Choosing a partner for starting a business can sometimes be stressful. It is important to find someone whom you have trust, good communication, shared mindsets, aligned visions and similar worldviews. Previously we spoke about the pros and cons of founding a startup with your best friend, and now we are going to explore the pros and cons of founding a startup with your family.

On a side note, my co-founder is my father and I have experienced the feeling of this is the worst decision Ive ever made and the feeling of this is the best decision Ive ever made. What has helped us move forward is to define and frequently review the roles, responsibilities, and who takes the final decisions on certain domains. Another tip I could share from my experience is that you must identify and address the emotional tensions before moving forward with conversations and decisions, to avoid personal conflict.

So lets see what are the pros of starting up with family:

1.- Common Core Values

Having strong core values becomes a competitive advantage for your business because core values support the vision, shape the culture and define the essence of the companys identity. Most likely youll share strong core values with your family and when you start a business together, the values become stronger giving you an extra edge towards shaping the identity of the company allowing it to run smoothly.

2.- Communication

Communication is key to every good relationship and this is also true for business relationships. Many family members have found a way to communicate effectively, in exactly the way that a businesses could benefit from. However, this is a tricky one because when conversations go the wrong way everything can go to bad places, breaking up relationships and businesses. One of the most important things when founding a business with family, is to address emotional and personal feelings soon to avoid friction and future problems.

3.- Loyalty and Strong Commitment

Building a business requires a lot of commitment in hard times and good times. A great perk of starting a business with your family is that youre more likely to invest extra hours and effort needed to reach your goals. Also the key people are more prone to make sacrifices for the success of the company, which also relates to strong loyalty between the founders, who are more likely to stick together in harsh situations and show the determination to accomplish the shared goals.

4.- Lower Cost Staff

The salaries and wages for staff can be take a big chunk from the companys budget, but luckily for family businesses, the staff is more willing to make financial sacrifices for the sake of the business. It is more likely for family members to accept lower pay than they would get elsewhere, to help the business in the long term or during a cash flow crisis. This can be beneficial for the early stages of a business or even when things are not going as expected.

5.- Appealing for Customers

Customers relationships with businesses are based on trust, and for many customers the fact that the business is family owned is appealing. They understand that strong core values are shared, loyalty and strong commitment drive the decisions, and this translates into building trust for them. Family businesses are more likely to satisfy and understand their customers needs and happy customers drive the business towards success.

6.- Leaving Legacy

Many founders think about the possibility of creating long lasting legacies through the companies we build and when partnering with our family, it becomes a bigger incentive to put our names into that legacy. We create the possibility of making a family legacy that will last for future generations.

Now lets evaluate the other side of the coin and explore the cons of starting up with family:

1.- Conflicts

Businesses can generate situations where conflict arises and when your partners are your family, disputes can mix personal and emotional situations. This creates a lot of friction for the business, slowing down progress and requiring the involved parties to engage in difficult conversations which can last for weeks depending on the situation. It is extremely important to resolve conflicts as soon as possible to avoid future unresolved issues and reduce friction that slows the progress.

2.- Favouritism

Businesses require making decisions with objectiveness and family members can easily forget about this when working together. For example, who gets hired for a role or gets promoted, should be a decision based onwho is more fit to develop the role and take the responsibilities. However, making this decision when family is involved can sometimes be difficult. as favouritism might arise. Another example is when outside employees feel the favouritism and take sides, avoiding offering feedback in fear family members might get offended. A great tool that helps to reduce favouritism, is to use numbers and indicators for making decisions and making sure every employee feels equally comfortable with sharing their thoughts.

3.- Emotional Labour

One of the greatest challenges we face as Founders is the emotional labour we must endure when starting and running a company, dealing with our fears, anxieties, sadness, and stress, which can easily get in our way to reach our goals. When working with family things get a bit more difficult, because there is an additional layer to the emotional labour from the relationship between family members. Achieving peace with this situation requires a lot of effort and patience, but when the work is done results are worth the effort.

4.- Life events

Even though life events occur sometimes without any previous warning, it is important to think about death, divorce and incapacitation, which are situations that could potentially destroy your businesses. Family members and also co-founders often face the risks of enduring those life events. This is why it is important to take some time to discuss the possibilities and define a plan of action for those types of situations.

5.- Generation gaps

In my personal experience this has been one of the hardest things to manage while working with my father. There is a generation gap which sometimes makes our worldviews too different. When starting a business with family, take into consideration that different generations with different experiences choose to take risks and analyze decisions in different ways, which most of the time can raise opposed perspectives and possibly conflicts between family members. A great strategy that has helped us manage the situation is to agree on the methods of evaluating risks and decisions, which should aim to remove any emotional and personal influences.

6.- Power Struggles

It is difficult to separate life and work when someone from your family is your business partner, sometimes family roles can mix with the business roles, leading to a pre-established chain of command which if changed or challenged might raise power struggles. Weve managed those situations by separating and clearly establishing the family relationship with the business relationship. This has not been easy but it pays off in the long run.

If you missed our article onthe pros and cons of founding a startup with your best friend, check it out as well for some more perspective.

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The pros and cons of starting up with family - EU-Startups

On June 17, WashingtonExec will be virtually celebrating the most impactful and innovative C-suite executives in government and industry. These chief officers work in technology, security, data, operations, finance, business and more, excelling on both sides of the government contracting sector. Our team of judges have chosen the finalists for the inaugural Chief Officer Awards, so before we announce the winners during the event, we wanted to get to know the finalists a bit better. This Q&A series highlights their careers, successes, proud professional moments and notable risks.

Lindsay Weissbratten, Siemens Government Technologies

Lindsay Weissbratten is chief human resource officer atSiemens Government Technologies and a finalist in the Public CompanyCHRO Award Category.

What key achievements did you have in 2019?

I joined in August 2019 and have been leading an expansion and enhancement of critical human resources functions for the company through a Focus on You initiative, where we are systematically developing human capital solutions and programming to better serve our workforce based on their feedback through surveys and multiple engagement forums with our CEO. Programming has included items such as revamping onboarding processes and improving new hire orientation, to recognition forums, mentoring, employee development and much more.

Our efforts all tie back to the simple but powerful premise that an employees connection to our company begins on their very first day of work and is continuously reaffirmed through opportunities to grow, learn and be recognized for their contributions to the success of the business.

What has made you successful in your current role?

While hard work and continuous learning have supported my professional growth and development, there is one informal mentor that I can point to throughout my career that has been pivotal in providing me with guidance. As one of my former managers, she was also an individual who led by example. I remain in touch with her today and know she is always in my corner.

In addition to her, my parents have always believed in me. Their confidence in me translated later in life to confidence I grew within myself to achieve goals I set out for.

What was a turning point or inflection point in your career?

From a personal perspective, roughly four years ago, we almost lost our youngest child due to a life-threatening food allergy. Twice in one week. It was the kind of experience that shakes you to your core and leaves you numb.

When I have been faced with hardship, I try to pause and find the positive in it. While this was a personal experience, having witnessed the fragility of life has impacted me professionally as a leader. In todays world, the demands are never ending. They will always be there and it is important to work to your fullest potential.

However, part of working to your fullest potential is ensuring that life does not pass you by without your participation. One of my more senior employees reached out to me in a prior role and explained how important it is to the future generation to see strong leaders value family and do their best to balance success.

I try to remind myself of the importance of leading by example and how I can help my staff and others be the best they can be professionally and personally through my own actions.

What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?

This spring, our team has been involved in helping the Army retrofit locations into hospitals to serve communities in need due to the coronavirus pandemic. I am proud to be a part of Siemens and the amazing things the company is doing at one of the most unique times in history. From health care infrastructure, to the development of antibody testing, we are truly making a difference when it matters the most.

One of our key strategic goals at SGT is ensuring we have a dedicated focus on being a good neighbor in the communities where our employees work and live and encourage them to leverage our Volunteer Time Off Program.

This spring, being a good neighbor took on a whole new meaning. Our employees have been giving back to their communities through activities such as making masks, printing face shields on 3D printers, donating plasma, caring for the elderly to volunteering at food banks.

Whatareyour primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?

When I think about serving an organization as an HR leader, Im reminded about our unique ability to navigate the business perspective and the priorities and challenges of an organization while also having the ability to influence the future of the company through successful talent management programming.

With successful human capital leadership, HR has the ability to impact the daily lives of the workforce, enhance job satisfaction and propel the organizations productivity and success. It is a wonderful thing to know that our employees make our nation stronger, more effective and more efficient. From an HR perspective, helping to recruit top talent and ensure we maintain healthy turnover is critical to our success in serving government customers.

Whats the biggest professional risk youve ever taken?

After more than a decade with a well-known government contracting firm in the area, I decided to take a leap of faith and exit the organization as part of a spinoff. I went from an HR staff of one in 17 days to a team of 20, led the rebuilding and design of all of our policies, procedures, systems and programming while doubling our headcount internationally in the first four months.

In addition, on our very first day as a standalone organization, we acquired another company that I was charged with helping to fold in. I remember telling my team this will be the experience of a lifetime and like no other job theyve ever had.

This was a time when I left the comfort and low-risk environment I had been a part of for over a decade for what many saw was a huge risk. There were so many unknowns and uncertainty. I have zero regrets and have grown so much since then as an individual, as a leader and as a HR professional.

The new experiences Ive gained have changed me as a person and as a leader and helped broaden my potential impact for the organizations I have worked for since then.

Looking back at your career, what are you most proud of?

During one of my positions at General Dynamics, I was charged with leading employee engagement and development. My team and I launched a resource for our employees called Dynamic Development. It was an amazing resource ahead of its time and best practices that provided employees with a holistic view of their development from traditional job changes to on the job development to emotional intelligence development.

It tied our recruitment, compensation ladder system and learning programs together in one place with exercises and resources embedded throughout that were tailored and customized specifically for our workforce. I worked closely with a vendor who helped us embed a behavioral competency tool within our intranet and later modeled our work creation into future offerings for their customers, even a decade-plus later.

