Exponential growth bias

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Imagine you are offered a deal with your bank, where your money doubles every three days. If you invest just $1 today, roughly how long will it take for you to become a millionaire? Would it be a year? Six months? 100 days? The precise answer is 60 days from your initial investment, when your balance would be exactly $1,048,576. Within a further 30 days, you’d have earnt more than a billion. And by the end of the year, you’d have more than $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – an “undecillion” dollars.  

If your estimates were way out, you are not alone. Many people consistently underestimate how fast the value increases – a mistake known as the “exponential growth bias.”   

David Robson writing for the BBC

Tuesday Tech Tools: 15 Website Analytics Tools

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Need to get an understanding of who is visiting your website and why they come? Here are some tools that will help.

Chartbeat
Tracks reader engagement and uses dashboards, reporting systems, headline testing, and other optimization tools to show what keeps them engaged. Used by many media sites. Three tier pricing plan.

Clicky
A simple interface for this tool that helps you keep up with activity on your website. Weeds out bots and spam. Free option with more info on the paid version.

Crazy Egg
A leading visualization software that gives website administrators popular heatmap reports showing how visitors are using pages. Designed to improve UX and ultimately increase ROI and conversion rates through A/B testing. Open to integration with other platforms. Thirty day free trial then plans starting at $24 a month.

Finteza
A cloud-based analytics solution that spots bots and potential scammers and hackers. Does not do data sampling, so the results are more accurate. Thirty-day free trial then paid plans.

Google Analytics*
Detailed statistics about website performance and traffic sources and measures conversions. The most robust and largest platform. Free though there is a paid plan (Google Analytics 360) for larger enterprises.

Hotjar
A relatively new web analytics tool using polls, surveys, heatmaps and visitor recordings to paint a picture of visitors to websites. Free plan or more functionality with a monthly subscription of $39 or $99.

Inspectlet
Records video sessions of website users’ behavior. Heatmaps show what users find interesting on your site.

Majestic SEO
Find out how all the websites on the internet link to each other. Information about how the fabric of the web is knitted together--and what is connected to yours.

Mixpanel
Measures user experience on websites and product interactions to help websites to identify trends and with customer retention. Free version and plans starting at $89 a month.

Open Web Analytics

Matomo (formerly Piwik)
An open-source web-analytics platform that gives you insights into you website's visitors. Doesn’t offer anything that Google Analytics cannot provide—except the user gets full control of the data and retains ownership of it. Free but also offers a pro account.
 
Positionly
Improves SEO by tracking your keywords and how well they are performing on the search engine result pages. 14 day free trial. Starting at $19 month.
 
SimiliarWeb
Understand website metrics for a site; like how many visitors a website gets, and where it get its traffic from. Free plan though the paid accounts get more options.

Spinnakr
Real-time web traffic response tool. Lets you post a targeted response on your website.

Woopra
A way to understanding website visitors from the moment they “set foot” on your site. People Profiles offer details on individual customers. There is a free plan but you have to pay to get tools like behavioral segmentation.Find more tools here.

Tech Tools

Avoiding Failure 

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When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout. Ironically, allowing for mistakes to happen can elevate the quality of our performance. It’s true even within roles that don’t require creativity.

Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work

The pit

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You have become acquainted with disappointments, broken dreams, and disillusionment. Crisis seems to be your closest companion. Like a ten-pound sledge, your heartache has been pounding you dangerously near desperation. Unless I miss my guess, negativism and cynicism have crept in. You see little hope around the corner. As one wag put it, "The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train." You are nodding in agreement, but probably not smiling. Life has become terribly unfunny.

Tired, stumbling, beaten, discouraged friend, taken heart! The Lord God can and will lift you up. No pit is so deep that he is not deeper still. No valley so dark that the light of His truth cannot penetrate.

Charles Swindoll, Encourage Me

Wired to blunder

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We're hardwired to make blunders and avoiding them requires nearly superhuman discipline. Four tendencies conspire to sabotage our decisions at critical moments:

OVERCONFIDENCE.

We think we're smarter than we are, so we think the stocks we've chosen will deliver even when the market doesn't. When evidence contradicts us, we're blinded by...

CONFIRMATION BIAS.

We seek information that supports our actions and avoid information that doesn't. We interpret ambiguous evidence in our favor. We can cite an article that confirms our view but can't recall one that challenges it. Even when troubling evidence becomes unavoidable, we come up against...

STATUS QUO BIAS.

We like leaving things the way they are, even when doing so is objectively not the best course. Plenty of theories attempt to explain why, but the phenomenon is beyond dispute. And supposing we could somehow fight past these crippling biases, we'd still face the mother of all irrationalities in behavioral finance...

LOSS AVERSION (and its cousin, regret avoidance)

We hate losing more than we like winning, and we're terrified of doing something we'll regret. So we don't buy and sell when we should because maybe we'll realize a loss or miss out on a gain.

These tendencies are so deep-rooted that knowing all about them isn't nearly enough to extinguish them. The best we can do is wage lifelong war against them and hope to gain some ground.

Geoff Colvin writing in Fortune Magazine 

Deliberate Practice

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Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn't especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. The other is the amount of repetition. 

Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball's greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than 30 years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night. 

If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and no one could distinguish the best from the rest. 

The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won't do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.  

The costs come now, the benefits later. The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort until the payoff starts to arrive. But if you're pursuing something that you don't truly want and are competing against others whose desire is deep, you can guess the outcome.

Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated

Risking your life

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Sometimes we make decisions on the basis of past experience, out of experiments we or others have conducted in the course of our lifetime. But we cannot conduct experiments that will prove either the existence or the absence of God. Our only alternative is to explore the future consequences of believing in God or rejecting God. Nor can we avert the issue, for by the mere act of living we are force to play this game.

Pascal explained that belief in God is not a decision. You cannot awaken one morning and declare “Today I think I will decide to believe in God. You believe or you do not believe. The decision, therefore, is whether to choose to act in a manner that will lead to believing in God, like living with pious people and following a life of “holy water and sacraments”. The person who follows these precepts is wagering that God is. The person who cannot be bothered with that kind of thing is wagering that God is not.

If God is not, whether you lead your life piously or sinfully is immaterial. But suppose that God is. Then if you bet against the existence of God by refusing to live a life of piety and sacraments you run the risk of eternal damnation; the winner of the bet that God exists has the possibility of salvation. As salvation is clearly preferable to external damnation, the correct decision is to act on the basis that God is. “Which way should we incline?” The answer was obvious to Pascal.

Peter L Bernstein, Against The Gods

Resume advice from an internship supervisor

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Top left is most important place.

Tell me about yourself in 300 words total on one page.

Only include highlights of your career.

List in order of relevance to the job you are applying for.

Your resume does not have to be chronological.

For internships: education comes first, put your graduation date to make it clear you-are you still in school.

For jobs: works comes first.

Sell me on how the experience you have is relevant to the job:- Make dairy queen relevant (ex: promoted in job while also attending school).

You must make it simple in order to catch the gatekeepers eye.

Did you include technical skills? Software and such to show technical skills "Strong knowledge of.."
"Familiar with..."

Include student organization involvement as experience if you are weak in this area.

Only include study abroad if it's related to the internship or job.

Marketing students and graphic design should have more than a black and white resume—show your design skills.

Don't include salary requirements—put negotiable if asked.

Avoid acronyms.

Be clear on your previous employers: What the company does and what you did there.

Include things/skills you learned for the job you want—what you would not know if you hadn't had that experience.

List projects including why it is relevant.

Send PDFs rather than Word doc so you avoid font issues.

Is it easy to read?

Show it to someone who doesn't work or study in your field—if they have any questions, something they don't understand, then change it.

Don't include references unless asked.

Does it look good when you print it out?

If awards are included, then is the relevance to the internship or job clear?

Try to keep your resume to one page.

No perfumes.

