#Stories by Sean Everett on Medium
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Stan Lee’s Daredevil Begins
Origins
In the early 1960’s Stan Lee was hoping that the people would see the light, and superhero comics would ramp up in popularity. The likes of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man were captivating the masses, and importantly, their pockets. As outlined in Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Lee was frantically capitalizing on recent growth in the market in an attempt to court both financial stability and overall legitimacy for himself as a writer and storyteller. Perhaps more impactfully he was striving to have those attributes applied to the comics as a medium itself.
Fans of the emerging Marvel universe were as caught up in the names behind the characters, than the costumed adventurers themselves. The likes of Steve Ditko, Stan himself, and certainly Jack Kirby, were attracting readers in an early form of fandom. In an effort to expand past the limited roster of both heroes and creators, Marvel comics began trying out fresh faces both off and on the page.
It would turn out that the faces really only needed to be fresh to the readers for the most part, as a good number of those recruited into the business at this time were veterans of sorts of the comic book industry. Along with himself and Kirby, Lee recruited artist Bill Everett to help with the creation of one of the new superheroes. Leaving right after the debut issue, creation would turn out to be the main contribution from Everett.
Slightly conflicting accounts of the design of Daredevil exist from all three of the regularly credited creators, as described by Mark Evanier on the Jack F.A.Q. at POVONLINE. Suffice to say Lee, Everett, and Kirby all seem to be wholly worthy of a co-creator credit. The full truth is most likely lost to the time, but the seemingly plausible explanation, as told by Marvel Comics’ former editor-in-chief Joe Quesada is that Lee, Everett, and Kirby significantly contributed to the initial character production. Artists Steve Ditko and Sol Brodsky also came in to help at least finish the issue, but their exact contributions have not been reliably expounded on. The starting point for Daredevil is precisely known however, as he originates from a former comics superhero named… Daredevil.
The original Daredevil was a Liv Gleason Publication character, created by Jack Binder in the 1940’s, and was slightly reworked early on by writer and artist Charles Biro. This costumed crime fighter would begin mute, equipped with a boomerang, and wearing a spiked metal belt over his superhero tights. The mute angle would quickly be dropped, and a background of being raised by an aboriginal community in Australia would be established, presumably to explain the boomerang shtick. The modern Daredevil would inherit the concept of a disability, though he would persist being blind, as opposed to his counterpart’s muteness. This, coupled with his evening status of costumed vigilante, were about all the shared crossover from the two heroes besides their moniker.
Early on in Lee’s run, Daredevil may appear to rip from the in-house hit of Spider-Man more than even the progenitor of his name. Using his billy clubs to swing around the city in lieu of webs, coupled with the signature quippy nature of Lee’s dialogue, it would take a bit for Daredevil to really break the mold. Many villains would be borrowed or generic, and honestly a lot of early Daredevil feels like it is re-treading ground a bit. As the series develops the relationships between the main characters do shine through, and that is where a lot of the title’s charm is derived.
For twenty four issues, the first half of the first volume of Daredevil only focuses on three characters in any depth. Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson are best friends and law partners, who start up the office of Nelson and Murdock. Karen Page is brought in immediately to act as their secretary. This small group and the overly dramatic connections between them, are the heart of the series.
Matthew Murdock
Matthew Murdock, The Man Without Fear, the titular Daredevil. Matt is a blind lawyer by day, and a crime fighting superhero by night. He has a superhuman radar sense that gives him increased perception abilities, and a vast array of related (and unrelated) powers. He received his blindness and radar sense from a truck spilling nuclear waste onto him as a child, while he was trying to save an old man. Also as a child, he was kept inside by his father relentlessly, in an attempt to keep Matt safe and successful in school. Matt’s physical prowess and fighting abilities are a combination of his radar sense and an intense training regiment he engaged in as a youth, in defiance of his father’s will.
Matt’s father, Jonathan ‘Battling Jack’ Murdoch was a boxer, who knew the dangers and downsides of a life of fighting for survival. These drawbacks would eventually end Matt’s father’s life and inspire the creation of the Daredevil persona. “Battling” Jack Murdock was ordered to throw a fight by the mob boss known as The Fixer. He refuses to do so in part because his son was in attendance of the fight and he felt a need to set an example. Jack would be taken out in a hit organized by The Fixer for this, and subsequently Matt would create his alter ego. This all happens in the first issue, prior to the climactic finale.
While hunting down The Fixer, Daredevil gets the villain into a pursuit, on foot and barrel. In the excitement, the mob boss has a heart attack and dies, but reveals that it was his lackey, Slade, who actually pulled the trigger on Jack Murdock. Daredevil finishes the night by turning Slade over to the police, announcing his name as Daredevil and running off into the night, promising to return. It’s a bizarre and weirdly tragic story that in many ways would define Stan Lee’s run on the title.
In the well-known origin of Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s refusal to act against a criminal results in the heartbreaking death of his uncle. This instills in him the responsibility of using his powers when they can make a difference. For Matt the situation is a bit different, as he actively trains and equips himself with the goal of going against a specific person. He does so, and from his own view he is quite successful. There is little to no worry over the death of The Fixer, and Matt seems to be having more fun than anything else towards the end of his introduction. He does not labor over guilt from the death at his hands, instead he throws himself fully into the Daredevil alter ego, even when it is not convenient in his day to day life.
Taken at face value, after becoming Daredevil, Matt is a callous jerk who routinely acts in defiance of basic decision making. He is much more concerned with quips and flips than being effective. This of course is all in service of playing the part of bouncing, energetic superhero. In many ways this archetypal personality would be reflected years down the line in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the headliners of Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel. The witty, headstrong protagonist is something the Marvel fan base will continue to gravitate to time and time again. There’s nothing all that unique about the characterization of Matt, as compared to other similar main characters that permeate the industry, especially at his origins. He becomes much more of a flawed individual, when viewed as a human who often hides his own intent and emotions. Sometimes from himself, intentionally or otherwise.
Matt experienced the terrible murder and loss of his father as well the traumatic accident of losing his sight early on in life. These events obviously deeply affect him, as he makes the decisions to train and reach physical peak, while running around doling out vigilante justice with billy clubs.This is clearly eccentric, but is also self sabotage, as his endeavors consistently jeopardize his day job of the ostensibly upstanding defense attorney. He is almost obsessed with his vigilantism, as he continually throws himself into mortal danger, risks his financial stability, and deceives those closest to him, all while gleefully offering never ending puns and sarcasm.
Accepting the main character’s behavior as erratic and manic makes the entire reading experience more enjoyable, and is encouraged by the plot. Future developments, such as the introduction of yet another alter ego for Matt Murdock further play into the idea that he is a bit more disconnected from reality than he realizes.
From the main presentation, it could be said Matt comes across as a boilerplate protagonist, a bit generic. This is subverted in a couple of notable ways, but foremost amongst them in terms of notoriety is the disability that spawns his superhuman abilities.
Despite it being his most famous characteristic, it can hardly be said that being blind is a focal point of the series in any way. Matt can’t see, but with his radar-sense it’s demonstrated that he has far greater and more precise perception than his sighted peers. This is the crux of his ability to be a superhero, but also could be seen to undermine his integrity a bit. Since he has the capabilities, he isn’t really needing the extra concern and care he is given from those around him. He is omitting parts of the truth.
Following that line of interpretation is shallow though, because the reality is those with disabilities are indeed capable, they just face individual obstacles that severely impede them. Matt does not go into depth on the real day to day hardships he faces, despite his radar-sense, but then he is not exactly the most self-aware at all. Matt as a character, much like the entire series, comes across more fleshed out when taking into account the struggles he, as a fictional personality, would omit when retelling. The small moral conundrums and stark dichotomies in Matt’s life come together to create someone who, at the very least, is an excellent vehicle for melodrama.
Foggy Nelson
The other half of the law office, Franklin ‘Foggy’ Nelson is Matt’s best friend as well as coworker. He is petty, jealous, and overall a bit immature. He constantly feels inadequate, comparing himself to Matt despite the fact they are of very similar means. Add on top his pining over their secretary Karen Page, who is more interested in both Matt Murdock and Daredevil each, and Foggy can come across as an unlikeable guy. Irrational at times, and frequently self-serving, the quirks of his character thankfully come across as lighthearted thanks to the light hearted tone of the series. The problematic nature of much of Foggy’s behavior is rendered at least comical and at most justified in relation to the context of many of the convoluted situations. Foggy deceiving his friend’s by pretending to be Daredevil is forgivable and funny when juxtaposed to the fact that Matt does the opposite on a daily basis.
Appearing slightly shorter and more portly than his superhero friend, Foggy’s realistic character design is a welcome rarity on the comics scene. Unfortunately this serves for a few cheap gags, but does differentiate Foggy from his superhero friend, and the usual muscle bound foes Daredevil goes up against. The limited cast in the series almost forces the story to push and pull the main characters around their respective moral spectrums, and being more reflective of the everyman works in Foggy’s favor.
The heart of the relationship between Matt and Foggy is complicated at times, but sort of redeems them both. His best friend is not just keeping him in the dark in an attempt to keep him safe, along the lines of Superman or Spider-Man. Instead Foggy’s bff is actively lying about his disability, and frequently using his powers irresponsibly or inappropriately. Daredevil consistently leads villains to the law office, and occasionally uses his super hearing to listen in on his colleagues private conversations, and then subsequently deceive them. While this spin is not the focus of the series, it does help to shine a redeeming light on a character some might find a bit off putting or bland at times.
Karen Page
The third member of the law office is secretary Karen Page. Coming across as relatively likable and normal, her backstory is certainly the least explored of the main cast. She is the typical comic book stereotype of a 1960’s woman, written by a man. At times immature and boy crazy, Karen can come across as juvenile frequently, despite her not being notably young or anything of the sort. In the contemporary X-Men series, Lee sometimes gets away with awkwardly misogynistic depictions of the singular woman character, Jean Grey, by specifying she is younger and less experienced than her teammates. Besides potentially an education in law gap, there is no real scapegoat in place for Karen.
Karen is immediately smitten with Matt Murdock, but laments the perceived inherent truth that a blind man could never marry a woman who can see. It’s a weird thought process that both Karen and Matt have, just patently refusing the idea of a blind person finding love. Along with her crush on Matt, she falls for both Foggy, Daredevil, and the idea that Foggy could be Daredevil.
Some of Karen’s thoughts and dialogues are seemingly results of a man trying to replicate those he has seen from others, but does not quite understand. A more practical depiction would likely touch on the power imbalance of both her bosses having romantic interest in her as soon as she is hired. Of course this is a superhero comic book from the 1960’s, and as mentioned previously there are only three main characters, so they each have to stretch and fill narrative slots. The constrictions of the format pad out the lesser writing job done for Karen, much like it softens the blow from some of the other two’s more outright malicious or nonsensical actions.
At the end of the first twenty four issues, Karen has a lot of tropes and associated baggage placed on her that has to be overlooked, but if that is possible, she has a few shining moments. She comes out a bit inconsistent and not always likable, but compared to many comic side characters and romantic interests particularly, Karen Page has a burgeoning personality and seems poised for positive character growth.
Year One
Daredevil comes right out of the gate stumbling. The first issue is drawn by Bill Everett, and while it is well done, it’s the only one he ends up completing. After the debut, Joe Orlando picks up the next three without too jarring of a change, but the first four issues as a whole leave a bit to be desired artistically. While completely inoffensive and passable, the art’s largest drawback is that it is seemingly trying to replicate Kirby and to an extent Ditko, to varying levels of success. Both Everett and Orlando’s Daredevil can look like a posed mannequin instead of an acrobat in motion more often than not.
The stilted depiction is accentuated by the signature flowery dialogue of Lee. There is a definite sense of trying to cram the product with content in the opening few issues. The scenes are rapid and all over the place, but filled with tons of text to stretch the reading time and each scene out longer. While fighting Electro, Daredevil manages to fly a spaceship into space and back down to Earth in the span of a couple of pages. These types of hijinks are the heart of this era of Daredevil. The tone is the epitome of classic costumed vigilantes and that has to be accepted and enjoyed for the series to have a positive impact in any way.
Bolstering the borderline corny setup is the monster of the week structure taken by the comics. While not uncommon to comics at the time, it is notable that storylines barely stretch over multiple issues, and the villain is usually unique for each of the first ten or so issues. This adds to the memorability of the villains since they get books entirely dedicated to both their origin and fight with Daredevil. However it can suppress interest in the established cast of the book, as they don’t make many lasting or impactful decisions during this stint. The small bits of lasting continuity tend to happen in crowded word balloons over a single page of conversation between Matt, Foggy, and/or Karen bookending the issue.
The plots can be overly melodramatic, but also compelling, such as when Karen insists Matt get an experimental surgery to cure his blindness. However since he is scared it could turn off his Daredevil powers he does not want to go through with it. The biggest drawback to these dilemmas specifically is that the crux of the problem tends to just be that Matt can’t date Karen because he is blind. The inherent idea from both of them that a relationship is out of the question is so manufactured for the plot it feels barely plausible. To be fair though,The world of Daredevil, and Marvel comics in general, does not necessarily thrive in the plausible.
One of the more notable aspects of the first half-dozen issues is Daredevil’s costume. He is sporting a garish yellow and black color scheme as opposed to his usual muted shades of red. The original suit is passable, and gets points for more resembling an acrobat costume, which is the inspiration. However as soon as the new crimson costume appears on the page, it feels more natural for The Man Without Fear. Along with the red apparel comes creator Wally Wood, who puts in a distinctly personal run on the title.
Still being the 60’s, there is no escaping the attempts to build off Kirby’s influential artistic style, but Wally Wood is the first on this series to make the style his own. Daredevil begins to move through the space a bit more like Spider-Man, making the dynamic motions appear more believable and natural on page. The ‘Marvel method’ of making comics (art done first, dialogue inserted second) clearly comes through with Wood, more so than the previous Orlando. Arguably there is a wide array of pages that are more understandable when simply parsing the art, and ignoring the dialogue altogether. Lee’s signature verbosity can just over explain exactly what has been drawn, and frequently slows the book to a crawl. Given the weight of the story which is held up by the art, it’s only slightly surprising to come across the tenth issue of Daredevil. Unlike the rest of the first fifty, this issue is not written by Stan Lee, but instead Wally Wood.
The tenth issue is a bit of a breath of fresh air, being distinct in style from the surrounding bunch. While clearly intentionally keeping with Lee’s signature tone, the plot of the issue is more complex to start. The story involves a group of villains, The Ani-Men, who should feel generic with names like Frog-Man and Ape-Man, but they each have a lot of charm. There is a more clear arc, and the writing feels more purposeful than the previous stories, which were more concerned with explaining the page rather than advancing the plot. There is a case to be made that the issue benefits from the singular writer/artist, as opposed to the usual tag team approach. The entire story is a setup to a mystery that will be concluded in the next one, while claiming that all the hints the readers need are there if they can find it. Even a small gimmick like that feels innovative given the context.
This is not to try and elevate the comic too much and say that it is some masterpiece, or even to say it is not clearly replicating Lee. However it shows, at the time especially, that Lee is not the only person who can effectively write his characters. It proves in some cases a fresh perspective brings new life to a series. By the next issue though it is clear these are not the takeaways, at least from those behind the scenes.
The eleventh issue, and all those that follow up to number fifty are given back to Stan Lee’s pen. Wally Wood departs from the book, and the second half of his story is given to Lee to wrap up, cliffhanger and all. In an awkward move, Lee decides to print in the comic a message to the readers about the situation. He proclaims that Wood left it to Lee to finish the story without giving him the ending or any notes. He was clearly both covering in case the story came out subpar, but was also publicly shaming Wood. The wrap-up is fine, and honestly would have been more enjoyable if it was not undercut by the meta commentary informing of its potential flaws.
At this point in the narrative, Matt decides to give Murdock and Nelson the same treatment Wood gave Marvel, and he gets out of there. Bob Powell does pencils with Wood, and does a few issues on his own in the aftermath of the departure.
John Romita Sr, comes in after Powell and brings a striking look to the book. Under Romita’s pen the comic gets darker, and more detailed in a borderline striking departure from form. This won’t last too long, but is another welcome shake up to the already formulaic series. The evolution and maturity of the stories does ramp up with the new art, and the second year of Daredevil ushers in a new rhythm for the title.
Year Two
Arriving at issue twelve of Daredevil, the Marvel Universe as a whole is picking up in quality and it’s noticeable. While Wood’s art was fantastic, the book just did not really ever take off on his run, possibly due to the creative challenges behind the scenes. For Romita and Lee, the chemistry seems to be there from the start, and the mindset on how to present the stories has changed up. Multi-issue arcs become quite common, and some light plot throughlines begin persisting and progressing instead of snapping back to a hard set status quo after each caper.
While the first year of comics had a tendency towards introducing and defeating villains in a single issue, the second year sees a lot more recurring antagonists. The building of storylines and slowly growing complexity of the series is starting, and welcomed. Prior, the narrative felt like it was spinning its wheels trying to establish a consistent status quo. In the second year, there is more of an emphasis on character development. Daredevil also starts to come up against obstacles that are simply too large for one man, fearful or not.
With his reputation growing, the story sees Daredevil develop into a more understood threat by those around him. His enemies, such as the Masked Marauder and the Owl, begin employing muscle to try and head off Daredevil instead of opting to face him themselves. While inspiring fear may bring him some level of respect and acknowledgment, it also highlights the sheer ineffectiveness and overall futile effort of Matt Murdock to deal with crime.
As one man, no matter how good he can punch and kick, he is unable to physically take down multi level crime organizations that are embedded into their communities. Arguably, Matt could have better luck utilizing his law degree to elicit local change, rather than punching people. This dichotomy of breaking and enforcing the law in order to better society is recurring and compelling, but rarely explored in depth.