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Chief Officer Awards Finalist Lindsay Weissbratten: 'Faced with Hardship, I Try to Pause and Find the Positive' - WashingtonExec

Harbor High holds drive-through graduation for its alternative school students on June 3, 2020 at its White Lake campus Wochit

High school diplomas were collected by 101 unconventional graduates and one proud, grieving mother on Wednesday night in the Huron Valley School district.

Everything about the 2020 Harbor High School and adult education commencement was unusual in this year of coronavirus.

In a drive-through ceremony, students popped out of their vehicles to pick up their diplomas from a table and stepped on to an outdoor stage while only the family they could fit in the car clapped and cheered.

Also applauding were school faculty spaced six feet apart and who mourned the hugs they couldnt give to their students whose paths to graduation were the most noteworthy of all, overcoming obstacles that even a pandemic could not overshadow.

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Every single one of the kids in the alternative high school and adult ed are overcoming something difficult, usually loss or adversity in their personal life that is really hard for them, Ben Dowker, director of the alternative high school and adult education for Huron Valley, said. They didnt think they were going to make it (to graduation).

One of the graduates honored Wednesday didnt make it to the stage, but his mother did in an exceptionally emotional moment.

Joe Wagner, 18, completed the necessary coursework for his diploma from Harbor High School last September. One day later, he was crossing Highland Road in White Lake when he was struck by a vehicle and died.

Christy Wagnerclutched her sons diploma as well as the Courage Award which staff bestowed upon Joe when she stepped on to the commencement stage.

Christy Wagner of Milford accepted her son Joe Wagner's diploma during Harbor High's commencement on June 3, 2020. Joe Wagner was killed in an accident last September, a day after he completed his coursework.(Photo: Courtesy of Huron Valley Schools)

It was bittersweet, the Milford mom said. Of course I felt sad that he wasnt here to accept all this, but me and my husband are honored to accept it for him. We promised we would always celebrate him like he is here.

Joe, who worked full-time for a construction firm and had overcome many personal struggles to achieve his diploma, was all about family, Christy said.He was also survived by his father, Larry, and his younger brother, Connor.

The motto that it takes a village to raise a child rings true to Christy, who said Joes village included Dowker and Karen Gerard, Harbor High teacher and adult ed student advisor, who she said feels like family to her.

Christysaid she plans to take her sons graduation cap to Dowker and Gerard to sign. At the graduation, she released a balloon signed by the family.

Larry and Christy Wagner hold a picture of their late son, Joe and his high school diploma on June 3, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy of the Wagner family)

Joe, who loved to be the center of attention, would have loved the fanfare.

I left there feeling like he accomplished something and we helped him accomplish it, she said. Joe had no shame in his game, he would have hammed it up and let them know he was there, and his personality would have come out for sure.

Jessica Worden, 35, finally crossed the finish line at the Huron Valley adult ed commencement, surmounting obstacles that make the pandemic seem like hardly a blip on her lifes radar.

The Waterford resident dropped out of school when she was 17 to raise her sisters baby in order to keep him from going into foster care. She had custody of her nephew for the next decade.

In 2016, Jessica and her mother, Jena Marek, enrolled in the Huron Valley adult ed program to finish their high school education together, but Jessica was foiled by a dog bite, which was a blessing in disguise.

The bite sustained from her Great Dane when she got between it and another dog resulted in 28 stitches and damaged nerves. While she was being treated at the hospital with her husband Tyg by her side, he suffered cardiac arrest, leading to the discovery of a heart condition for which he is now treated.

In the fall of 2017she enrolled to try again.But two months laterwas called upon to help her brother-in-law, a widower with two young sons, one of whom was discovered to have a brain tumor. Surgery was successful, but tragedy lay ahead.

In May 2018, another nephew was murdered in Pontiac, leading her to spend a great deal of time in court for the trial and leaving her feeling defeated about life and her education.

And then I just gave up for a little bit, because I had already tried three times to go, and my Mom was like, You have to give it one more try, Worden recalled. I felt it wasnt meant for me to go to school anymore. Every time I start, something horrific in my life happens. What more can I take that is going to happen?

Last fall, she dug in again, and then coronavirus arrived in March threatening yet another derailment of her dream.

Jessica Worden celebrates her high school graduation during a commencement ceremony held by Huron Valley Schools on June 3, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy of Huron Valley Schools)

Worden, who is a home healthcare worker and raising nephew Dayvin, could only look in stunned disbelief at the email that said school was closed.

I thought, Oh my God. Seriously? Here we go, its really not meant for me to finish school, she recalled.

But a worldwide pandemic was the one enemy she would finally defeat, and even though the graduation ceremony was way out of the ordinary, she said she wouldnt change it.

With everything I have been through, it was everything and more than I could have asked for, she said. Because I didnt go through school the traditional way, why have a traditional ceremony?

True to form in a life that hasnt been easy, her car was in the shop and she and husband Tyg pulled up to the drive-thru ceremony in a rented 2020 GMC Terrain, with nephew Dayvin, as well as two nieces.

She got out of the car, wearing her cap and tassel adorned with a passage from Proverbs, She is clothed in strength and dignity and she laughs without fear of the future.

Tyg Worden holds wife Jessica Worden, who displays the top of her graduation cap on June 3, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy of Jessica Worden)

In her excitement to get to the stage as Gerard announced her as the adult ed valedictorian, nearly forgot to grab her diploma and carnation from the table until reminded by Dowker.

She recalls proudly the clapping and cheering she received from the staff, the people who had pushed for her, and believed in her even when she didnt believe in herself.

I felt like a star, they absolutely made me feel like a starI felt amazing, she said. I felt like a 30-year goal was accomplished, I felt wonderful. It almost made me feel like everything I had to endure and go through was worth every bit of it.

She reflectedback on 2016, when she had first stepped into the Huron Valley adult ed building in White Lake and told her mother and Gerard that she didnt belong there, that she was too old.

Gerard responded with words that have stayed with her.

She said, Youre never too old, its never too late to go back and finish something, Worden recalled.

Those words, along with gestures like the staff sending her flowers following her husbands heart troubles, when she was again out of school and at the lowest point of her life, or just lending an ear when she needed it, are not forgotten and never will be.

Worden, who recently accepted a job at Fords Livionia transmission plant and plans to attend college to become a social worker, cant wait to return to see the Harbor High staff when it is safe and hug those who helped her succeed.

Gerard looks forward to that day.

I know that good things are in store for them in the future, she said. They showed determination and courage to even walk through the doors of this building to complete their education and by willing to adapt to the current situation, they showed the inner strength they had and I know they will have success in their future because of their ability to do that.

Contact reporter Susan Bromley at sbromley@hometownlife.com or 517-281-2412. Follow her on Twitter @SusanBromley10.

Read or Share this story: https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/milford/2020/06/05/huron-valley-alternative-and-adult-ed-graduates-granted-2020-diplomas/3137246001/

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Abstract

Human technology is characterized by cumulative cultural knowledge gain, yet researchers have limited knowledge of the mix of copying and innovation that maximizes progress. Here, we analyze a unique large-scale dataset originating from collaborative online programming competitions to investigate, in a setting of real-world complexity, how individual differences in innovation, social-information use, and performance generate technological progress. We find that cumulative knowledge gain is primarily driven by pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks flexibly, rather than by pure innovators or habitual copiers. Our study also reveals a key role for prestige in information transfer.

Culture is responsible for the behavioral diversity that has led to our species remarkable adaptability and ecological success (1, 2). At the heart of culture lies social learninglearning influenced by contact with other individuals (3)which is used by an extensive variety of species. Only in humans, however, do we see compelling evidence for the buildup of socially transmitted information over multiple rounds of innovation and social learning, often into complex multicomponent functional solutions, leading to tools, products, and knowledge that no one individual could have invented alone (2, 4, 5).

Strong evidence suggests that individuals should use social learning selectively according to strategies that guide how, what, and under what circumstances they copy others, and when they rely on their own experience (611). Recent studies show that humans exhibit consistent individual differences in the rates of using either social or asocial information in decision-making (1216), with these preferences consistent across time and contexts (13), and linked to personality traits in both adults (17) and children (18). Such individual differences in social-information use have profound implications for the way researchers conceptualize and model social learning. In particular, there has been little research thus far on how variation in learning strategies between and within individuals could affect the processes underlying cumulative cultural evolution.

Here, we analyze a unique large-scale dataset to investigate, in a cumulative cultural evolution setting, whether and how individual differences in learning generate collective progress. The dataset arises from a series of collaborative online programming competitions organized by the MathWorks software company over the course of 14 years (19). Each contest involved participants attempting to craft and improve solutions to a set of NP-complete computer coding challenges (20). Such challenges do not have an exact solution, which allows open-ended improvement, as typically characteristic of cumulative cultural evolution. This exclusive dataset provides a rare opportunity to isolate the causes of technological progress in a setting that approaches real-world complexity.

Complex cultural systems, often characterized by opaque links between cultural traits and payoffs, require individuals to use effective heuristics to guide their learning. One cue thought to be particularly important in human societies is prestige, defined as high status or influence typically related to higher competence in valued domains of activity (21). In complex contexts when direct observation of payoffs is difficult, watching how much other individuals defer to, attend to, or copy a model can provide an efficient proxy for that models information quality (22, 23). Prestige can extend across domains, for example, being perceived as a successful yam grower might still increase the probability that an individuals fishing techniques would be copied (4).

The complex interactions characterizing cumulative cultural evolution provide an ideal context for such prestige bias to emerge. Repeated interactions between individuals in a challenging environment characterized by hard problems allow individuals to create reputations that are used to guide the copying of beneficial traits. In the aforementioned programming contests, once an individual submitted a valid entry, it became public, making its code accessible to other participants, along with its score and the authors chosen username. Over time, some individuals took part in more than one contest, which allowed the potential to build reputation and influence across contests.

