem from a meta-analysis of a variety of seminal governmental reports and non-governmental information privacy codes, both foreign and domestic. The principles were first summarized in this form by a U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report in 1973, and have been incorporated into privacy policy doctrine by the Trade Commission in 19988 and 2001.

Check out this guide (PDF, 213 KB) I wrote about FTC principles and best practices for privacy policies. You can also check it out on Scribd!

Privacy Policy Primer

If you found this helpful, you should follow me on Twitter and send me your best tech and law links!

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg allegedly stole the idea for Facebook from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss before he dropped out of Harvard. Mark slightly modified the idea and launched the site without them. Today, Facebook receives 127 million hits a month, and Mark is worth $4 billion. All of the money and success comes from an idea Mark stole from the Winklevoss brothers, who stole their idea from Myspace and Friendster.

And this is precisely how innovation should be.

It’s probably impossible to come up with a uniquely new idea that has never been thought of by another human being. The course of human history spans too long and makes the window of innovation too narrow, for each new idea found makes other innovation more scarce. Instead, we are left to improving ideas that already exist in a slight way. That is, the nature of present innovation is to steal the basis of your idea from someone else (preferably less brilliant than you).

As Picasso always said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

And as David Drummond claims in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, no author is an island. Each successive work communally builds upon a rich body of works embedded in the past and the present. With every new technological innovation, we stand on the shoulders of the innovators that came before us.

Therefore, an aggressive copyright regime that punishes others for “infringement” of ideas may be the worse thing we can do for innovation. Stealing ideas, and adopting them as our own, may just be the best way to go.