Closing Arguments
The first two years of Daredevil’s existence are the epitome of a beginning comic book superhero. Tropes and plot contrivances are abundant, the tone swings from lighthearted to surprisingly dark, with Stan Lee’s wise cracking dialogue shepherding the story along. Compared to modern books, there is not too much from this classic that hasn’t been seen before. However with services like Marvel Unlimited, the series becomes as accessible as any app, and Daredevil comics become a fun and easy way to waste time instead of the horrors of social media.
For the most part, the audience for this in the current day is mostly folks capitalizing on nostalgia or interested in the history and development of Daredevil. Arguably there is a lot of fun to be had, the book just requires a certain approach and limited expectations. The reader who idolizes their hero, and wants a paragon of virtue or a stone cold badass, will be disappointed. However the reader who is ready for melodramatic plots, severely flawed characters, and is willing to skip some text in the never ending fights, will have a solid experience.
Citation Station
The Cover Original Article
Daredevil, Issues 1-24
1-9, 11-24 written by Stan Lee
10 written by Wally Wood
1 art by Bill Everett
1 art by Jack Kirby
2-4 art by Joe Orlando
5-10 art by Wally Wood
9-11 art by Bob Powell
12-19 art by John Romita Sr.
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, by Sean Howe
Newsarama
The Jack FAQ
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I just came across your book.
I just came across your book. Reading voraciously. This highlight stood out as an important entrepreneurial principle.
from Stories by Sean M Everett on Medium http://bit.ly/2FeAfY6
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AI is a Math Book & Isn’t Taking Your Job
You need Biologic Intelligence before that happens and only one group is building it
I. Setting the Stage
There’s a troubling trend happening across the media and public conversation these days, spreading fear and misunderstanding of the way something works.
No, AI is not going to take your job anytime soon. In fact, AI isn’t going to do much of anything to impact your everyday life anytime soon. At least not without a watershed innovation in the way that it’s built.
People say the letters A and I and immediately assume that we’re already at a technology as advanced as that shown in Hollywood, whether Terminator 2 or Bicentennial Man. It’s not judgement day yet, ladies and gentleman.
II. Narrow versus General Intelligence
It begins with something very simple. The difference between Narrow and General Intelligence. The most basic definition I can give is that narrow intelligence does one thing, and does it very well. So well, in fact, that it has optimized itself almost to perfect. You can recognize a simple object in a static picture. You’ve been shown 1 million baseball bats from all angles, lighting conditions, and backgrounds. So, it becomes very easy to recognize the next baseball bat you’re shown as a baseball bat.
General Intelligence works differently. It can recognize a baseball bat, similar to before, but it can also balance a checkbook.
The mechanics of how a system works to recognize a single thing, and only a single thing, is very different than being able to do 2 things with the same system.
Currently, narrow intelligence works with a variety of math equations. Here’s the part that pisses me off. Go back to high school, grab your math text book. Put it on the table in front of you and open it up. Read the equations to yourself.
Is that Terminator? Is that Judgement Day? Did that math book just take your job? Does your math textbook have a soul or consciousness.
Of course not.
But don’t you see that all this mayhem and fear and smart people talking about how these math equations are going to take your job are really just plain wrong?
III. Math Equations Run Amok
What they’re doing is a bait and switch maneuver. And you need to recognize these things as they happen. I’m the tech press. I write a sensational story about math equations run amok. You click on the headline. Ding, there goes the cash register with a new ad impression. A story about fear. Ding! A story about math taking your job. Ding! A story about Robots needing to be taxed by Bill Gates. Ding! Ding! Ding!
Please can we all just pause and stop.
Math isn’t going to take your job. But I tell you what will. General Intelligence. When a robot can pick something up, put something together, manipulate physical objects, and send a communication to another robot, then yes. If you work on an assembly line, you’re out of a job.
But didn’t we see this story play out in Hollywood, nominated for an Oscar? In Hidden Figures, one of the women was a supervisor for “computers”. You know, women who computed things by hand. Then came in this big hulking IBM machine that did computing much faster and more accurately. It “took” those women’s jobs.
So, lets go ahead and hate computers then, right? And then we don’t have Facebook or your beloved smart phone. Or video games. Or, or, or.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Because I can tell you from personal experience being involved in building the future of general intelligence (i.e., Biologic Intelligence), that these mathematical approaches (i.e., Deep Learning) aren’t the answer. They aren’t going to get us very far. The only thing you see is a huge data center the size of a room, running the same calculation over and over again until it finally spits out an acceptable answer.
But that same math equation isn’t going to recognize a cat, balance your checkbook, or drive a car. Everything is time-consuming and a custom job. It’s not a product. You’re just doing the same thing over and over again, applied to a new domain.
There isn’t some new crazy approach that they’re doing. Pitting one “neural network” against another and calling it by funny-sounding names like Adversarial Networks.
Just because you link two things together and apply a weight to them doesn’t mean you’ve recreated the neural pathways and mechanics of a brain and nervous system. It just means you wrote down a regression line. You know: ax² + by³ + cz² + error
And all you’re doing is trying to minimize that error variable to zero. The line of best fit. Only it’s a squiggly line, instead of straight. That’s what the little 2 and 3 represent above the x and y and z. Just squiggles. You’re trying to draw a squiggly line around a bunch of data and separate it into two different buckets: like all of these over here are apples and those over there are oranges but they’re kinda mixed together.
Does that sound like something that’s going to take your job? Does that sound like something dangerous? Does that sound like something you should be fearful of?
Well, only if you get paid by getting ad impressions and want to write sensational headlines that get you to click through on Facebook.
How do I know this? Because I’ve got a theoretical Mathematics and Actuarial Science degree. I used to memorize equations that ran across entire pages of text books then took a series of professional examinations that made the CFA look like a coloring book, with nothing more than a pencil and blank piece of paper.
IV. How To Recognize Falsehoods
Do not be fooled. Dig into the details yourself and stop regurtitating things other people have said. Repetition is your enemy. That’s how Trump got elected. It doesn’t have to be true, as long as it keeps getting repeated, you will eventually believe it.
Yes, even if you’re an engineer taking online courses trying to learn about this voodoo called artificial intelligence. Ahem, excuse me. I mean linear algebra. It’s shown some cool stuff. Like hey it played poker and and go and chess. It played jeopardy. It can drive a car (kind of).
But at the end of the day, it’s still a bunch of humans sitting behind a computer and typing commands into it, trying to hand annotate data and then feed it into a computation device to run a million calculations over and over and over. The result is surprising, I’ll grant you, and that’s why everyone is getting so crazy these days.
But you have to remember that the most successful AI business right now is a startup that labels millions of rows of excel data, by hand. Cat, cat, cat, cat, dog, cat, llama, cat, cat.
It doesn’t sound so intelligent once you realize that a human is spoon-feeding all of this “intelligence” row by exhausting row into a machine into the first place. Then a math equation takes all those cats and spits out “cat” when you ask it for a cat.
So I ask you. Is it taking your job?
Once Biologic Intelligence starts getting bought by major industrialists, and exists in space, helping to ingnite the largest gold rush in human history (space mining and manufacturing), then you can start getting concerned.
Because that means what we’ve been building has made its way into the real world.
And then you have to ask yourself a very real question. Are you lazy and going to sit on your ass when our software and robotics takes your job? Or are you already going to be building something on top of this new platform to profit from this new industry that never existed before.
If you’re reading this, then you already know the answer. You’re curious. You’re involved. You want to contribute. You get excited by it. You will become a part of it.
So, you don’t have anything to worry about.
But the others? The ones who just sit there and don’t want to “work” will just become an additional drain on the system and those that are already working hard to make the world a better place.
Ayn Rand, you minx. The motor of the world won’t stop, it just may leave a few of the rusty cogs behind.
— Sean
Your Recommended Reading
Notes from Gigaom’s 2017 AI Conference
Early Stage Robotics & AI Funding & Market Size
My Tour of SpaceX Yesterday
Self-Driving Cars Are Hurtling Towards an AI Brick Wall
Biologic Intelligence is NOT Artificial Intelligence
AI is a Math Book & Isn’t Taking Your Job was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2m7kNop
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Principles for Survival
Background
I’m breaking my nearly three years of silence on Humanizing Tech. I started this publication as a resource for those who shared my lifelong mission of “building the world’s most advanced technology and using it to help people”. Because of the clear and present dangers that continue to present themselves as we’ve crossed the threshold into this new decade, I feel a responsibility to share a few primary principles on how to think in order to protect yourselves and loved ones in a constantly evolving and unforgiving universe.
Believability
Whenever anyone communicates anything, the first thing you should assess is whether they are believable in what they are saying. Said differently, do they have the expertise, education, or understanding that makes them a resource you should listen to. If not, you should simply ignore it.
Therefore, you must analyze this content and decide for yourself whether you should believe it or ignore it. To help, I’ve provide the background necessary so you can make an informed decision.
The first 20 years of my life was primarily focused on physical achievement, while the last 20 years on intellectual achievement, though I’ve maintained both over all four decades of life.
I’ve been studying mathematics seriously since I began advanced classes in the 6th grade (from about 10 years old onwards). Mathematics is focused on a single study: encoding the universe into symbols that can be manipulated spatially in order to solve difficult problems in how the universe actually behaves. Said more simply, “solving problems”.