Here, we show that the successful individuals that drive cumulative improvements in the programming contests are neither habitual innovators nor inveterate copiers, but rather mixed-strategy pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks flexibly. We further demonstrate that superior performance in contests allows players to generate reputations that are used by other players as a cue to guide social learning above and beyond the effect of payoff bias, both within and across contests.

We analyzed data from 19 online programming competitions organized by MathWorks from 1998 until 2012 (19). Overall, we had data from 1964 unique participants from 19 contests, with an average of 136 participants per contest, some of whom took part in more than one contest, and collectively submitted a total of 45,793 valid entries. We grouped submitted entries according to the participant that submitted them (henceforth called contestant) both within each contest and, where possible, across different contests. Each contestant was thus responsible for a collection of entries, which can be characterized in terms of activity (the total number of entries submitted to the contest), novelty (similarity to the entry with the current best scoreas there is substantial copying taking place in the contest, this similarity is an unbiased, relative measure of how much an entry is deviating from the current population consensus), and performance (whether the entry became, on submission, a leader in its contest, i.e., whether it achieved the best score at the time of its submission). Each individual contestant could thus be characterized by a number of entries, a distribution of leader similarities, and a distribution of performance measures for every entry they had submitted. To begin with, for simplicity, we analyzed each contest as independent and assumed that all contestants were distinct (i.e., contestants were not linked across contests; see below for an analysis considering the same individuals participating in multiple contests). This means that each contestant had an associated activity, novelty, and performance measure for each contest in which they participated.

We found that individuals differed widely in their activity, use of novelty, and performance. Activity ranged from those who only submitted one entry to very active, very exploratory individuals who returned a wide range of raw scores. The number of entries per contestant was approximately exponentially distributed in all contests, with 30% of contestants submitting only 1 entry in the entire contest, 60% submitting 5 or fewer, and less than 1% submitting >50 entries (fig. S1). Of all participants to all contests, 22% submitted at least one entry that took the lead, and 14% did this more than once. The average number of entries per leading contestant was 10 times larger than the average number of entries per nonleading contestant. Activity was therefore strongly linked to performance at the individual level (fig. S2). However, the variation in activity levels among leading contestants indicates that high activity was not necessary for a participant to be able to take the lead8% of leading contestants submitted only a single entry, while 16% submitted less than five (fig. S2).

The novelty results show that this between-individual variation extends to how individuals used social learning in their solutions. Some contestants were very conservative and preferred to keep their entries safe through solely copying the current leader, while other contestants were relatively adventurous, submitting entries that varied in their novelty (Fig. 1A). However, contestants did not display a bimodal distribution in use of copying or introduction of novelty, but rather could be broadly split into three groups, albeit on a continuous distribution: (i) a surprisingly large number of contestants who only submitted entries with low similarity to the current leader, a group that we term incurable mavericks, who barely ever took the lead (Fig. 1A, left section); (ii) an intermediate group whose entries ranged from zero similarity to very close copies of the current leader, termed occasional mavericks, who were the most likely group to take the lead (Fig. 1A, middle section); and (iii) a smaller group whose entries were always very similar to the current leader, termed extreme conservatives, who, again, rarely took the lead (Fig. 1A, right section). Most leading contestants and the most active contestants lie toward the copying end of this spectrum.

Similarity to current leader (A) and score increment (B)average values with bars spanning the range of the distribution. The colored circles indicate leading contestants (i.e., contestants who submitted at least one entry that improved the overall score at the time of its submission), and the size of the circles is proportional to the total number of entries submitted by each contestant. The shaded panels in (A) indicate a visual split of participants into mavericks (left), copiers (right), and flexible users (middle) based on how they make use of social learning. The shaded panels (B) indicate a visual split between poorly performing contestants (left), contestants who are variable in performance (middle), and consistently good performers (right).

There was also considerable between-individual variation in terms of performance (Fig. 1B), with participants again split into three groups: a number of contestants who displayed very little variation in scores relative to the current leader and who often took the lead but more often than not only submitted one or two entries (Fig. 1B, right section), a group of contestants who showed variation in performance but tended to take the lead (Fig. 1B, middle section), and a final group of contestants who varied in their scores but showed poor performance on average (Fig. 1B, right section). Leading contestants use social information in a notably different manner to other contestants (Fig. 2). We split participants into leading contestants (i.e., contestants who submitted at least one leading entry that beat the current best in the contest, in at least one contest) and nonleading contestants (who never submitted any entry in any contest that beat the current best leader). To test whether the way individuals used social information affected their performance, we fitted a generalized linear mixed model with a binomial error distribution that predicted whether an individual was a leading contestant or not as a function of the mean and the range of the distribution of similarities between that individuals submissions and the current leader at the time of submission, to ask whether more or less innovation in terms of solutions was beneficial.

(A) Distributions of average leader similarities and distribution of leader similarity ranges for all nonleading and leading contestants. (B) Probability of a contestant becoming a leading contestant as a function of mean leader similarity and the range of the leader similarity distribution, as predicted by the generalized linear mixed model.

According to the generalized mixed linear model (GLMM), the probability of a contestant introducing leading entries increased with a higher mean similarity to the current leader, but was also correlated with a higher range of the distribution of similarities between each entry submitted by the author and the current leader (i.e., the variation of solutions submitted by the author; Fig. 2B and Table 1). For every one unit increase in mean similarity, the log odds of taking the lead increasd by 3.488 (i.e., the odds increased by a factor of 31). Therefore, both between-individual variation (i.e., how much copying a contestant engages in on average, as measured by the average similarity to the current leader) and within-individual variation (i.e., how variable the solutions submitted by each contestant are, as measured by the range of the distribution of similarities to the leader for each individual) are predictors of individual performance. Leading contestants, who were almost always occasional mavericks, were more similar to the current leader, on average, than nonleading contestants. However, leading contestants also showed considerable flexibility in their behavior, being substantially more variable in their use of social and asocial information than nonleading contestants. Leading contestants deviated more often from the status quo than extreme conservatives, while (unlike incurable mavericks) still sometimes working on variations of the current leading solution and scoring consistently better than nonleaders even with their nonleading entries (fig. S3). Results from the continuous version of this model confirm our findings (table S1 and fig. S4).

Results from GLMM: LeadingContestant ~ MeanScoreDifference + MeanLeaderSimilarity + RangeLeaderSimilarity + (1|Contest). Predictors are standardizedsimilarity ranges theoretically between 0 and 1 and score difference between 1 and 1.

We devised a measure, which we call influence, that captures how much of an entry a population picked up following the entrys submission. Influence is broadly calculated as a normalized version of the average similarity between an entry and subsequent entries submitted by other contestants in that contest, thus capturing how much of an entry is reflected following entries, while controlling for self-similarity (fig. S5). Leading contestants were also copied more (i.e., they had, on average, higher influence) than nonleading contestants, through both their leading and their nonleading entries (Fig. 3). Leading entries had higher influence than nonleading entries overall, but even nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants had higher influence than entries submitted by nonleading contestants (Table 2), even when we control for score difference. For instance, a nonleading entry submitted by a leading contestant had a 0.135-point increase in influence compared to a nonleading entry submitted by a nonleading contestant. If the entry was also leading, this added another 0.175-point increment. This was in addition to the increase in influence due to higher increment. Notably, leading contestants submitted entries that had a higher influence on other participants, even when those entries were not the best available to copy, and even when variation in actual score was accounted for. This demonstrates that a prestige effect was taking place in the contests, with contestants who manage to take the lead at least once forming reputations that influenced how others copied.

Entry-level influence distribution for entries submitted by nonleading contestants, nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants, and leading entries submitted by leading contestants.

Results for fixed effects from linear mixed model: Influence ~ LeaderGroup + Increment + (1|Contest/Contestant). The top row represents the baseline, entries that neither led nor were submitted by contestants who were ever leaders. The following two rows indicate additive effects relative to the baseline for nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants and leading entries submitted by leading contestants. The last row indicates the relationship between influence and performance as measured by score increment (standardized between 1 and 1).

Crucially, this effect extended across contests (fig. S6). Overall, again, leading entries had significantly higher influence than nonleading entries, and so did nonleading entries that had been submitted by a contestant who managed to take the lead in the same contest. Leading entries submitted by a contestant who was a leader in the current contest had, on average, 0.243 higher influence than nonleading entries submitted by a contestant who was never a leader, but even nonleading entries submitted by a contestant who had taken the lead in the contest had, on average, 0.217 higher influence (Table 3). More surprisingly, this prestige effect held even for entries that did not take the lead, submitted by contestants who did not become leaders in the focal contest, but had taken the lead in a different contest (Table 3), which achieved 0.120 higher influence than the baseline, nonleading entries submitted by contestants who never led. This was true while controlling for payoff bias, i.e., mean performance overallfor every unit increase in mean score increment, influence increased by 0.284 units. This shows that cross-contest individual behavior was significantly related to entry-level measures of influence, indicating that consistent individual characteristics affected how entries were copied, in line with the expectations if prestige effects were forming across contests through repeated participation.

Results for fixed effects from linear mixed model: Influence ~ LeaderGroup + Increment + (1|Contestant/Contest). The first row indicates the intercept: nonleading entries submitted by nonleading contestants who never took the lead in any other contests. The following rows indicate the additional effect corresponding to each factor level indicatedbold indicates leading (either entry, contestant, or contestant in a different contest). The last row indicates the relationship of influence with performance, measured here as score increment.