Bring copies of your resume and other material with you to interviews

Research the company ahead of time.

Be prepared but not overly rehearsed

Pro tip: The more you say, the more likely they will find something they don't like. Be concise.

Ask for feedback.

Before leaving, ask for “next steps” and when is it OK to follow up.

Don't take the decision personally.

The ideal erotic relationship

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Our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.  

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. 

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn. 

Jonathan Franzen, excerpt from Kenyon College 2011 Commencement speech   

Tuesday Tech Tools: 17 Organizers

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Need to get yourself organized? Here are some tools that will help.

Airtable
Manages projects and processes-weddings, movie shoots, companies, etc. Allows you to log entries in spreadsheets which can be turned into sets of data stored in the cloud. Some limitations you won’t find in tools like Trello. There’s a video explanation here.

Boomerang (formally Baydin)
Schedule Gmail or Outlook email for a later send date.  Add-on for Firefox and Chrome. Free.

Buffer*
Popular social media scheduling service for posting to multiple sites at one time or later, including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. Provides analytics. Free, but $10 (and up) a month gives you unlimited scheduling so you can plan your content well ahead of time.

Evernote*
Access notes on any computer, tablet or phone. Search function lets you find a note in either text or audio format. Free for iOS and Android. For more options there is Evernote Plus $2.99 a month, while Premium is $5.80 per month.

Freshbooks
A cloud-based accounting app that helps you manage clients and projects, send invoices, and track time, expenses, and estimates right from your iPhone. Best for running a business in which you have specific projects for different clients that involve billable hours. The first three clients are free; then $20 for up to 25 clients or $30 for unlimited clients per month. 

Meetways
Find a halfway point between two locations. Great for setting up meetings between people.

Nozbe
Task management system. Organizes according to the context in which they are done (online, at the office, at home, etc.) . Designed with teams in mind-which could be as simple as sharing a shopping list. Available for most devices. Works with Google Calender.  Monthly fee: $8 for a single user, $16 for a family, $40 for a team.

OmniOutliner
Mac program that keeps lists and organizes outlines. Low learning curve to create rich, multi-column, collapsible outlines in many styles. Add embedded notes, images, links, etc. $40 to buy the standard version, $70 for the pro model. An educational discount of $25 and $50 is available here.

Google Now
Tracks your online behavior and uses this data to predict the information that you will need, such as local traffic or weather updates.

PinBoard
Bookmark things you find in social media. One time $9.94 cost.

Podio
Social work platform for basic project management tasks — calendar, contacts, activity stream — that helps teams collaborate and communicate. Both free and paid versions.

Process Street
Document, manage, and track your workflows and business processes. Records tasks in templates – lists which show what tasks to do and what order to do them in. A video explanation here.

Scrivener*
App that gives you a single place to dump all your ideas. Especially helpful for creating and managing complex writing projects: writing a novel, play, TV show, magazine feature, etc. Write in fragments and then shuffle scenes/chapters in a "bulletin board" mode.. throw in research notes, multimedia files, and character sketches.  Allows you to slowly "grow” books, scripts, and articles. Easy to convert the document to an e-book, web page, a PDF, or Word doc. Works with Mac and Windows.  Free 30-use trial. $45 for the latest version. Many writers swear it's worth it. Doesn't work on iPads though.

Trello
Organizational tool that integrations with many other apps. Tasks or projects are stored in cards which are then arranged into columns.

TripIt
Organize all your travel plans into mobile itineraries.

Ulysses
Writing app for Mac. Uses plain text or Markdown for writing, but also includes notes, exporting, organization and more. $44.99.

WorkFlowy
Digital note taking app. Excellent design, but lacks due dates, reminders of upcoming deadlines and calendar view. Free version limits you to 500 lists or "items" per month.  Pro accounts can be backed up to Dropbox. Individual pro accounts ($4.99 per month or $49 per year) and Team ($3.99 per month per user, or $39 per year per user, with a two user minimum) A short video introduction here.

Find more tools here.