I leveraged my mathematics education into something called Actuarial Science, which is the study of risk. Insurance companies, financial firms, and pension funds hire Actuaries in order to make sense of uncertainty. They calculate the probability of events (including death), and their financial impact, using sophisticated mathematical models. During my time as an undergraduate, I passed two Actuarial exams and worked for well-known companies in the space: PricewaterhouseCoopers, Mellon Financial.
I would later leverage that to work for Watson Wyatt, which has gone through multiple mergers (Towers Watson, then Willis Towers Watson), and now Aon after its acquisition for $30 billion. I designed incentives for the largest global companies, creating systems for boards, executives, employees, and sales people to achieve agreed upon financial and operational goals.
For approximately the last 15 years, I’ve been operating high technology companies, building large global teams (remotely) across cultures, languages, time zones, tech stacks, customer profiles, and markets in order to build the world’s most advanced technologies, even before Big Tech firms had done so, and commercialize them for a broad population of people and businesses.
The focus of my adult life has been on creating systems for how to achieve the second and third principles listed below. Over the last few years, however, I’ve been focusing primarily on the first principle, which I believe supersedes the other two, and is arguably more important.
Principles
Adapt faster.
Find risks, then remove them.
Prioritize problems, then solve them.
Situation
Today, the entire world is experiencing an elegant technology that any Venture Capitalist would salivate to invest in and operators would compete to work on. Without any PR or marketing budget, it has made headlines globally because it is a disruptor the likes of which we have never experienced. Not Uber, not AirBnB, not Digital Transformation, and not even the Internet can hold a candle to its speed of adoption.
It has been installed by people across nearly every geographic boundary and gives every user equal opportunity to experience it regardless of education, wealth, social status, sexual orientation, race, or age. It has disrupted people’s daily lives, the global financial system, and the global healthcare system. Users didn’t have to change any of their daily habits to experience it, it’s completely free, and takes up no space so it can be carried anywhere. It’s completely decentralized, low-power, can upgrade itself in real-time in response to market conditions, and is highly scalable.
It is a self-replicating, biologic intelligence that is invisible, viral, and non-discriminatory. Of course, I’m talking about the Coronavirus.
If it had a positive impact on humanity, we would be marveling at its features, celebrating its creator, and leveraging the technology for every other product.
But it’s not.
Strategy
And so, as a human species, who have three of our own features (survival, intelligence, opposable thumbs) we must use in order to compete against it and win. This is Uber vs Lyft, Coke vs Pepsi, and a Space Race with stakes higher than we have dealt with before.
For all of human history, people have designed and changed our environments for habitability. As we face this novel technology, and a guarantee of even more elegant ones in the future, we must create and use tools to evolve our environments at a faster rate than the threats that seek to disrupt them, either within our outside our bodies.
If our iteration speed is higher than our competitors, we will win. If not, we will lose. But it requires a 100% execution of fundamentals. Like a professional tennis player, it is the competitor who makes a mistake first that loses. As such, it requires that we develop systems that guarantee we do not make a mistake while also iterating faster. Which brings us to another principle that’s taken me decades to develop and describe succintly:
Quality at Speed.
Tactics
From a product management perspective, once you understand a problem, you need to prioritize and begin executing a solution immediately while systematically removing risks that could stop you from execution. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs holds true here.
Continual clean air supply: you only have a few minutes to remove this risk.
Continual clean water supply: you have a few days to remove this risk.
Continual food supply, ideally fresh superfoods like broccoli, bananas, tomatoes, nuts, along with specific supplements (Turmeric, Chondroitin, Glucosamine, Vitamin B/D, Cinnamon, Copper, plus the more popular ones): you have a few weeks to remove this risk.
Strengthen your immune system: get a full night’s sleep as a primary priority, drink fluids to maintain hydration and expell , reduce stress as much as possible, and continue to get exercise (both cardio and strength).
Strengthen your mind: figure out a system for maintaining mental fortitude so you can continue to perform at a high-level under extreme duress and circumstances.
Sustainable shelter: protect yourself from any harsh environment, including other people who may be dangerous with or without them knowing.
Sustainable energy collection and storage: hand cranks, leg power, solar cells, batteries, and generators.
As Ryan Holiday wrote, “the obstacle is the way”.
Mindset
In addition to Intelligence, Heart is another superpower of humanity.
It enables us to connect to one another on a personal basis, which is the first half of the equation. The second half is about compounding our collective strength by acting together on unified goals, but doing so without threatening our survival.
Please remember, the internet is not a guaranteed resource, nor is food or water supply chains, and you certainly can’t eat or drink money. Invest in the right things, in the right order.
Next
We are have been preparing for years, from a variety of perspectives. If you need help preparing you and your family, please reach out. I will do my best to give you the information you needed to keep you strong regardless of what the universe puts in your way.
Stay calm. Nothing grows forever and most growth is defined by s-curves so all you really have to worry about is protecting yourself until you find the inflection point.
Sean
Citations
Getting Enough Fluids, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 4/30/2019
Stress Research, The American Institute of Stress, 3/16/2020
Superfoods: Recent Data on their Role in Prevention of Diseases, Current Research in Nutrition and Food Science, 9/14/2018
How to Boost Your Immune System, Harvard Medical School, 9/1/2014
Internet Sacred Text Archive, 3/16/2020
Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of Health, 3/16/2020
Principles for Survival was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
from Stories by Sean M Everett on Medium https://ift.tt/2x1dCp3
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Emerging Trends of Master Product Management
What you need to be at the top of your game in 2019
I. THE WORLD HAS CHANGED
The world of Product Management is no longer changing. It has changed. At some point over the last few years we transitioned into a new way of thinking when it comes to technology. Let’s review the situation as we move into the last year of this decade.
What used to be emerging tech a decade ago has now become the de facto standard. VCs used to be enamored by SoMoLo (Social, Local, Mobile) and Gamification, but the new emerging technologies revolve around Spatial Computing. The focus now is about taking computing from behind a rectangular piece of glass and bringing it into the real world. This includes Augmented and Virtual Reality as the interface layer, Artificial Intelligence as the logic layer, and Blockchain as the emerging database layer. With 5G connectivity and the proliferation of IoT devices and sensors, we enable new things like self-driving and Pokémon or Amazon Go.
The future of Humanizing our Tech
Our interfaces are becoming ever more invisible as we begin to wear our computers. AirPods in the ear and speaking to voice assistants like Siri and Alexa our in the world or at home. Even physical touch interfaces went from some-of-the-time with smart phone taps to all-of-the-time with vibrating wearables and always-on heart rate monitoring.
Meanwhile, blue chip industrial companies are investing in SAAS-based technologies and because Wall Street no longer rewarding a gigantic sales team that has to start each quarter from zero. The sawtooth revenue curve of the past is being replaced by curves that look more like hockey sticks. It’s not just software that’s eating the world, it’s also their business models. Namely, moving from one-time payments to Monthly Recurring Revenue from Software as a Service. Did you know Salesforce got its start by convincing customers they shouldn’t use installable CDs, but rather a website that gives them updates every day? Now this is taken for granted but changing software buying patterns was hard in the beginning.
Today, everyone has a startup or a side hustle. What we used to hear five years ago, “I’ve got an idea for an app”, is now, “I’m raising $1M on a $5M pre- and have traction with 100,000 users”. Wait, what? You’re only 15 years old? Which brings us to our next point. Digital Natives, Gen Z, and yes, Millennials, have overtaken mindshare, marketing, and advertising share from the Baby Boomers. Many of us with decades of Product experience merely adopted the tech, but these individuals were born into it. Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out.
Valuations have soared since 2008, and new millionaires are minted so regularly that we now collective keep count in billions. Growth at all costs, even profits, have created an irrational exuberance the likes of which Greenspan could hardly comprehend during the go go dot-com days.
Even retailing has changed. The anchors of malls aren’t seeing the foot traffic they once did, Sears is shuttering its doors and Best Buy is struggling. The reason is because we get free shipping and cheaper prices shopping online, and at least in the US, eCommerce executive’s go-to-market strategy is simply www.amazon.com.
As we transition into the mindset of investors, we see a more modern Private Equity, new family offices sprouting up in record numbers, new regulations like the JOBS Act, and new funding mechanisms like Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and Security Token Offerings (STOs) enabling much more capital flowing into tech than ever before. Because traditional LPs have been reading the same blogs and would rather source and diligence their own deals than pay a middle man their 2-and-20 fees, we see more demand than ever for the best deals and unique deal flow as a competitive differentiator. The leveraged buyouts of yore targeting low-growth manufacturing firms are now targeting niche software companies because the economics and multiples are better with the same consistent cash flow.
As we turn our attention to go-to-market strategies, the traditional ad budgets spent on TV and display continue to evolve more towards a universal view of a person. Spend on Influencers have shifted from Movie Stars and Athletes to the Kardashians, and then to micro-influencers, and now to pico-influencers with 500 followers who are all personal connections. It’s the word-of-mouth virality that spells success for many products, after all. GDPR regulations that came online in mid 2018 means every website we now visit has a horribly thick bottom bar overtaking our screens. As a result of all this hypertargeting, user tracking, and dynamic content, the user experience of the web has decreased dramatically, especially when including abysmal loading times resulting from excessive overuse of Javascript. Did you know there are now 7,000 MarTech startups, up from 5,000 only a few short years ago, creating a bewildering amount of programmatic ad choices, and ever-increasing customer acquisition costs. The result being building quality product mechanics for incenting organic virality and engagement are 10x harder than they used to be.
Finally, there’s a resurgence of interest around outer space and private rocket companies. Space Tech is a thing and with falling prices of launches by Blue Origin and SpaceX, the cubesat subsector will ultimately enable next-generation cellular connectivity from space. This is how the other 50% of humanity gets internet access while also being a source of cash for the burgeoning New Space industry in desperate need of investment.
II. THE WINNERS & THE LOSERS
Taken together, we’re all playing a whole new ballgame. The playing field has become shorter while the game has become faster, and harder. Greenfield opportunities where you used to be competitive with a buggy LAMP stack and lackluster UX has even stopped working in the Enterprise. High-quality consumer apps that everyone now uses means we expect the same from all our software, including what we use at work. And desktop apps are no longer enough. The world has become smaller but we’re traveling more often and so we’d rather lose our luggage than our smart phone. We expect our work software to be just as efficient as the apps we use for play. Customers and users don’t care that it takes 320 different video encoding renditions for a single video file shared behind a firewall. “It’s just a play button, why is that so hard?” They don’t care how the sausage is made, expect perfect connectivity and high-resolution streaming. And expect it to be as cheap as YouTube.
We have reached a significant milestone for humanity. Half the human population is connected to the internet, mostly with mobile phones, and everyone is in search of the next gigantic growth product. Skill and talent has blossomed in unexpected markets around the world. France is a key global spot for world-class software development, Africa is emerging as a new startup capital learning from the likes of the Valley and Singapore, while China and the US are in an AI arms race for powering the world of our future. Information is shared in tiny bursts through text messages and short-form videos, with the entire world is trying to steal market share of eyeball for their Monthly Active Users.
At this point you may be feeling a bit down, wondering why you should even consider starting a new project. With the degree of difficulty steadily marching up-and-to-the-right, what hope do you have for standing out in a sea of competing projects, apps, sites, and initiatives?
The winners will be the ones who both Accept & Acclimate to this new world quickly. There’s no time to debate. The winners take action. The losers, on the other hand, will continue to exist in the Web 2.0 or, even worse, pre-connected world. It’s true that legacy business models and declining markets have a much longer tail than anyone realizes, but it’s getting shorter.
In either case, you’re either compounding in a positive direction or a negative direction. The graphic below from Farnam Street tells the story better than any amount of words could.
Source: Farnam Street
The key insight here is that it doesn’t require organization-wide adoption to reap the benefits. It only takes a single “2-pizza team”, as Jeff Bezos famously states, to kickstart action in the right direction. But whom you pick for those teams makes all the difference in the world.
So it begs the question: with a discipline as varied and misunderstood as Product Management, how can we begin to slice the skill sets required to determine the right person for the first project but also the second? Is it a mini-CEO, a turnaround genius, a mobile app maven with hundreds of daily builds, or a growth hacking expert who’s earned the stripes from a decade in the trenches? As a high-performing Product Officer, you need all of these next-level skills to stay at the top of the capabilities mountain.
The Product winners understand the importance of spending the time and budget to go find the right talent before doing anything else. The team is the single biggest difference maker between 2x and 10x. The Product losers, on the other hand, focus on business as usual and going with whomever is a phone call away, whether or not they have the requisite skills required to execute in this new world.
III. THE PROMISED LAND
But what does it look like to win? It means you’ve got a successful project on your hands. Your KPIs are up, the product is working, the team is energized, and the kudos stream in from around the internal organization and external community. Most importantly, your revenue and/or users are growing with a healthy k-factor above 1. The A/B testing and Cohort analysis is paying off once you found the correlation between Retention and Engagement. You’ve maintained quality and are in a great repeating cadence of 1) customer development, 2) agile design and development, and 3) continuous deployment and retrospectives.
Master-level Product Management means that the compounding flywheel effect applies to your product, but also the operations of your team, whether that’s a small 3-person group or a large 10,000 person global conglomerate.
A well-run machine is the opposite of chaos. You’ve developed esoteric metrics, like how many Slack messages are sent and how many files are sent back and forth to tell you how good the team is working together and how high-quality the work product is. And of course, that the entire group works backwards from the customer or user, and not forwards from the technology, unless we’re in Hard Tech territory like Quantum Computing.
Master Product Managers have been doing all these things for years but as we move towards 2020, a new set of skills has emerged.
IV. TOP 3% PRODUCT MANAGEMENT MASTERY FEATURES
Below are the top things you need to execute on to maintain your role as one of the best Product Managers in the world, or in identifying them for your next project.
Focus on one KPI: Revenue. Paul Graham of YC fame said a Startup could be defined by a sigle word: growth. Projects and businesses can also be defined by such a word. If the business is not making money, then eventually it ceases to exist. So, for any Master Product Manager, the starting base-level KPI for any project must have Revenue in it somewhere. Even a consumer app with MAU as a metric eventually needs to become self-sufficient at some point. You can choose a monthly subscription fee (Netflix) which has gained popularity above the one-time purchase to match ongoing revenue with ongoing costs, or an ad-supported model (Facebook) to sustain itself. Pricing strategy is understood as a key component of this. If you double the price and demand decreases by less than half, then you just created additional revenue growth with nearly zero marginal cost. In short, the right Product also has the right Price. Note that we’re leaving aside Not-for-Profits as they have a different motivation and core KPI, which would typically center around positive impact, measured by Human, Animal, or Environmental improvement.
Understand and design business models, especially applying them in new ways. A project starts by answering the question of “Who buys what from whom, for how much, and why?” For a lemonade stand, the answer is: a customer buys lemonade from us for $1 because she’s thirsty and we’re located right next to the park she walks her dog at. There are a limited set of business models that exist, like Remove-the-Middle-Man or Give-Away-the-Razor-To-Sell-the-Blade. Flipping standard business models on their head creates new insights and the Master Product Manager has a list of them at the ready with examples. One such example is the new online school that kept the definition of the customer the same (the student), but shifted when the student pays. Instead of paying every semester for classes as a big up-front cost for a buyer with very little money, this startup shifted the cost for the student to a percentage of salary for the first two years after graduation. Of course, the school makes a promise that they will help the student get placed. So, the novel insight here was shifting the business model to a transaction fee of the benefit rather than an up-front fixed cost. Payment processors have been using this model for some time. You submit an invoice to someone and in return for a company processing that payment, you’re willing to give them a fee because it’s small compared to the amount of money you just earned. It’s the same concept, now applied to a different industry: education. Gamification and Incentive design also play a part and have been recognized widely in the tech community since the days of Foursquare and Gowalla. Today, with the emergence of Initial Coin Offerings and its successor, Security Token Offerings, creating an app that becomes an economy means a Master Product Manager needs to understand the intricacies of micro and macroeconomics down to the granular level of “How do users earn tokens?” and “Where do users spend tokens?”. In the beginning of Bitcoin, for instance, it was much easier to acquire the cryptocurrency than it was finding who would accept it as payment. Thus, supply, demand, and transactions are important for unleashing value creation and developing a healthy economy. See Metcalfe’s Law for more.
Position Brand as a key differentiator. A brand is not a logo or a design. A brand is how it makes you feel. Apple feels different than Google which feels different than Facebook or Amazon. They do different jobs for their users, but it’s wisely said that the money in a company’s bank account is really just a physical measure of the trust that their customers or users have in the organization. People spend more money and return more often to brands they love. Today, when consumers are much less brand loyal and are willing to switch providers and products on a dime based on the service they receive (i.e., how it makes them feel), getting Brand right is a big deal.
Executes as CEO of the Product and the real CEO. As the world moves faster, demands of shareholders and the team become larger, and quality-at-speed becomes the new standard, CEOs and Founders are spread more thin than ever. Master Product Managers understand the intricacies of the entire business, not just their own product, in order to successfully deliver on where the puck is heading. They can run the business if the CEO was on leave for a month, they see around corners, understand where the industry is headed, talk with the Board and investors, raise capital while maintaining cost controls, hire grade-A talent, work with adjacent industries to establish new critical Business Development opportunities, and execute capital allocation strategies. See the book Outsiders by William Thorndike for more on how the top 8 public company CEOs over the last half century allocate capital.
Embed social and moral ethics into the atomic unit of the product. MNI Targeted Media’s study showed that more than 50% of Gen Z (i.e., between age 3 and 23) favor a brand who is socially conscious, so the $4B in buying power they have today will transform into tens of billions more when they reach full maturity. Master Product Managers not only act as technology builders, but as an ethical voice of the product and organization as well. They are not afraid to raise a red flag, take a stand, and stick to what’s right and just. Even the CEO of the most valuable brand in the world, Tim Cook, has taken stands for human rights and privacy, total shareholder return be damned (though studies have shown it actually helps). In addition, while operating ethically within business has long been a subset of the standard CFA exam, it is a growing requirement when news spreads around the world in an hour, and talent has the ability leave in a moment’s notice to work for anyone from anywhere. Long-term relationships matter because the apprentice of today will be the master of tomorrow, and reputations are written in stone on the internet.
Has smooth PR and media presentation skills. Master Product Managers know how to talk to the media about the product succinctly. A “repeatable sound bite” is just another way of saying “viral marketing”. Because if the viewer can’t remember it and repeat it, that alone can negatively impact the product’s k-factor. Today, the builder is more important than ever, as it’s less the CEO talking about the product and more about the the trade-offs the people building it had to make. Jony Ive is a hot commodity because the way he thinks is a leading indicator of what gets built. Great Product people are comfortable on camera, and don’t use the “ums”, “ya knows”, and “likes” that have become so prevalent in spoken conversation. As the steward of the product, you represent the product both on camera and on social, whether or not your profile says, “my thoughts don’t reflect my employer”. Again, who you are definitely becomes what you build, especially when customers and users care so much about what Products do with their data, they research who the people are behind them. In terms of efficient communication, a former McKinsey consultant, Barbara Minto, literally wrote the book on it, called “The Minto Pyramid Principle”. She teaches you the way to craft concise memos, reports, presentations, and talking points for a short attention span audience. World-class product people study not just the art of Judo, but also the subtle art of communication.
Exist outside the tech bubble. There are 7.5 billion human beings in the world. These are the users and customers of your product. They have feelings, stresses, and relationships that machines don’t have. Understanding consumer behavior is arguably the most critical aspect of any product. The Job-To-Be-Done framework must also include something new called The-Feeling-It-Creates framework. Is your product about saving time, money, and stress, or is it about escape, fun, and entertainment? As an example, BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model was used almost entirely as the core product mechanic for Instagram, because Kevin Systrom took his class at Stanford and remembered it when investing his product from location-centric to image-centric. Dale Carnegie’s famous book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is another great resource as is Chip Heath’s book, “Made to Stick”. These are all now table stakes. Understanding human consciousness, and the move towards mindfulness are necessary requirements for building a product that moves past addiction, and into transcendence. Technology always changes, but humans never do.
IV. IS THIS POSSIBLE & WHAT’S NEXT?
What we’ve laid out here may seem overwhelming, especially for those Product people just entering the discipline. But because the best Product people are ruthless prioritization experts, and agile enough to climb seemingly insurmountable challenges, we believe this gets the best and the brightest excited.
This is a juicy new problem to solve, and a new vector for investing in ourselves and our discipline. “Give me more to learn!” we hear some of our close friends in the industry constantly saying.
So, yes, it is possible. Similar to the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the mountain of mastery reaches ever higher, and even after seven decades spent as a master, it’s an unreachable target. So, if you’re more junior, or know nothing about Product, but need someone who does, you’ve come to the right place.
The subtleties in Products often end up making the most difference but can take decades of experience to uncover. Thankfully, this is where many of the top Product people in the world call home, to work together, and learn from each other.
We are equally as excited as we are humbled, to build the products that influence future generations.
— Sean
Emerging Trends of Master Product Management was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
from Stories by Sean M Everett on Medium http://bit.ly/2Cw8at5
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Why have I continued to see nobody working on this major broken arm problem to consumer adoption?
Why have I continued to see nobody working on this major broken arm problem to consumer adoption? Identity theft is your phone number now, that’s how they drained my Coinbase last fall.
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I just use email and Evernote.
I just use email and Evernote. When things get REALLY overwhelming, I add Trello until I get it under control. Even managing large global teams with multiple products, a simple one-page spreadsheet that shows red, yellow, green with status and next step. That covers a $100M global company. No issues. So I’m with you. It’s the ping, ping, ping of distractions that are the problem. And trying to treat everything as priority. Focus on P1 and if any leftover time, get to the P2s. Otherwise forget about it :)
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Give me a shout when this goes live.
Give me a shout when this goes live. What I’m really looking for is a consumer friendly “bank” where they can just store their money and not have to think about or worry about any other details. Is what you are working on that easy?
from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2CoaOkw
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I’d be curious of what the plan is.
I’d be curious of what the plan is. I’m not quite sure how it could be solved where you have the worry free safety of a bank when you have to secure it yourself. Can you make an intro by chance? Talking to CNBC tomorrow about this exact topic.
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But I’m still looking for a solution that guarantees my coins / investments won’t get stolen.
But I’m still looking for a solution that guarantees my coins / investments won’t get stolen. What startup is laser focused on the single biggest problem in the entire ecosystem? A wallet is not a bank.
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To give, is to get. Nicely done.
To give, is to get. Nicely done.
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10 Best Podcasts of September 2017
First listen from The Mission
In no particular order, below are the best of the best podcasts for the month of September 2017, curated by the Editors here at The Mission to help make your morning wake up, back-and-forth commute, and general entertainment listening experience better.
The New York Times Daily: it’s a new property for the venerable NY Times, with a daily program giving you a 30-minute rundown of what’s happening around the world. If reading the paper and blog posts just seems to take too much time, let this be a more efficient mechanism for staying caught up.
My Dad Wrote A Porno. You can’t make this stuff up. Which is also why it’s so interesting. The guy’s dad actually did write an erotic novel and published it on Amazon for the entire world to read with reckless abandon. It even has a few celebrity appearances because they’re such big fans of the show (i.e., Elijah Wood, Daisy Ridley, Michael Sheen). If you’re into the softer side of Sears, this one might be right up your alley.
74 Seconds: this is the real MPR podcast, not to be confused with NPR because it’s Minnesota, not national. It follows trial story of Jeronimo Yanez. He is a police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile, who was a 32-year-old black motorist. The incidence occurred in July 2016 in the Twin Cities. We highly suggest the opening episodes, which hit you like a brick to the face. It’s going to be hard to put this one down. Or un-hear it. Whatever the analogy is for sound.
Food 4 Thot: A great conversational podcast that describes itself as, “A new podcast discussing sex, relationships, race, identity, what we like to read, & WHO we like to read.” And don’t think that Thot reference got past us. It’s a place for real talk and no holds bar commentary about popular culture. Their email sign up form is pretty great too (we won’t spoil it for you). This podcast got no chill. “It’s like NPR, on poppers.”
Pod Save America: Let’s just say they’re no fans of Donald Trump. A few staffers from the Obama administration started this podcast after the most recent election to focus on “a political conversation for people not quite ready to give up or go insane.” Equal parts humor and rage, they pump out one to two shows a week. If you’re into politics and you were a fan of Hillary, this one might be for you.
The Bill Simmons Podcast: HBO and The Ringer’s Bill Simmons interviews Kevin Durant across three episodes. Why listen if you watch ESPN and already have heard Kevin’s thoughts? Well, this one is a deeper dive into the consciousness of athlete celebrity as it nears the peak of his career. The first two episodes track the Golden State Warrior star during the regular season, while the final episode happened after he had won the NBA Finals. Pay attention to the subtleties between the two. That’s where the nuggets are.
Mogul: The Life & Death of Chris Lightly: Music is a massive part of most of our lives whether we consciously know it or not. In this documentary series, it teaches you about the music industry and the business of hip-hop through the lens of one of its legendary music executives.
A Cast of Kings (Game of Thrones): HBO’s entertainment phenomenon, Game of Thrones, has taken the world by storm. There are a number of GOT-focused pods out there, but we like this one. It might take you awhile to catch up. There are nearly 100 episodes to listen to. So go make some coffee and make a start, friends.
S Town. This show keeps popping up everywhere so we’d be remiss if we didn’t include it on our own Best Of roundup. It’s from the same team as Serial and is about a man who was bragging about town that he got away with murder. Maybe it’s just me, but if you want to get away with murder, you probably shouldn’t talk about it. Because now you’ve got one of the world’s most popular podcast people covering it. If you like character studies, you’ll like this. Be sure to check out their website as well, the glorious animations and visual graphics make for an enticing entry into their curvy S world.
Serial. You didn’t think we’d leave this one out did you? It single handedly restarted the podcast movement based on the movie-theater like storytelling about investigative journalism for a murder trial in the year 2000. If that doesn’t get you going, then how about a stat. It has over 100 million downloads. If that was a music album, it would make it the highest selling in history.
— Sean Everett
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10 Best Podcasts of September 2017 was originally published in The Mission on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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The Story of Your Future Retirement
Where you place your bets today will matter tremendously in 30 years
I. The Future Is Your Past
Last weekend, I had the distinct pleasure to spend a Saturday morning with an old mentor and friend. He retired about the same year I started my professional career, so I always found it interesting to look at the world through his eyes, while he was looking at the world through mine.
You can learn a tremendous amount of wisdom by sitting quietly and listening to one of your elders regale you of stories when they were coming up. How to make good decisions. Where to place your value in life. How they handled struggle. And what life after work is really like.
His advice was as simple as can be, but powerful as hell:
“Don’t give up on yourself.”
He’s right. Without yourself, you’ll never get anywhere. You have to get out of bed, walk somewhere, talk to someone, send a note. People aren’t going to just show up knocking on your door.
The atomic unit of this entire thing called life could be broken down into something equally as simple: make good choices. Easier said than done. How do you know up front what’s a good choice and what’s a bad choice?
Read on to find out how to invest best for your future, both in life and with your money.
II. Making Good Choices
I want you to imagine a simple mechanic. You make a single choice today. You make another choice tomorrow. You make a third choice the day after. Each of those choices compound on each other and at some point in the future you see the result and impact of that choice.
Let me give you a very simple example.
You know you need to save for retirement, but you also want to go on vacation because you work hard and dang it, you earned it.
So this year, you decide to spend $5,000 taking the family to Disney World for a week. If you didn’t go, you could have invested that money. So the question you have to ask yourself is how much is that experience worth to you. We can actually model that out financially and tell you.
There are a number of stats that show the average annual stock market return is 7% after inflation from 1950 to about 2009. It’s a nice round number and relatively accurate for the S&P 500 so lets just go with it.
If you’d have taken that $5,000 and invested in the stock market for 30 years, that money would be worth nearly $40,000 (remember we removed inflation from the return calculation so this is in present value, not future value, dollars).
Thus, that vacation you took today didn’t cost $5K, but rather about 8x more than that. It cost you $40,000 which you will need to help you survive after you retire and no longer have an income from working. You only have an income from what you saved.
Based on your standard monthly living expenses, how long would that $40K let you survive? Call that your monthly burn rate. Depending on your lifestyle, maybe you can stretch that out for 6 months to a year with house, car, food, entertainment, travel, etc.
So that 1 week vacation could have cost you a year of living in the future.
I bet you never thought of it this way, but that’s the power of compound interest and investing properly.
III. “Don’t Be Stupid”
There’s this great philosophy employed by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame and Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway fame. In both cases, these gentlemen pass any choice they make through the “is this a stupid move?” test.
Bezos will tell you that Amazon will always spend money investing in R&D on things that make prices cheaper and deliveries faster. What customer is going to complain about faster and cheaper? Nobody. So it’s a sure bet. It’s not being stupid.
As you think about decision-making for your own lifestyle and consider the choices you will make for investing in your future, it’s an apt framework to test anything against.
Investing for the future doesn’t always have to mean putting money into a CD, Bitcoin, Stocks, Real Estate, or Bonds. It can also mean the job that you take. Or the partner you choose to live your life with.
But the one that we will focus on here is specific to investing for retirement because without that burdensome thing called money, you simply can’t survive.
Charlie Munger (left) and Warren Buffett (right) of Berkshire Hathaway fame. Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame.
IV. The New Retirement Savings Game
One of our favorite apps is Robinhood. It has turned saving for retirement nearly into a game. With zero trading fees (everyone else charges $10 per trade), it’s an easy way to onboard new customers.
And onboard people they did. The team, product, and funding is growing like crazy. They just raised another $110M in a Series C round bringing their total funding to $176M.
The impact it’s having, however is more remarkable. Young professionals just entering the workforce are saving more, more often. Instead of relying on a corporate 401K program with 10 incredibly bad mutual fund options that they never tell you what is actually being invested in, the new way is to take the after tax money and invest it yourself in places like Apple.
There’s even a bit of Fantasy Football style competitiveness where friends are sharing their returns with other friends, much like how the people in the 90s would brag about how their dot com investments were doing during the bubble.
Of course, now that’s been replaced with ICOs but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The more you invest, the closer attention you pay, the more you see your balance going up sheerly from you putting more and more money into it. It becomes your own viral mechanism for retirement saving. And you’re doing it all on your own, with a little competition from friends using as little as $25 for the cheaper stocks.
So, instead of buying that t-shirt for $25, the choice becomes “Do I buy this stock for $25 and get a return on it”. It’s like the Disney World vacation analogy up top, but now brought down to everyday life.
The more you choose to invest today, the more money you will have that can compound in the market over decades. Time, when it comes to investing, is your best friend.
Holding your savings in cash is the worst possible decision you can make over the long term. Because every year that cash is guaranteed to be worth almost 3% less than it was the year before. That’s this little devil called inflation eating away at your hard-earned money, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, until it’s finally all gone. Nasty little trickster.
The only way you can combat inflation is by investing it in something that gets a return greater than that.
From 1950 to 2009, the median annual rate of inflation was 2.7%.
Some years more, some years less, but overall that’s what you can expect for how much less your money will be worth next year as it is this year. So, if you made $100,000 this year, without a raise it means you’re making $97,300. That’s nearly $3000 per year! That’s $225 per month. So basically a car payment.
Every year, it’s like giving away your car with nothing in return! Jeez, that sure makes this situation real doesn’t it.
What are we to do about it?
V. New Apps for Investing
If you’re going to beat back the cold shrew called inflation, and begin making money with your money, you’re going to need some help. So let’s do a little round-up of how the state of Saving For Retirement has shifted in recent years with the push towards mobile for digital natives.
Robinhood. First up is Robinhood as we’ve mentioned above. Zero trading fees. Makes investing fun. But you have to do your own analysis. We’ve helped you with that in the past on The Base Code, but ultimately you need to do your own valuation analysis, Warren Buffett style if you want to pick the right stocks. Or, you could just invest in the S&P500, which has handily beat the best hedge funds on Wall St over a long time horizon.
Robinhood
Stash. Next up is Stash, which doesn’t let you invest in a single stock directly like Robinhood. Instead they let you put in as little as $5 and invest in one of 30 ETFs (Exchange Traded Fund). If you don’t know what that means think of it like a mutual fund, where you’re getting a portfolio of stocks. Sometimes that could be hundreds, other times only a handful. But their value proposition is that you choose your risk tolerance and they select the right group of stocks best suited to that.
Of course, we believe investing is about something different. You either invest in the entire market at large (i.e., the S&P 500) or you find a single stock or two that you’ve valued appropriately and know that it’s undervalued by the market, then invest in that until the price increases to reflect what you think it should be. Truthfully, we do both. It helps reduce risk while also giving you exposure to the large upside.
Stash
Acorns. This is similar in concept to Stash in that they offer a number of ETFs that track the S&P 500 or smaller portfolios of stocks and bonds. But the main difference here is that you can invest your spare change and set up recurring monthly investments to get money into your account. They round up your credit/bank card purchases to the nearest dollar and invest that small difference. Over time, that starts to add up.
If you find you always seem to spend all your money, then this could be a good solution to start saving for retirement. A few cents here, a few cents there, over the years adds up and you’d be surprised how much money you can earn over time.
Acorns
Betterment. This exists more like the classic model of investing. You have real human people to help you plan for, and invest for, retirement. Of course, they also offer the mobile and web apps. It’s a more full-service type of product.
You can solicit unlimited expert advice from professionals. But be careful, not all investors are created equal, so it pays to understand how they make decisions. Most credible people will tell you that success in the past doesn’t predict success in the future, but what does work is a way of thinking. If you utilize the same frameworks and models for what you invest in, and they prove to be right, then you’re in for something good.
Betterment
AI Investing. There are also some apps and startups out there who claim to do all the investing on your behalf using mathematic AI equations. Don’t get caught in this trap. It’s algorithmic trading, and in order to do it right, you need incredibly high speed, technical analysis, colocation at the exchanges, and a $250M infrastructure, plus an experienced team to do it like the big boys. They are so good that they have algorithms that are built just to identify the novices in the space and take advantage of them. You lose, they win.
Either get smart and do it yourself, or invest in the S&P 500. Or have someone you trust an incredible amount to manage it for you. But even then, we’ve seen how that can go haywire with Bernie Madoff. Just be careful, and do your homework. You’ll be fine.
VI. Getting Educated
If you’re not familiar with the name Ray Dalio, that’s okay, not too many people outside the finance community. But he owns the largest hedge fund of all time and is worth a cool $17 billion. Not bad for 68 years old and heading into retirement.
But the reason we’re reading him is because he just released a new book, which is really an update to Principles that he’s been writing his entire life. It’s a set of, ahem, principles to help you make better decisions, whether in life or investing money. You can watch his TedX talk to see how he developed a system where even a new intern can call out his ideas as garbage. Pretty radical, but clearly effective.
Go buy the book. And you’ll learn how to make better decisions in life and in investing. It’s not going to hurt. And it might open your mind to do-it-yourself investing that will protect your family for years after you’re gone.
Good luck. Godspeed. And stay thirsty for knowledge. It’s the one tool you can invest in that will never hurt you. It’s a “don’t be stupid” kind of thing. See you soon.
— Sean Everett
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Seriously digging this type of story format my friend.
Seriously digging this type of story format my friend. I find myself reading, reading, reading know that the grand reveal is going to have some famous person that I had no idea about their backstory. And then, bang! You surprise me every time and I’m forced to go click the claps button a bunch of times. Ghandi is the man. Can’t wait for the next one!
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14 Billionaires & Celebrities Get Coached
Helping you get to where you want to go in life, faster.
I. The Feeling That Just Won’t Go Away
The world is screaming at you, like a monstrous wave, coming faster, a million miles per second. Your teeth are sweating. You’re in a place you’ve never been before in your life. Impossible decisions. Immovable objects. Unstoppable forces. Problems abound, financial, career, health, relationships, life.