In a cumulative cultural evolution setting with real-world task complexity, we have shown that individual differences in reliance on social and asocial learning give rise to considerable variation in performance. Analysis of individual-level patterns of entry novelty did not indicate a dichotomous split between individuals who preferred copying and those who preferred innovation, but rather a continuous spectrum, in which individuals varied not only in their proclivity to copy and/or innovate but also in how much within-individual variation (i.e., exploration across entries) they displayed. Notably, the spectrum of the individual reliance on social learning had long tails formed by individuals with relatively pure always innovate and always copy approaches, who had relatively low success overall. The best-performing individuals occupied the center ground, mixing a balance of copying the leader with their own innovation and exhibiting flexibility and exploration in achieving this balance. Our results suggest that, to succeed, it is not enough to innovate alone, or solely to copy uncritically, but rather, individuals must strike a balance between the two. Successful individuals are pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks.

Previous work acknowledges and occasionally focuses on between-individual variation in social-information use (9, 15, 24), sometimes identifying factors that could explain this variation, such as confidence (9), intelligence quotient (25), or age (26). For instance, in a dataset of 60 years of opening moves in the game of Go, Beheim et al. (27) found both individual variation in social-information use (some players copy more than others), as well as cultural variation (players from certain countries copy more than others). Modeling work has shown that a mix of innovation and social learning can be beneficial, at both the population and individual level (6, 11, 28), and improvement is maximized by a careful blend of exploration and copying (29, 30). The literature less often discusses within-individual variation in social learning and how it is linked to population-level improvement. Morgan et al. (9) show that individuals flexibly adjust their reliance on social information over time, as they gain confidence in the task, and Toelch et al. (31) show that individuals change their reliance on innovation when presented with social performance cues. Such findings are indicative of growing evidence that humans implement learning strategies flexibly (32). We extend these findings to show that not only do individuals use social information flexibly but also this flexibility is adaptive in the sense of being associated with successful performance: The best-performing individuals are those that most effectively navigate the trade-off between innovation and social learning.

Within our current framework, it is not immediately obvious how this trade-off is negotiated, or even how to predict accurately how good ideas are generated. Individual preferences for copying versus exploration can be explained in terms of both perceived expected payoffs and built-in proclivities for either type of learning. The structure of the scoring system allows for better scores either through algorithmic improvement or through speeding up the code, which means that copying is a safe strategy and individuals who are not especially proficient coders will typically receive higher payoffs from copying than innovating. Nonetheless, we see evidence of poor performers who stick exclusively to innovating and refuse to copy, suggesting a personal preference, manifest independent of payoff. Given the substantial search space of existing solutions, the fact that entries tend to have high similarity to the current leader is not surprising, as copying the leader is a quick heuristic for reducing the space and focusing on proven solutions. The fact that new leaders are both similar to current leaders and more exploratory could be interpreted as leaders being good at innovating from a starting point of the current best solution, although studies show that a degree of randomness can aid exploratory search (33, 34). However, our data imply that both conservatism and exploration play a role in effective innovation. We have shown in previous work that many leading entries were very similar to the current leader, but a handful were very different, yet associated with higher improvement (19). The latter generated large innovative leaps that triggered the population to adopt this new solution, which was then optimized through small modifications. Here, we show that the individuals responsible for these crucial entries rarely worked alone and also participated in the tweaking process. Overall, leaders showed a higher level of engagement than nonleaders, perhaps symptomatic of relevant personal motivators (interest, expertise, and perseverance).

Prestige effects are expected to emerge where there is a correlation between status and performance (21). According to participant accounts, introducing an entry that takes the lead is a highly sought-after prize, which suggests that reputation is a valued commodity in these contests. Moreover, participants remember good players from previous contests and pay attention to their submissions. Our study provides clear evidence that leaders had more influence on the patterns of solutions in the population than nonleaders, even when their entries did not take the lead. This effect extended across contests such that individuals who had proved successful had influence even in contests in which they never took the lead. Modeling the influence of leaders while controlling for the individual performance of each entry allowed us to establish whether leaders had higher influence merely as a result of submitting generally better entries or whether leadership genuinely creates a reputational effect. The analysis confirms genuine prestige effects in the copying of leaders. This prestige effect held up across contests, suggesting that an individuals reputation builds in the MATLAB contest world independently of the specific challenge, perhaps serving as a heuristic used to reduce the overwhelming search space. This is in line with Henrich and Gil-Whites theory (21), suggesting that prestige can be a useful tool in the face of uncertainty, even when that uncertainty is not a result of lack of success information, but rather an excess of it. However, such effects are still reliant on general programming expertise, as opposed to, say, a gifted footballer promoting a brand of clothing, and it remains to be established how widely this cross-domain influence extends.

We have investigated how individual-level use of social information contributes to technological progress in a cumulative cultural evolution microcosm, where cultural artifacts are incrementally improved over time through modifications by multiple individuals. We studied what humans do when unguided or unprompted, confirming and extending results from theoretical models and small experiments in a large-scale realistic setting. Although there were no experimental interventions in this study, we can nonetheless draw clear inferences about the factors that shape cumulative cultural change. Our results suggest that overt attempts to maximize cumulative cultural adaptation require populations consisting of many individuals exhibiting leader qualities (i.e., exploring and flexibly switching between social and asocial information). We have also shown that prestigious individuals have a disproportionate influence on cultural transmission, a finding that implies that performance increments may be achieved through coupling prestige with superior solutions. We note, however, that prestige bias need not speed up cumulative cultural evolution, if this means that good solutions introduced by nonprestigious individuals are hindered from spreading through the population. While our study system might mimic patterns of improvement in some contemporary scenariostodays business world, for exampleit is limited in its generality. For instance, many cultural adaptation scenarios do not involve the level of competition or transparency manifest here. Further realistic studies of such phenomena are needed to establish the generality of our findings.

Consistent interindividual variation in behavior has been a focus in behavior studies for over a decade, sometimes controversially (35). Our study contributes to the growing expectation that differences between individuals, and groups, in their approach to learning will have important effects on the patterns of cultural evolution (36).

However, our findings also draw attention to within-individual flexibility in the use of social and asocial information, suggesting that not only the predilection to use social information but also the contexts in which humans copy could be learned. Here, any assumption that social learning strategies are not learned could underestimate the speed of response to environmental variation (36), as well as the patterns of change of these social learning strategies (32), and the vulnerability to the propagation of maladaptive traits (37). Our study implies that flexibility in learning is a key ingredient for successful innovation.

Last, our study provides compelling evidence for prestige bias. To date, little empirical work has focused on the importance of prestige bias [see (38) for a review of the existing literature], but the complex cumulative cultural evolution microcosm provided by our dataset provides a useful framework for studying this learning mechanism in a naturalistic setting. Why prestige effects should be so potent is unclear, but plausibly, this bias has been co-opted as part of norm psychology, a psychological suite of traits evolved to support cultural evolution (39), and is used even in the presence of more effective learning mechanisms. If the effect of prestige is manifest even in the presence of a clear cue of success, then our findings suggests that prestige could play an even more prominent role in human social learning contexts in which payoffs are opaque.

We analyzed data from 19 online programming competitions organized by MathWorks, the company that produces MATLAB, from 1998 to 2012 (19, 40). Each contest involved the organizers proposing an NP-complete problem (traveling salesmantype constraint problems; see the Supplementary Materials for an example) and participants submitting solutions to it, in the form of MATLAB code. Each entry was submitted to an online platform and evaluated automatically. Once submitted, each entry, along with its score, submitting author, and time of submission, was freely available on the website for all the other participants to access and copy. Participants could only learn their score by submitting an entry. Prizes were nominal (e.g., a MATLAB T-shirt), and participants competed mainly for reputation. Participants were incentivized with small intermediate awards like daily leader and highest improvement in a day. Both these intermediary prizes and the final winner were highly sought-after accolades. The contest attracted programmers that varied in their skill level and engagement with MATLAB, from beginners to engineers and academics who use MATLAB proficiently in their professional life.

Our dataset consisted of 1964 participants from 19 contests, with an average of 136 participants per contest, some of whom took part in more than one contest, and collectively submitted a total of 45, 793 valid entries. Participants submitted an average of 21 entries each, but with very large variation between participants, ranging between 1 and 1502 entries submitted. Of the total of 1964 individual participants, 83% participated in only one contest, and the average number of contests participated in was 1.34, with 2 participants competing in 14 of the 19 contests we studied.

Throughout the week of each contest, participants were allowed to submit as many solutions as they wanted through an online interface, which resulted in numerous participants submitting multiple entries. The participants were identified using an identification number that was linked to a MathWorks account that they themselves created and that was needed to submit entries to the contest. Individuals were not forbidden from creating multiple accounts if they wished to do so, but we have reason to believe, based on online communication between participants, that most did not and, because this would have required substantial effort (e.g., creating a new account, linked to a new email address), we expect that this was not a major confounding factor in this analysis.

The score of each entry was a function of its effectiveness on the task, the speed of execution, and code complexity, measured using McCabes cyclomatic complexity (41), such that improving an entry could be achieved by improving the success of the algorithm and/or the speed of execution, and/or reducing its complexity (the latter could be achieved without considerable programming proficiency). Entries were disqualified if they exceeded execution time or length limits, and the winner was the entry with the lowest score at the end of the week.

We characterized individual variation through three principal metrics that we term activity, novelty, and performance. The analysis included only valid entries, which followed the contest guidelines and received a score (if an entry contained a bug that stopped execution, it was not valid and did not receive a score). Some of the contests included a period of darkness in the first 2 days, in which contestants only had access to their own entries, in an attempt to encourage individual exploration. To compare accurately across contests, in our analysis, we included only data from the third day onward for all contests.

Activity was measured as the total number of entries submitted in a contest. At the individual level, activity is an indirect measure of motivationwe expected that more motivated, more interested players would submit more entries throughout the contest.

Novelty is inversely related to social learning, and hence, this measure allowed us to quantify and investigate individual differences in both reliance on social learning and innovation, as well as link these factors to performance and thereby establish their adaptive value. To measure novelty, we first used similarity to the current leader as an index of copying. We have shown elsewhere (19) that solutions quickly become very complex, which incentivizes participants to copy the current leader (i.e., the entry with the best score at a set time) substantially and tweak that leading solution instead of submitting completely original entries. As a result, populations converged on similar solutions over each contest. Entries are much more similar to the current leader than to any other entries, and although this similarity might not indicate direct copying but rather could be mediated through third entries that copied the current leader, it is nonetheless a robust measure of how much an individual is deviating from the population consensus and, reciprocally, a measure of how much novelty they are introducing. Although we could have used raw proportion of new lines introduced into the contest as a straightforward measure of novelty, this would be a biased measurethere is much more scope for novelty at the beginning of the contest, while novelty naturally decreases over time as possible space of solutions is explored and exhausted. Therefore, we settled on similarity to the current leader as a relative measure that is conditional on the current level of novelty entertained by the best entries. Code similarity was measured using the Czekanowski similarity, designed as a statistic for comparing two ecological samples in terms of proportion of overlapping species, given byCZik=2j=1Smin(xij,xkj)j=1S(xij+xkj)(1)where CZik is the similarity between samples i and k, xij is the number of instances of species j in sample i, and xkj is the number of instances of species j in sample k. For our analysis, each sample corresponds to an entry, and each species is a line of code. Every entry is a set of lines of code, so the similarity between two entries is a function of the total number of lines they have in common, including reoccurring lines, relative to the sum of their lengths. Each individual contestant could thus be characterized by a distribution of leader similaritiesthe novelty introduced by an individual is therefore given by the distribution of dissimilarities (i.e., 1 CZik for each entry).

Performance of an entry was simply characterized as whether that entry became, on submission, the leader in its contest (i.e., achieved the best score at the time of its submission and thus improved the overall score). Extending this to the contestant level allowed us to quantify how many of each contestants entries improved upon the current leader. To test the link between social-information use at the individual level and contestant performance, we fitted a model that predicts whether a contestant ever became a leader or not (within a contest) as a function of that contestants social-information use. We used both the mean and the range of the distribution of similarities between a contestants entries and the current leader as measures of copying and exploration around the population consensus. Thus, we fitted a generalized linear mixed model with a binomial error distribution. The predicted outcome of the model was whether an individual was a leading contestant, and the dependent variables were the mean and range of the distribution of similarities between that individuals submissions and the current leader at the time of submission.

An additional independent variable accounts for the fact that some contestants were better players overall. Thus, the model also included an average performance measure for each contestant as a fixed effect. We used the difference in score between the current leading entry and each specific entry as a continuous, relative measure of performance at the entry level, which takes into account the steady improvement in score. This score difference is positive for entries that improved the overall score, and negative for most entriesa large negative difference indicating a particularly unsuccessful entry. We rescaled this increment within each contest so it fell between 1 and 1 according to Eq. 2I=sign(I)IIminImaxImin(2)where I is the original increment value, Imin and Imax are the minimum and maximum values taken by all increments, and I is the rescaled increment. We included the mean score increment for each contestant as a fixed effect in the model. The model also includes contest as a random effect to account for inherent differences in performance and similarity introduced by different tasks in different contests. Therefore, the model specification wasLeaderijBinomial(1,pij)logit(pij)=+1MeanIncrementij+2MeanSimilarityij+3RangeSimilarityij+aiaiN(0,a2)where leaderij is the probability of contestant j in contest i to become a leader, and ai estimates the random effect corresponding to contest i. All models were implemented in R, using the lme4 package (42).

In the context of the MATLAB contests, being a leader was a highly prized achievement and a principal motivator for contestants. Here, leading entries and leaders have the broader significance of improving the overall score at the population level. As a result of the considerable copying taking place, most entries scored just below the current leader, making those entries that did surpass the leader even more salient. This pattern extended to the contestant level: Most contestants, including leaders, had a mean increment value just below zero. Leaders whose mean increment value exceeded zero generally submitted a small number of entries (one or two), while many leaders had a negative increment value because they submitted both leading and nonleading entries. For these reasons, whether a contestant was a leader or not is a more meaningful measure of performance than mean increment (or other continuous measures of performance), although we also fitted an additional linear model similar to the above, in which we use mean increment as the outcome variableMeanIncrementij=+1MeanSimilarityij+2>RangeSimilarityij+aiaiN(0,a2)

To investigate whether individuals formed reputations that affected how they were copied, we needed to establish the extent to which an individual was copied throughout the contest. While we used similarity as a proxy for copying, this does not exclude the possibility that the two entries are related through copying via a third entry they both copied. As quantifying indirect copying is impossible in this context, we devised a measure that we call influence that attempts to capture how much of an entry a population picked up following the entrys submission.

Influence was calculated as the average similarity between an entry and subsequent entries in that contest. To control for the situation in which a contestant is working on a solution and submits a series of very similar solutions to each other, we only took into account subsequent entries submitted by other contestants. This excludes self-similarity as an explanation for high influence. The influence of the entries submitted at the beginning of the contest will naturally be lower than the influence of the entries submitted toward the end, purely because the number of subsequent entries is higher for the entries submitted at the beginning of the contest, which translates into a higher number of entries that could potentially be dissimilar to these initial entries. Therefore, we divided this average similarity by a number indicating the order of the entry into the competition, ranging from 1 for the first entry to the total number of entries in the contest for the last. We used the order of submission rather than the raw time point of submission to control for variation in the rate of submission across the duration of the competition (although the results hold when using raw time point as a normalizing factor). As mentioned above, in this analysis, we only included data starting with day 3, when participants had full access to everybody elses entries; therefore, this timestamp never actually took the value 0. To correct for the skew introduced by the difference in magnitude between similarity and this measure of time, we used a log transformation of the influence measurethis skew correction was used for both measures of time, raw time point, and entry order. Thus, influence was given byInfluence=log(mean similarityentry order+105)(3)

Last, this influence measure was rescaled between 0 and 1 using the same form as Eq. 2 to make comparison across contests possible. Influence is therefore a continuous measure of subsequent-entry similarity for each entry that indicates how much a given solution, once introduced, is used by others in the population. This measure does distinguish between the initial innovator and the following copiers purely because innovators have precedency and therefore a higher number of entries that can potentially copy them, but it does not completely discount copiers as completely lacking influence on the population outcomescopiers deserve credit, too, for recognizing a successful solution and popularizing it, thus influencing the population repertoire.

To test whether leading contestants had a higher influence than nonleading contestants in either or both their leading and nonleading entries, we fitted a linear mixed model with the influence of each entry as the dependent variable. The influence was predicted as a function of a factor with three levels that specified whether (i) the entry took the lead and was submitted by a leading contestant, (ii) the entry did not take the lead but was submitted by a leading contestant, and (iii) the entry did not take the lead and was submitted by a nonleading contestant. The intercept baseline was set to group 3, the entries that did not take the lead and were submitted by nonleading contestants. The model also included the entrys score increment as a fixed effect, because better-performing entries can be expected to have higher influence irrespective of the contestant who submitted them. This allows us to compare between prestige-bias, here measured as how much more influence entries submitted by leading contestants have, and payoff-bias, measured by the score increment of the entry. The contestant and the contest were included as random effects, with contestant nested within contest, to account for the fact that each contest might be characterized by a different average level of copying and that within each contest some contestants might have generally higher influence independent of their leader status. Therefore, the model specification wasijk=+i+ij+1Incrementk+2ContestantFactorkiN(0,12);ijN(0,22)InfluenceijkN(ijk,32)for each entry k submitted by contestant j in contest i, where i indicates the random effect corresponding to contest i, and ij captures random effects corresponding to contestant j in contest i.

The predictor of interest here was the contestant factor. We expected leading entries submitted by leading contestants to have a significantly higher influence than entries submitted by nonleading contestants. However, if prestige bias was operating, we also expected greater influence of nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants compared to entries submitted by nonleading contestants.

Some individuals participated in multiple contests, which gave us the opportunity to investigate whether individuals performed consistently across different problems or whether the variation between contest problems somehow breaks down these individual characteristics. This was tested using a similar mixed linear model as for within-contest influence. In this context, however, the predictor of interest was a factor that specified whether the entry took the lead, whether the contestant submitting the entry was ever a leader in the same contest, or whether the contestant was ever a leader in a different contest. This factor had six levels: (i) nonleading entry submitted by a nonleading contestant who was never a leading contestant in any other contest, (ii) nonleading entry submitted by a nonleading contestant who was a leading contestant in a different contest, (iii) nonleading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was not a leading contestant in a separate contest, (iv) nonleading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was also a leader in a different contest, (v) leading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was not a leader in a different contest, and (vi) leading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was also a leading contestant in a different contest. As before, we included score increment as a fixed factor, and contest and contestant identity as random factorsin this case, the model included a random effect for contest nested inside the random effect for contestant, as contestant identity explained more variation than contest identity. To capture within-participant variation adequately and to ensure methodological validity, we chose to examine individuals who participated in at least three contests, giving a sample size of 96 repeat contestants, of the total of 1416 unique contestants overall.

This allowed us to establish whether entries had more influence when submitted by a leading contestant, independent of how well they scored. Crucially, this analysis also allowed us to establish if entries had more influence when submitted by a contestant that was a leader in a different contest (i.e., if reputations carry across contests, as predicted if prestige bias is important). If entries that do not take the lead, submitted by contestants who do not become leaders in the same contest, but who had been leading contestants in a different contest still have higher influence than entries submitted by nonleading contestants both within and across contests, it would mean that the leadership reputation at the individual level was maintained across contests, evidence of prestige bias.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton Univ. Press, 2016).

R. Boyd, P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1985).

M. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).

R. M. Karp, Reducibility among combinatorial problems, in 50 Years of Integer Programming 19582008: From the Early Years to the State-of-the-Art (Springer-Verlag, 2010), pp. 219241.

E. Miu, Understanding human culture: Theoretical and experimental studies of cumulative culture, thesis, University of St Andrews (2017).

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Flexible learning, rather than inveterate innovation or copying, drives cumulative knowledge gain - Science Advances

Learn to say no, and put time on your calendar to think.

