Last week I took part in a Medical Imaging study at Vanderbilt in Stephen Bailey's laboratory and lookey at this:
... it's my brain! Yeah, literally, that is my brain! And if you want to know what I think... I think it's a beautiful specimen!
A week ago I met with an aspiring entrepreneur who had some interesting ideas regarding a recruitement startup. But during the conversation I got the feeling that he was holding his cards close and I was having a little trouble getting the whole picture. Towards the end of the conversation he confided that he was really vested in his ideas for the startup and that it actually hurt to hear those ideas criticized.
This got me thinking. I was also once this way - I held my "good ideas" close so they wouldn't be stolen away. And when people poked at the faults in my ideas... well, it hurt. But over the years I came to realize that this way of thinking is flawed.
I was lucky enough last week to find myself drinking a beer with Pat Poels, Eventbrite VP of engineering and two-time World Series of Poker bracelet winner. And I was luckier still that he was in the mood to talk about his poker days. I love hearing these stories but I'm always reluctant to ask because I suspect people ask him about "the poker days" all the time.
In the start of the discussion Pat was talking about just how much of an edge you have if you are able to read people closely. He told me a story about a very subtle tell that one of his old poker buddies fell victim to. This friend, we'll call him Bob, had the tendency to fold his hand quite predictably when confronted with the right circumstances. In particular, if Bob knew that he had a bad hand and if someone else showed an inclination to start betting aggressively, then Bob would quickly leave the hand on the table. Another one of Pat's buddies noticed this first. This buddy, (we'll say Steve), found out that every time he wanted to check on Bob's hand, all he had to do was riffle around his chips, indicating that he was in the mood to bet big. If Bob folded, then that would be the answer Steve was looking for. If Bob didn't fold then Steve would think long and hard about whether or not his hand was good enough to stay in the game. Thus, having this one insight into Bob's behavior and psychology provided quite an edge to Steve's game.
Following Pats story I aimed the conversation more towards business. "In the time since you retired from poker have you put your psychic ability to read people to any business use?" In my mind I pictured Pat in board meetings peering into colleagues eyes and inferring any hint of a hidden agenda.
"It's not a psychic ability." This is where Pat turned my thoughts around on me. "And the important lessons that I learned from poker were not about reading others but about reading myself." Then he explained: Even though reading others' tells could give you an advantage in poker and in life, that advantage pales in comparison to being able to understand your own intentions and motivations, your own abilities, and the limitations of what you can know about the world around you.
Better late than never for my Penny Chat Review for Bryan Hunter's FP discussion. Here are some of the things that I picked up:
I had a great Penny Chat with Kara Fulgum regarding a very foreign concept to me, Influence Marketing. But first off...
Influence Marketing is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers. (Yep, totes stole that from Wikipedia.)
If you've been friends with me for very long, you've probably heard me reference my mysterious side-project, the social-network-infiltrator! Basically it is a Twitter graph scraper that is able to apply simple algorithms and answer interesting questions. Questions like: