“Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The Secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work.”
— Fortune Magazine

Two years ago, I went down with my son to the Ledbetter Golf Academy for a father-son week. Ledbetter is part of the IMG (sports management giant) sports complex that includes Bolleteri (tennis) as well as residency programs for soccer, baseball, skating, baseball and others. We were part of the tourist track, but we could see the PGA hopefuls playing who live there year long. I asked my instructor how they could tell when they had the next Tiger Woods. She said it was straight forward. After hours and hours of grueling practice, when the buses came back for dinner, the stars would go out on the range and hit another 1-2 hours of balls while the others dragged themselves to the dining hall. This was the case with Ben Hogan and, more recently, with Tiger.

There has been a lot written and speculated about what is the source of greatness. The two groups fall into the innate greatness camp and the passionate focus camp. Study after study has failed to deliver many points for the “innate greatness” side, but a growing body of research supports the grueling, demanding practice position. While innate ability is obviously a key factor in grouping competitors (e.g. a five foot person is not likely going to make it far in basketball), the difference between good and great is "Deliberate practice".

Fortune’s recent cover article was on the Secrets of Greatness. In it, they discuss how most people “learn quickly at first, then more slowly, and then stop developing completely…How are certain people able to go on improving?”. They go on to discuss work done in the early 1990’s by Anders Ericsson of Florida State that shows a consistent correlation between star performers and practice. Ericssson, and many studies after, show that “the most accomplished people need around 10 years of hard work before becoming world-class.” Coincidentally there is an adage in the venture business that VC’s don’t truly become productive and competent until after their first decade in the business.

In tennis, there is little that differentiates the #5 and the #100 player in the world beyond drive and determination. In violinists, the top group averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives, the next best averaged 7,500 hours and the next averaged 5,000. On the innate side, Ericsson noted that some international chess masters have IQ’s in the 90’s. Jerry Rice of 49er fame was passed up by 15 teams for being too slow, Jordan failed to make his high school team. The list goes on. I will write later on a corresponding Scientific America article on genius which came to a similar conclusion from a different angle.

How does all of this apply to you and me? The article consolidated its learnings into 5 points on how to become more effective and skilled at what you do:
1) Approach each critical task with an explicit goal of getting much better at it. The example, in golf, is not to just hit golf balls for an hour, but specifically focus on landing 80% of the balls within 20 feet of the pin with your 8 iron. This focused effort is what researchers call “Deliberate Practice”.  Practicing with a specific goal of getting better leads to longer retention and a deeper interpretation.

2) As you do the task, focus on what’s happening and why you’re doing it the way you are. Be aware of what you are doing. When you tune out and execute on auto-pilot, your neural pathways don’t form with the same energy or vigor as when you are focused and present.

3) After the task, get feedback on your performance from multiple sources/angles. Make changes in your behavior as necessary. Most people avoid criticism and don’t seek feedback. Without direction and assessment, you “don’t get any better, and you stop caring.”

4) Continually build mental models of your situation – your industry, your company, your career. Enlarge the model to encompass more factors. Create pictures of “how the elements fit together and influence one another.” Grove, Gates, Rockefeller all had maps of their industries. Napoleon would identify and track the key elements from the battlefield in his mind.

5) Do those steps regularly, not sporadically. Occasional practice does not work. Consistent practice is key or entropy sets in. Hogan used to say that if he missed a day or two of range practice, he would be set back a week.

Great. How does this mumbo jumbo fit into business? If you think about it, everything in your work is a practicable skill. Trouble shooting, managing time, making sales pitches, negotiating deals, etc. Focus getting up every morning with the goal of not just getting through the day or just clearing the to do lists, but rather, to focus on getting better. Approach each task, whether it is writing a report or dealing with crisis, with "deliberate" focus.  Think through how all of your actions & tasks fit into the bigger picture of your work.  What is critical and what can you be doing better? When doing those things, focus on improving. 

This still leaves a variety of questions unanswered. Where do people get the passion to focus on continual improvement when the day-to-day routine can drag you down? How do you define what is important and should be focused on and what is not? A lot of this comes from doing what you love and have a passion for.

It’s the weekend, so time for a more satirical look at the tech world. There is a growing outbreak in the technology world around capitalization. It is now passe for a firm to have just one capitalized letter in its name. Names are being created by combining words and each of the original words get to enjoy capitalization. Looking at the Red Herring 100 finalist list this year, it was a downright epidemic: YouTube, BitTorrent, ContextWeb, ClearFuels, EqualLogic, FatLens, FeedBurner, FilmLoop, JotSpot, HelioVolt,…. I am certain that advertising friends can explain the power of this as well as historically how we got here.

Some companies are getting sneaky and starting with a lower case letter and throwing in the capital letter when you don’t expect it. Thanks to Apple, any name starting with an "i" will do this…iRise, iUpload, iCapitalize (okay, I threw in the last one myself). A couple of companies have taken the model to other parts of the alphabet such as rPath and nTAG. I don’t know of any firms brave enough to capitalize just the last letter.

The last permutation is the bold strategy of using all capitals name. No, these are not your garden variety Acronyms like CIA, FBI or EPA. These are pioneers in the all out technology wars. All caps connote power and presence. SNOCAP, Shawn Fanning’s Digital Music Registry, is an example. I would imagine if your potential partner/enemy is the RIAA (Recording Industry Associaton of America…the music police), you have to trump their acronym with an uber-cap strategy. Having lost his first battle to the RIAA using only one Capital letter (Napster), Shawn obviously did not want to make the mistake again.

The true innovator here are biotech firms like our portfolio company, CyThera. Not to let their IT brethren get the better of them, life science firms are fighting back. One creative use of the capital strategy is another of our firms, RenaMed. It is a renal therapy firm originally called Nephros. However, issues & confusion with the publicly traded Nephros forced a name change. Without the capitalize "M", it would read Renamed (which is exactly what they were doing). Very slick!

I don’t know where all of this innovative naming goes next, but I look forward to seeing new and creative uses of our alphabet.

In my on-going tributes to inspirational graduation speeches, I am writing about a column written by Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich. Okay, so this is cheating since it never became a speech though she said this is what she would have said if she had ever been invited. Baz Luhrman put it to music. This song pops up on the radio every so often after a big hit in 1999 when the shortened US version hit shore. I recommend to those curious to click on either link.

Everybody’s Free to Wear SunscreenDownload everybody_is_free_to_wear_sunscreen.mp3

Condell Park give a bit of history and the lyrics on the song at this link.

The sign of a world class CEO is that he/she has an infectious personality. The risk is that you get very homogenous board meetings. Well, it finally happened at FeedBurner this past Board Meeting on Halloween…

 

A friend recently invited me to the Morgan Stanley Mercedes Day at the Tracks. Mercedes supplied $5M worth of cars totaling 15,000 hp. The star car is their $450,000 SLR McLaren which was beast on the race track (0-60 in about 3.5 secs)…photo of yours truly in the drivers seat. I asked how many they were making of the "limited" release. Given the price tag, I would have assumed a couple hundred cars.

They are making 7,000. That’s right. They are planning on selling 7,000 $450,000 cars. Granted, it is an amazing car with the reintroduction of the classic Gullwing doors. And the Bubble inflates a little more…

"80% of success is just showing up."
— Woody Allen

Patience and resilience are core requirements for the entrepreneurial world. Often, it seems like an eternity as you wait for customer behavior to come around or for a market to take off. You do everything you can to keep the company afloat so that you don’t get taken out during the drought At some point, you begin to get up every morning wondering why you are doing this…the low salary, the fire drills and stress, the long hours and the frustration. And then, just when you’ve had enough, the market begins to come around. One customer buys, then another and another. Eventually, you are scaling rapidly and your issues turn to operational issues and efficiency.

This, unfortunately, is more the norm than the exception in the technology world. That said, persistence and "just showing up" each day can, in the end, result in nice win for you. I have often said that if your vision is right, it doesn’t mean your timing is (right product, wrong decade). Since you can’t control the latter, you have to keep your faith that eventually, the boat will turn.

One example of this is the photo service, Shutterfly. I did not even realize that they were still around post their initial battles with Ofoto (now Kodak Easyshare) and Snapfish (owned now by HP). The New York Times article, A Dot-Com Survivor’s Long Road, does a good job laying out this journey. When it went public recently, it re-affirmed my faith in the power of persistence and tenacity. Many a time, a company will start with big hopes, hit a series of challenges and disappear from the public scene only to re-appear several years later with a viable business model and scale.

Now, how you manage the long periods in the desert is more of a personal journey. Just remember that 80% is within your control…

In the previous post, I referred to "the starfish story". Here it is. A young boy and his grandfather were walking down the beach. It was a beautiful afternoon and the tide had pulled backed leaving hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand. The boy began to run around, picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the water. His grandfather laughed at his efforts and said "Jimmy, why do you run about so. There are hundreds of starfish and you are wasting your time. You can’t possibly make a different here."

His grandson stopped, looked carefully at the starfish in his hand and threw it back into the water. He said "Granddaddy, that may be the case for all of them, but I can make a difference for that one."