June 2, 2020 5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

As a business leader, is your management style dependent on thesituation? Or do you instinctively adapt your style to suit specific conditions?

I interviewed Serguei Beloussov, CEO of global tech and cyber security firm Acronis, at their Global Cyber Summit in Miami, FL.When asked about his personal leadership style, Beloussov shared a story about a hockey game he attended in Finland. One of the teams was more skilled,but the other team was playing faster. While the faster team made more mistakes, their speed made itimpossible for the skillful team to keep up, and the faster team won, explained Beloussov.One thing about leadership style is that I try to operate in a situation where there is a lot of change, and in those situations, you always operate faster than its possible to organize." He went on to say thatsituations like this force you to do things that may look impossible first, andthat styles of leadership always change to meet the demands of the situation. The main thing is that you have to be detail-oriented and you have to be hands-on, and you have to be ready to adjust your style.

In todays business and economic climate its never been more critical to have the capacity to adapt. Beloussovs advice inspired me to critically think about daily habits, the ones that successful business leaders engage in every day. Here are eight habits that most business leaders tend to agree on.

Maybe its that overwhelmed feeling thats been slowing you down. The cool kids in the business world have figured out that busy-ness shouldnt be worn as a badge of honor. Warren Buffett spends a lot of time thinking, and he says its a key to his success. Take time to think. Its one of the modern luxuries of the 21st century.

Related:25 BestHabitsto Have in Life

We hear the sports analogies all the time, but they apply well to this business principle. When youre trying to assemble a winning team, your people are your players. Instead of a top-down approach to team leadership, coach-leaders activate their teams to win championships while helping players take ownership of their roles.

Too many demands on your time, especially meetings, can drain creativity and zap energy, leaving you little time to accomplish anything in a day. Its okay to say no to meetings if you dont expect to add much to the conversation. Say no more often, and youll be surprised how it impacts your productivity.

This will be a challenge at first, especially when most of us check email on our phones several times per hour. But you dont have to completely ignore your inbox throughout the day; just flag emails that may demand same-day attention, and then go back and answer them when the time is right. You will become a lot more focused if you force yourself to hold back on emailing outside of the scheduled time.

At no time has planning been more attractive than now, when so many business leaders wish they could go back six months and plan for this current reality. Now is a great time to dissect and understand what drives your business and decide what to do if that changes.

Related:12Daily Habitsof Exceptional Leaders

When is your brain firing on all cylinders? Some of the most effective business leaders prefer to wake up at 4 am and get to the office before anyone, and then spend the first four hours of the day in prime critical-thinking mode. Your pattern could be just the opposite. Start paying attention and youll find the schedule that works best for your brain.

Putting positive energy and commitment into your personal relationships will have an immediate positive effect on your career and how you interact with peers in the workplace. Just a small change in attitude can make all the difference, especially in our digital world. Pay attention to your communication style and remember to stay positive.

As much as possible, I try to push myself to do something new and potentially uncomfortable, every day. It could be something simple, like striking up a conversation with a stranger, or something more daring like agreeing to speak at a conference. Pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone causes growth, and it can also help you to make valuable connections.

Related:Daily HabitsThat Will Help Increase Productivity

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8 Daily Habits of Effective Business Leaders - Entrepreneur

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.-Daniel Burnham, 1891

Even for the privileged among us, who still have our jobs, arent on the front lines with the pandemic, and havent had anyone close to us felled by COVID-19, the current crisis has brought hardships big and small. Parents have confronted the daily struggle of trying to do their jobs while also home-schooling. Adult children havent been able to visit their elderly parents. Graduations, weddings, and even funerals have been put on hold or Zoomified.

Yet as difficult as it has been, there have been a few silver linings, too--especially for those of us lucky enough to not be touched directly by the crisis. One of the most valuable, Id argue, is that pressing pause on our usual routines has given many of us the opportunity to take a step back, get out of our ruts, and take stock. What do we really value? What do we really miss? What cant we wait to do when this is all over? What necessity of our past lives--whether the daily purchased latte or frequent meals in restaurants--are we finding that were quite happily doing without?

My husband and I have been having these conversations regularly on our nightly walks. (The fact that we don't have much news to report from our days spent in our respective corners of the house helps elevate the conversation!) Travel is his greatest longing, and we both miss cooking and entertaining big groups of family and friends. Talking about how the pandemic has changed our thinking on a topic, or made us want to do more of something else, helps us feel like were using the present situation productively. The current sense of isolation wont be for naught, because its shaping how we intend to use our lives in the future, when we once again have a full set of choices before us.

Id argue that its also a good time to put a fresh set of eyes on your financial plan, taking a similarly expansive view of it that you might not have been able to do when you were busy and mired in your day-to-day activities.Carl Richardspresented this general thesis when he argues that too often, financial plans (and planners) move straight to the solution phase, without stopping to ask some basic questions about what someone is trying to achieve and what their real problems are. What will constitute success for you over the next few years, not just in financial terms, but in life terms, too? Are you allocating your time and money in line with your intentions, what you find fulfilling, and what brings you joy? These questions are incredibly personal; no one else can answer them for you.

Whether youre well into retirement or early in your career, it can be easy to backburner questions like these and move straight to logistics--determining your asset allocationandminimizing taxes, for example. Those are all worthy pursuits, and Morningstar.ca is full of information to help you do those jobs well. But if you find yourself with a bit of extra timeto think a bit more broadly and introspectively about your financial plan, here are some of the key questions to ask yourself.

What expenditures bring you happiness?As most investors know, the biggest determinant of whether you achieve financial success is how much youspend versus how much you save. But as important as it is to make sure your intake exceeds your outgo, budgeting can seem like sheer drudgery. Carl Richards posited a different way to go about it. Simply begin to take note of how various discretionary expenditures make you feel. Ive started to do this (at least in a pandemic-adjusted way) since we talked, and its been incredibly illuminating.

How are you allocating your precious resources?At Morningstar, we devote a significant amount of attention to helping you make smart allocations of financial capital across opportunity sets--not just saving versus spending but also debt paydown versus investing in the market, how much to allocate to retirement versus children'seducation, and so on. Those are crucial topics worthy of significant analysis and introspection.

Ultimately, the right answers are a matter of math (expected return on investment) and personal preference. But many of us, myself included, pay much less attention to how we allocate an even more scarce resource--our time--even though that allocation will ultimately have an even greater impact on whether we feel like weve met our goals. Of course, some of our time expenditures are pre-ordained--the time we spend working or caring for children, for example. But even within those allocations, it seems worthwhile to be more mindful, to help ensure that your allocation of time in a given day, week, or year aligns with your goals and vision for that period. Technology tools can help you determine how much time you waste (er, spend) on social media and other activities that could be detracting from your productivity and happiness.

Whats your own definition of enough?Many of us are operating with an incredibly vague notion of how much we really need to save in order to achieve our financial goals and find security. And even financial planners might rely on rules of thumb when setting your retirement-savings target--for example, they might assume that youll need 80% of your working income in retirement and extrapolate the rest of your plan from there.

As humans, we often have a natural tendency to reach for more more more, regardless of whether that "more" is actually bringing more happiness and security. Trying to keep up with the people around us, in terms of possessions and outward signs of success, can get exhausting and may not get us any closer to our life's goals. That's why, in this period of limited activity, spending, and social contact, it's so worthwhile to think through your own definition of enough--both now and for the future.

What do you want your legacy to be?When taking a strictly financial- and estate-planning perspective, leaving a legacy is one of those topics that can seem overly narrow. Its about leaving assets behind for children, grandchildren, and other loved ones, as well as charity if we so choose. Its about making sure we dont burden the people we care about. Those are crucial considerations, and theyre why everyone needs an estate plan that includes wills, powers of attorney, and beneficiary designations, among other key documents.

But while youre at it, why not think big-picture about your legacy, too? What do you hope people will say about you after youre gone? What life philosophy or pieces of wisdom do you hope that your loved ones will always associate with you? If you find yourself with a bit of extra time for introspection, write down a few ideas along these lines. And no, you're not too young to start thinking about this.

You can find templates for creating a personal legacy online, but my advice is not to overthink it. Balance more serious ideas with more lighthearted ones. At my fathers funeral, my husband read several of pieces of wisdom we had all learned from my dad, ranging from mundane but joyful (never say no to ice cream and put extra olives in the martini) to more profound (embrace progress and pick the plants that havent yet bloomed because watching them bloom and grow is the best part). We all have credos that we live by; make sure your loved ones know yours.

Editor's note:Read the lateston how the coronavirus is rattling the markets and what you can do to navigate it.

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OK, People: It's Time to Think Big - Morningstar.ca

I dont really watch YouTube. Rather, I listen to it. Youll find an overwhelming amount of podcasts, lectures, and music playlists in my recommendations and yes, I keep my phone screen lit 24/7.

Naturally, the YouTube Premium ad came for me. It popped right when Joe Rogan asked Jordan Peterson a tricky question. Obviously, time expanded right then, and I couldnt bear waiting. So I took my phone out of my pocket to skip the ad. Yet, instead of pressing the button, I froze. My observant eye caught a subtle marketing trick.

The message box didnt say skip ad, it said skip trial.

Its not a random choice of words. YouTube marketers were leveraging a specific psychological trait which is loss aversion.

According to psychological studies, our minds are more sensitive to losses than to gains. It is especially the case for objects and possessions say, a month of free trial, for example.

Roughly speaking, losses hurt about twice as much as gains make us feel good. If we wanted to measure the difference using an imaginary emotion-meter, itd mean that finding $10 brings 100 positive emotional points while losing the same $10 strikes 200 negative emotional points.

YouTube subtly used loss aversion as a marketing tool. Marketers didnt ask me if I preferred to skip the ad, but to skip the trial. The former translates into merely ignoring a commercial, while the latter meant that I was giving up on something.

When I saw the message box, I hesitated. Does this mean that Ill never get this offer again? I thought. Frankly, I hate being interrupted by ads I should probably consider subscribing. Besides, my battery will thank me for it.