How are you supposed to perform at the world-class caliber level you’ve worked your ass off to achieve, in spite of this seemingly never-ending stress?
That knot in your stomach isn’t in your stomach any longer. The cords have wrapped themselves around your bones, up your neck, into your head, down your arms and legs, and into your toes. Someone is on the other end of that rope, both feet propped up on your back, and they’re pulling as hard as they possibly can to tighten that invisible chain, attempting to collapse you into an immovable ball.
How did we get here?
The people in this world who achieve incredible things, and people who just want to live a happy carefree life, have to go through this wretched pain. A hero’s journey.
If any of this sounds familiar, you might just need to find yourself a life, wellness, or executive coach.
You could call it a teacher, a therapist, a mentor, or a coach, but in the end we all need a little help getting to the next level. That could be that hyper-competitive class with the bomb teacher who helps get you into the League of Ivy. Or maybe someone who teaches you how to be empathetic to your colleagues, removing the roadblock to the promotion you’ve been passed over a few times. Or, dealing with some deep-rooted pain that’s existed since childhood. Of course, it could be as simple as getting the confidence you need to go out and tackle something that seems just slightly out of reach.
If your arm is broken, you go to the hospital and get a “coach” to fix it. But in all other areas of life, there really isn’t much of that. Isn’t that sad?
We can do better.
So we put together a list of big name people who’ve gone an alternative route, and used it to great effect. Lets just all stop adulting and live like kids again. Life would be so much more fun.
Enter: The Coach.
II. Billionaires & Celebrities Get Coached
It’s not a coincidence that these people are where they are. Achieving incredible results isn’t just luck. It’s suffering. Suffering for years, for decades, until all that work compounds, adds up, and finally pays off. But they don’t rest on their laurels. They keep going. Keep pushing. They…get coached.
Running A Huge Tech Company. Chairman of Alphabet (formerly CEO of Google), Eric Schmidt, says the best advice he ever got was to hire an executive coach. A famous Venture Capitalist and Board member, John Doerr, was the one who suggested it. But Eric was a longtime executive that was already running a successful global business that was growing like a weed. He didn’t need a coach. And so he resisted. But eventually turned the corner, gave it a shot and in a later interview with Fortune Magazine, he said “everyone needs a coach.”
Building A Massive Media Brand. Oprah is such a household name that you don’t even need to include her last one. She built her brand from a local news station into one of the most trusted advisors of consciousness in America and maybe, the world. She’s attributed part of that success to her life coach, Martha Beck, and has been a major advocate of it. Oprah’s even gone so far as showcasing various life coaches to her audience over the years and recommending one for everybody.
Recovering From Childhood Stardom. Sometimes it’s not about achieving success that’s the problem. Sometimes it’s dealing with what happens afterwards that is. If you remember Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family days, you’ll remember a precocious red-headed kid bound for success. But after struggling with drug abuse, legal issues, and homelessness, it wasn’t until a life coach entered the picture that things got better. He’s now a life coach on air, helping others just like they helped him.
Achieving Super Bowl Champion Status. The Denver Broncos star linebacker, Von Miller, has had issues with the law in the past. And we all know where that will lead if left unchecked. There’s no Superbowl rings in jail. He got a coach to help turn his life around and since those low points, he’s now a Super Bowl champion and, wouldn’t you know it, MVP.
Becoming a Famous Actress. Nia Long has been a successful actress for two decades. She’s come out and said living a happy and fulfilling life is a result of working with her own coach.
Rock Star Status. Famous rock bands are no stranger to family fueds. When you spend that much time together, add in a mix of fame, fortune, and social power, the mix can be downright disastrous. In Metallica’s case, this rang all too true. In fact, there was even a documentary made about it. So they got themselves a life coach named Phil Towle who helped them work through the issues, resulting in their subsequent album reslease. Now that’s what I call success if I’ve ever heard it.
Oscar-Winning Actor. There’s famous, and then there’s really famous. Leonardo DiCaprio is the latter. And he spared no expense with his life coach, going all the way to the top to, you guessed it, Mr. Tony Robbins. Leo keeps tight-lipped about his experiences, but it’s hard to argue with the results. If the struggle found within the plotline of The Revenant is analogous to the struggle of becoming one of the greatest actors ever, then it stands to reason that the DiCaprio-Robbins dynamic duo is going to be one for the history books. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your own?
Leader of the Free World. You know what’s a hard job? Being a leader. You know what’s even harder? Being responsible for 300 million people. Bill Clinton, the former President of the United States is also a proud customer of Tony Robbin’s coaching. And I’d say it paid off. That job is pretty darn hard to get. In the entire history of the country, he was only the 42nd person to have been promoted into the role.
Tennis Goddess Overcoming Injury. Let’s throw in one more Tony Robbins customer for good measure. In this case, we’re moving from acting to leadership to sports. Serena Williams to be exact. Her big struggle was one of a steady stream of injuries. When you play such a hard-hitting sport like tennis for your entire life, it’s bound to add up. Tony helped her work through the pain, get her mind right, and get back on top. Not just any top. Grand Slam top. Nice volley, you.
Tennis Star Overcoming Addiction. Let’s shift gears to another tennis star on the other side of the gender divide. He was so great at his sport that even decades later, he’s still a household name. But did you know that Andre Agassi was once ranked 126th in the world? He eventually became #1 in the world, but that came with different issues, like drug abuse, which he’s been open about. We happen to be family friends with the coach who helped him through it. Both incredible people with incredible stories. Everyone struggles, but it’s the people who lend a helping hand that become your family, whether by blood or otherwise.
Musical Prodigy Grows Up. We’re all familiar with the musical prodigy, Justin Bieber. He’s had his ups and downs transitioning to adulthood. But when Hillsong’s Carl Lentz stepped in, things started moving in the right direction. He now appears happier, more motivated, and driven with a purpose he didn’t quite have before. Coaches can be called many names. In this case, Justin called him Pastor first, and friend, second.
Wolverine’s Personal Improvement Plan. Sometimes you’re not struggling as much as you are focused on getting a little bit better every day. And so you go out looking for novel ways to achieve that. For two decades, Hugh Jackman had been wanting to work with Tony Robbins (another one!) based on all the positive feedback from his peers. When he finally had the chance, Tony’s first words to him were, “I have a gift for you.” I don’t know about you, but I really want to know what that gift was. Of course, it’s so personalized that it wouldn’t much matter to you, but that’s the whole point of coaching, no? The personalized tactics?
MMA Mental Fights. By now most of us have heard of the MMA. It’s a brutal sport that requires both physical and mental stamina. And one of the best to ever do it was Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell. He also spent time working with Tony Robbins (noticing a pattern?) to get his mind right. The body is a tool, and can only be driven by the mind. So if the mind’s off, your body will be too. Chuck gets it. You should too.
III. Secret Bonus: The Star Wars Hero’s Journey
In all of the cases above, you’ll see a similar story. The mechanics are the same:
Struggle + Coach = Achievement
If you remove the struggle, there’s no need for a coach because it means you’re not working towards anything great. If you remove the coach it means you might just fail emotionally, intellectually, physically, or spiritually and never achieve what you want either. What’s required then is both, working together as one, to get to where you want to go.
You might be surprised to learn that Star Wars may never have happened if it weren’t for one man’s dedication during The Great Depression. It was his work that directly influenced George Lucas’s success. Read on to discover his secret sauce:
How to Find Your Mission and Success
IV. Just Launched: ‘Find Your Mission’
Find Your Mission is a training, coaching, and accountability service unlike any other. Find Your Mission focuses on leveling up your:
Health, by improving your fitness and diet.
Wealth, through upgrading your career, or finding a better job, or helping you make more money.
Wisdom, by creating a personalized learning and self-education plan.
Each of our coaches have achieved results in the real world that put them in the top 1% of their respective fields. They have traveled the paths you must to achieve your goals and can offer real, substantive strategies and tactics. Their expertise will help you save months, if not years, in the achievement of your goals. Each of these coaches are doers, and not just talkers or writers.
Sign up and be entered into a drawing to win some free stuff:
Top 10: Get a Free 30 Minute Strategy Session
Top 5: 30 Minute Strategy Session + 1 of Our Favorite Books
Top 3: 30 Minute Strategy Session + 1 YEAR Audible Gold Subscription
For those that apply, we have a contest running until the end of Sept. Check it out!
— Sean Everett
If you enjoyed this story, please click the 👏 button and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.
The Mission publishes stories, videos, and podcasts that make smart people smarter. You can subscribe to get them here. By subscribing and sharing, you will be entered to win three (super awesome) prizes!
14 Billionaires & Celebrities Get Coached was originally published in The Mission on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2x4fkDE
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14 Billionaires & Celebrities Get Coached
Helping you get to where you want to go in life, faster.
Read this story, and many others like it, in our parent publication, The Mission:
14 Billionaires & Celebrities Get Coached
— Sean Everett
14 Billionaires & Celebrities Get Coached was originally published in Humanizing Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
from Stories by Sean Everett on Medium http://ift.tt/2wscO6v
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