Isn’t that the reality of life. None of us will likely change the big picture. There will always be hunger, war, disfunctional families and illness. However, we can each impact those around us a person at a time (or a customer at a time…). When added up across all of us, the needle begins to move.

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on
the bus
Trying to make his way home
— Joan Osborne Song

It is very easy to get wrapped up in the challenges and tests of the day. In the venture business, unfortunately, approximately 50% of investments end up in the losing column and 10% of the deals drive the superior returns (hopefully). As a result, you spend over 80% of your time dealing with the issues in the portfolio such as fundraising, hiring management, revisiting strategy and costs and such. When things go wrong, they go wrong very quickly and one company can take up most of your waking hours (and many of the other ones as well). These are not enjoyable times. This, however, is not the focus of this post. Perspective is.

Today, I spoke with our building’s former landlord, Dave. He is a wonderful person who treated the building, its employees and its tenants like family. Our head maintenance guy, Pedro, recently had a stroke. I was not aware of the full extent of it, except that he was not coming back to work and Dave had set up a public fund for him. Today, however, I heard the full story.

Pedro is 52 and has lost the use of portions of his left side including his arm. He is working hard in rehab to regain use, but it is an uphill battle and it is not certain how much he will succeed. It is a struggle for him to walk, but he tries to get out for a mile each day with a walker. He has three young children and wife to support. However, it is uncertain if he will be able to work again. Social security disability pays some and he has some savings set aside, but this all will eventually run down.

Pedro was an everyday part of many of our lives in the building. When he had his stroke, it was out of sight, out of mind for many of us. Dave was one of the only people to reach out to help Pedro. This is true compassion and true leadership. This is what people mean when they say that their company and employees are like a family. It means you legitimately care and you spend time and effort to take care of each other.

It made me think about how many people are around me everyday and, because I am so focused on my daily grind, my most recent troubled situation, I don’t look up and I don’t take the time to care. I also fail to put things into perspective. Stories like Pedro’s make me realize how truly fortunate I am to have my family, my job, my opportunities and my friends. It also makes me think about how I could be using all of these more effectively for the betterment of those around me, even if it is just one person at a time (starfish story to come later).

I don’t know how Pedro will make it through his harsh reality. I will do what I can to help Dave in his efforts. However, given how much Dave is doing, it makes me understand how much more engaged and helpful I could be. Not only is Dave helping Pedro, he (and people like him) are setting a bar for the rest of us. It is up to all of us to lift up our heads from the rat race and rise to the challenge.

Quick follow-up. I just noticed that all of the anti-US footage in the post below has been removed. Whether you support the war or not, this is a bit surprising. This definitely puts Google into another censorship bind like with China. In this case, it is the US government applying the pressure, not China. This will continue to advance the debate over where the government should or shouldn’t censor content. While I don’t support airing this footage, I am even more concerned by this censorship…

"The first casualty when war comes is truth,"
— Senator Hiram Johnson

User generated content is obviously having an impact on all corners of life. I figured that it would just be a matter of time before user generated ads started hitting and, sure enough, we have three coming up in this year’s Super Bowl. I predict (always a no win) that next will be a company (perhaps Google/YouTube) that will create a platform for simple ad creation that bridges between the "creator" public and  corporations looking for innovative ideas. I don’t know how this would work but it will be coming (don’t know if it will be fad or permanent). Users could create copy, viewers could vote and corporations could use this filter to select innovative new ideas. Just a thought…

Where user generated content is really having an impact is in Citizen Journalism (no surprise). When Katrina hit, the first footage out was from the public. Recently, it has taken another turn…some would say for the better and others for the worse. Raw footage of Iraq has been steadily coming online (YouTube, etc) and the New York Times just did a piece on Anti-US Attack Videos Spread on the Web.

This has the government up in arms as well as those people supporting the war. The anti-war crowd sees this as a way to get graphic realities out to the public around the US spin machine. I personally find the videos shot by insurgents hunting our soldiers to be a bit too graphic for my tastes, but it does have the result of showing some of the brutal realities of the war there. What it really does is give the public unfettered access to a broad array of content and perspectives on the war. This is not what the Bush Administration wants or needs at this point. I wonder how  we, as a society, would have responded (and supported) WWI and WWII if graphic shots of trench warfare and beach landing scenes (like Finding Private Ryan) were scattered across a medium like the web back then?

This war is obviously much more controversial and the rationale for its genesis is not as universally supported. Just as opinion of the Vietnam war was shaped by the rise of color television, Iraq is being impacted by the internet. Ironic that the internet had its genesis with the Pentagon. I’m guessing they would have killed off the project if they had know that this would be the result…