All it took was one word to seduce my attention and make me consider subscribing

But what can the rest of us learn from this? Were not YouTube. We dont have the same resources nor the same reach. Nevertheless, we could still leverage loss aversion in our marketing.

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YouTube sells subscriptions with just one word heres how you can emulate it - The Next Web

To reduce risk, it is necessary to avoid a portfolio whose securities are all highly correlated with each other. Harry Markowitz

Yesterday I had the supreme experience of having lunch in La Jolla, California, with the father of modern portfolio theory, Harry Markowitz. He is considered to be a legend on Wall Street.

The lunch was arranged by Rob Arnott, a successful financial consultant who is known as the godfather of smart beta. He is also a strong advocate of value investing and will be a keynote speaker at this years FreedomFest.

Your editor in between the Father of Modern Portfolio Theory and the Godfather of Smart Beta.

Markowitz is a legend in the investment world. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1990 based on a single article he wrote in the Journal of Finance in 1952 called Portfolio Selection.

The eureka moment came when he discovered that investors could increase their returns and reduce their risk by properly diversifying their portfolios into stocks, bonds and cash.

He wrote, In choosing a portfolio, investors should seek broad diversification. Modern portfolio theory recommends that you diversify with a balance of stocks and bonds and cash thats suitable to your risk tolerance.

For example, during the stock market crash in March 2020, stocks fell and bonds rose. Thus, a portfolio of both stocks and bonds would have survived intact. Ditto for the financial crisis of 2008.

If you made the mistake of only being invested in stocks, you were in trouble. If you only invested in bonds, you missed out on the mother of all bull markets from 2009-2020. But by investing in both, you survived and prospered.

Markowitzs message is clear. Its vital to have non-correlated investments that move in opposite directions during crises. He states, To reduce risk, it is necessary to avoid a portfolio whose securities are all highly correlated with each other.

During the most recent bear market, most stocks, ranging from financials to utilities, fell together. However, many online-related tech stocks rose.

Gold and Real Estate as Non-Correlated Investments

I brought up gold as an excellent non-correlated investment that often moves opposite to the stock market. The precious metal has held up well in 2020. But I was surprised to learn that gold doesnt interest him.

Instead, he favors Californias real estate. He has a condo on the beach, which he says is benefiting from rising demand and cheap mortgage rates.

Harry is amazingly alert for a man who is 92 years old. He was born in the year that Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs 1927! He was two years old when the stock market crashed in 1929. He has lived through it all World War II, the inflationary 1970s, the 1987 stock market crash, the dotcom boom and bust and the longest bull market in history.

What is the Most Important Lesson of Investing?

Markowitz has survived and prospered throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Near the end of our luncheon, I asked Harry what he thought was the most important lesson of investing after all these years.

He hesitated, so I suggested one of my favorite quotes from The Maxims of Wall Street.

Exclusive 4 Top Coronavirus Recovery Stocks to Buy

Wall Street exaggerates everything.

Both Harry and Rob nodded in agreement. Thats why diversification is so important, stated Markowitz. It reduces the risk.

They were both intrigued by my new 7th edition of the Maxims, and we spent the rest of the time reading, smiling and commenting in response to various quotes from the book.

Here are some of their favorites:

Psychology is probably the most important factor in the market and one that is least understood. David Dreman

You cant worry and hit home runs. Babe Ruth

Know value, not prices. Arnold Bernard

Take calculated risks, but dont be rash. General George Patton

Harry especially liked this one:

Im not a bull. Im not a bear. Im a chicken. Charles Allmon

Harry was delighted to receive an autographed copy of my book.

Rob Arnott Buys a Box of Maxims!

Rob Arnott was so impressed that he decided to buy an entire box of 32 copies, which I sell for $300. He plans to give them out to his best clients.

I offer a super bargain price for the Maxims. The first copy is $20, and all additional copies are $10 each. They make a great gift to friends, family, clients and investors.

I autograph each copy, number them and mail them at no extra charge. If you order a box (32 copies), you pay only $300.

To order go to http://www.skousenbooks.com, or call Harold at Ensign Publishing, 1-866-257- 2057.

Dennis Gartman said it best: Its amazing the depth of wisdom one can find in just one or two lines from your book. I have it on my desk and refer to it daily.

Jack Bogle, the legendary founder of the Vanguard Group, wrote, What a treat! Its great to have all these sayings in a single spot.

Alex Green says, Its a classic!

Updates Regarding FreedomFest

Rob Arnott will be one of our featured speakers at FreedomFest from July 13-16 at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. He will speak on Value Investing Why Its Not Dead and will debate Steve Moore on Inflation vs Deflation: Whats Ahead in the Economy and What It Means to Investors. Both are not to be missed!

He will attend every day of FreedomFest.

Meet Dr. Drew and Bestselling Author Dave Rubin in Vegas!

Now for a special announcement: I am pleased to report that Dr. Drew, the famous M.D. and television personality, will be our keynote speaker at FreedomFest in Vegas, July 13-16.

Dr. Drew (Pinsky) is known for his outspoken views on the pandemic and his warning to the media to stop the hysteria. Stop it, just stop it! he warned.

He will give us the latest update on the COVID-19 virus. He is also an expert on addiction and the social impact of the lockdown.

He will be joined by Dave Rubin, the host of the popular online show The Rubin Report and the author of the bestselling book Dont Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason.

Dave Rubin is also famous for his sellout 12-week 12 Rules for Life tour with Dr. Jordan Peterson.

Just in: Tom Woods, the top economist at the Mises Institute, will be the judge in the most important trial of the new decade: The Pandemic on Trial!

Exclusive Who Sold in May With So Much Cash on the Sidelines?

And Professor Allan Litchman, the author of Keys to the White House, will give us his surprise prediction on the November elections! Right now, the election betting is showing that the Democrats are gaining on President Trump and the Republicans. The Democrats may even take the Senate! Thats why our emergency meeting, hosted by Steve Forbes, on July 13 is so important.

Heres Your Chance to be a HERO

It is not often in life that you have a chance to make a difference in the world and proudly say, I was there to mutually pledge my life, my fortune and my sacred honor in defense of our First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.

FreedomFest will be the FIRST live conference in Vegas (if not the country). We are determined to defend our constitutional rights.

On this day, choose who you will serve the state or the individual. Declare your independence in July.

Please read the Open Letter to All Freedom Lovers that can be found here.

FreedomFest starts next month. Caesars Entertainment is so thrilled to host the FIRST live convention in Vegas that it has moved our conference from the Paris Resort to their premier property, Caesars Palace.

It is rolling out the red carpet for YOU: Hotel rates have been cut to $119 a night at Caesars Palace. And they are only $57 a night across the Strip at the Flamingo Resort.

Plus, FREE PARKING is back!

Only 50 Tickets Remain for my 40th Anniversary Celebration!

We are filling up fast. So far, 150 people have signed up for the 40th anniversary celebration of my newsletter, and attendance for this special event and reception is limited to 200 subscribers. Everyone who attends will receive (a) a 2020 American eagle silver dollar, (b) an autographed, numbered copy of The Maxims of Wall Street and (c) the name of my favorite penny stock (its moving up!). Plus, a special reception will be held where attendees will have photo opportunities with celebrities such as Steve Forbes, Alex Green, Jim Woods, Hilary Kramer and others.

To sign up for FreedomFest and receive all three benefits, please click here. Or call 1-855-850-3733, ext. 202, be sure to mention you are a Investor Cafe subscriber and use the code FF20EAGLE. If you have already signed up, email me at mskousen@chapman.edu, and I will send you the name and symbol of the stock, as well as all the details.

To All Those Who Cant Make It This Year

I know a lot of you are fearful of traveling or going to a conference this year. Please consider sponsoring students who want to come to this years FreedomFest. The price for each student is only $150. Im hoping to bring a dozen students from Chapman University, but we need your help. To make a contribution, click on rates at http://www.freedomfest.com.

Good investing, AEIOU,

Mark Skousen

You Nailed It!

Chapman University Leads the Way

The overweening Governor Gavin Newsom here in California has mandated that all state universities (USC, UC Berkeley, etc.) stay locked down for the rest of the year. This means that they will have to teach online, despite all the evidence that young people are not threatened by the coronavirus.

Exclusive 6 Gold Investments to Buy for Limiting COVID-19 Risk

But Chapman University, a private school where I teach, is bucking the trend and plans to open up for regular classes this fall. Good for them!

President Daniele Struppa was reluctant to close the campus in the spring semester, but was forced to do so under extreme pressure from students and parents. (By the way, President Struppa will be a speaker at FreedomFest come join us and meet this hero of modern times.)

It turned out to be a rushed judgment, as the evidence is growing that the virus is no where near as fatal as was believed, especially among students. Even medical experts at Stanford University, the first major university that closed its campus, agreed that students should never have been sent home.

I taught the first half of my Financial Economics class in the spring in the classroom as I normally do. Yes, we had a few students who stayed home for a week with the flu. They were self-quarantined. Perhaps they had the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China. Who knows?

We were forced to go online, and I have to tell you, I hated it. Teaching on Zoom or Panpto cant hold a candle to teaching in person and interacting with students. In their course evaluation surveys, students concurred. Online education is a poor substitute for the real thing.

A Teachers Dream

I had an interesting experience last week. I had a total of 44 students in my spring course, and I needed to finish grading all of their work so that I could submit their final grades.

Only one student had an incomplete as I never received his 10-page paper. He had done all the quizzes and had taken the midterm and final, but I couldnt find his paper. He was a football player who was a cancer survivor.

I made every effort to contact him. I called, texted and emailed him two to three times, with no response. I even called one of his football buddies, but he couldnt reach him either. Finally, I tracked down his parents and left a message on their voicemail.

His father called me one night and apologized for his son. He said that his son has had memory problems since the chemo treatments and had forgotten about the paper. He said that his son would do the paper and send it to me.

Then he said something Ill never forget. He stated, Prof. Skousen, I just want to thank you for going the extra mile for my son. I graduated from Ohio State, and I can tell you that no professor at Ohio State would have taken the time to reach out to a student. Thats what makes Chapman so special. My son will be back in the fall.

We ended our conversation on a lighter note I told him that my family and I are huge Gator fans and cant stand Ohio State. We even had a good laugh talking about Coach Urban Meyer.

If you want to send your son or daughter to a great liberal arts college, you cant do much better than Chapman University.

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Avoid This #1 Mistake and You Will Be Rich - Stock Investor

Dave Rubin speaks at the 2019 Young Americans for Liberty Convention in Austin, Texas, September 6, 2019. (Gage Skidmore) Don't buy Dont Burn This Book. But don't deny Rubin's appeal.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE R ecently on Twitter I saw someone make a thread of their favorite meals the best meals theyd ever eaten. It was all Italian countryside this, New York hole-in-the-wall that, Asian metropolis, Michelin star, and so on, complete with gorgeous pictures. I could remember a few meals Id had like that. But I found it easier to remember the first times Id eaten certain things: sushi from a grocery store; roasted peppers on soggy bread with a tapenade whatever that is in a college dining hall; and, most of all, grilled chicken and rice pilaf at a Dennys near a hotel in, I think, Philadelphia. I love grilled chicken; Ive eaten a lot of great grilled chicken since then. But theres a sense in which it all started at that Dennys. If I went to Dennys today, Id probably hate their grilled chicken. But if Id never gone to that Dennys to begin with who knows?

You may be wondering what Dont Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason, the new book by Dave Rubin the host of The Rubin Report, interview show and centerpiece of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web has to do with Dennys grilled chicken. Well, you see, Dave Rubin is the Dennys the memorable if unspectacular entryway of a certain brand of cultural politics, a brand with which Ive become somewhat entangled. Some problems with Rubins book have already been pointed out. For instance, he gets some facts wrong and makes some incoherent arguments (my favorite: He says that the idea of reverse psychology came from German philosopher Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, back in 1970, but Adorno died in 1969), he talks a lot about ideas but doesnt seem to have any of his own, and he may have taken one of the books best ideas from Bridget Phetasy. Ill add another problem right now: There are several spelling and grammatical mistakes in the book, hallmarks of the poor editing endemic to contemporary publishing. (They get pretty egregious: His brother is acknowledged as Jonat]han, and I dont think Elon Musk named him.)

But what I really want to know is: What makes Dave Rubin, like Dennys, seem both so good to people who are new to this to the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and its process of questioning progressive pieties and so bad to people who have some experience with it? How can the process of acquiring a taste lead you to so strongly dislike the thing that introduced you to that taste to begin with? If we dont like Rubin anymore and hes faced plenty of criticism from fellow members of the Intellectual Dark Web does that mean we have to start hating the things to which, in our own experiences, sampling our share of Rubin led?

Rubins book starts out as a bit of a time capsule, a recapitulation of the greatest hits of Internet outrage from the mid 2010s. Rubin had been a stand-up comedian and then a talk-show host affiliated with the progressive Young Turks. Having himself been a progressive for most of his life, his experience being associated with progressive media, and the general distaste for disagreement and free thinking he felt he observed in progressive circles led him first to lose his hair an episode he describes in the book, which does elicit some sympathy in the reader and then his faith in progressivism. After describing his own experiences, Rubin covers Ben Afflecks tussle with Sam Harris on Bill Mahers show, the failure of some progressives to adequately condemn the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the cancellations of figures such as Bret Weinstein, Lindsay Shepherd, and James Damore. Rubin explains that witnessing these excesses of progressivism led him back into the political philosophy of classical liberalism which had been abandoned by the regressive left. How? Well, the main factor seems to have been that the progressives became obsessed with group identity, while the classical liberals saw individual rights as paramount. This is a bit confused in Rubins presentation. He writes: Progressivism has traded a love of individual rights for paternalistic, insincere concern for the collective. It judges people based upon their skin color, gender, and sexuality, thus imagining them as competitors in an Oppression Olympics in which victimhood is virtue. Of course Rubin thinks progressivism is wrong, but why does he call it insincere? And whats the relationship between a focus on groups and a focus on victimhood? Individuals can be victims too, and individuals can parlay all sorts of victim narratives that have nothing to do with their membership in any sorts of groups.

Rubin provides a list of classical-liberal principles. The first item on the list is DRUGS. The discussions in this section are a bit uneven. For instance, about abortion he avers that life begins the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. But he gives abstract reasons, from the realm of political theory, that abortion should still be legal: Personal views of morality and public standards of law butt heads in an intractable opposition. . . .This is the constant push and pull between the private and the public. . . . The belief in individual freedom must extend to having confidence in people making the best decisions for themselves even if we personally believe they are ethically and morally wrong. Rubin never says exactly why abortion presents a unique challenge for this sort of balancing.

On free speech, too, which should be one of Rubins strengths, his ideas arent quite clear. He writes that people are scared of being unpersoned by social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. . . . As private companies, theyre free to do whatever they want, but censorship is not a solution to bad ideas. Then, writing about Colin Kaepernick, he says: The NFL teams owners were . . . free to decide if they wanted to keep Kaepernick or let him go for being too much of a distraction. . . . Nobody was silenced; everybody got to make their point. I dont doubt that there are ways of differentiating the Kaepernick case from the Big Tech cases, but Rubin doesnt even try! In the one case, he simply says that a private companys decision is censorship; in the other, he simply says that nobody was silenced. At least some awareness of likely counterarguments would be nice.

But the examples in Rubins tale of leaving the left, hackneyed as it may be by now, are well-picked, and the stories are not always poorly told. Some are very familiar. Some involve Rubin himself, such as a story about a New York Times cover story The Making of a YouTube Radical. Apparently this YouTube radical watched Rubins program, and so Rubin was blamed in part for his radicalization and that of countless others in which web surfers are seduced by a community of far-right creators by the YouTube recommendation algorithm, which sees that a surfer enjoys videos of a particular political bent and proceeds to show them more, and may travel all the way to neo-Nazism or stop at milder forms of bigotry. But the subject of the story, Rubin writes, ended up watching far-left content. Yes, thats right. The article about YouTube radicalizing people to the far right ends with the subject becoming a lefty. You cant make this s*** up. But this is a little glib on Rubins part. In fact, the article describes its subject spending five years in a vortex of far-right politics, and it describes some lefty YouTubers trying quite intentionally to combat the alt-rights YouTube style in order to deradicalize people like the articles subject. So Rubin has, without outright lying, given a false impression of the Times story. However, his instinct to dismiss the Times narrative is probably right. Researchers Mark Ledwich and Anna Zaitsev have found that YouTubes recommendation algorithm has an overall deradicalizing effect, not a radicalizing one.

Mainstream handwringing about alt-right videos often comes from journalists who are upset to see even one recommendation for content they disagree with. Unfortunately, Rubin expresses a similar sort of idea, writing that our factory settings everything the system teaches us to believe are programmed into us from a young age. For Rubin, ideas like Democrats = good, Republicans = bad are easily swallowed by the idealistic and impressionable youth. The message is even more appealing when its constantly reinforced through academia, the media, and celebrity [sic], which make it look cool and credible. But this is a theory of entertainment radicalizing a gullible consumer not unlike the one advanced in the New York Times story to which he objected. So which is it: Are people gullible and easily brainwashed, or can they be trusted to think for themselves? Though he has some good instincts and interesting takes, Rubin cant quite corral facts or principles into a coherent, consistent argument without a guest or partner of some sort helping him out. On his own, in this book, he seems to end up flailing.

Rubin is at his worst when hes trying to explain and argue for his own views. But he is at his best in at least a few places in the book, as the interviewer-cum-character hes developed and made so popular. There is a certain kind of magnanimity to this character that dissipates any mystery about why former guests on his show are by and large so loyal to him. Rubin takes many opportunities in the book though maybe not quite as many as he should to shift the focus from his own views to those of various guests hes had on his show. He admiringly describes his interactions with Jordan Peterson, the Michael Jordan of psychology, on some sort of international tour: I realized that [Peterson]s moments of humility were something I had implemented in my own work. In fact, it was a founding principle of my (frequently criticized) interview approach. Sometimes Id be seeking knowledge or clarity as much as the viewer at home . . . and wasnt afraid to ask for it. (Ellipsis in original.) And he describes in detail being owned by conservative commentator Larry Elder when Elder appeared on The Rubin Report before Rubin had fully left the left. Throughout, Rubin presents himself as just an amateur trying his best to make sense of the world, helped out by people he really admires: his guests.

Rubin once famously said during an interview: I have to say that my brain is still in recovery mode from taking in so many high-level, important ideas. The listener gets to see things from his perspective and begin to take in new ideas. This is the sense in which Rubin is both a character and an interviewer, as I suppose most interviewers are and his character is the protagonist, the audience stand-in, who leaves home for the first time and sees a whole world open up before them. Rubin spends a lot of time writing about the stress and sometimes illness that for him came with becoming politically homeless. Hes the hobbit, not the powerful wizard; its all a bit much for him.

Heres one theory. What makes Rubin bad is precisely what makes Rubin good. The sort of dull charm that makes him smilingly uncomprehending of disagreement in one case helps him bulldoze through obstacles in another. So, for instance, when a journalist scolds him for having two ex-Muslims on his show, he writes that the journalist heavily implied that Im somehow Islamophobic, which seems more disturbing to him than [one guest]s arranged marriage or [the other guest]s brother being killed by jihadists. I think of what my own reaction would be. I might try to understand the charge, to see how I might defend myself. But Rubin just waltzes through it. The real issue isnt what hes been accused of; its what the journalist is focused on. And hes right! Rubin is right that its the journalist, and not him, who comes off as inhumane and opportunistic. Now, theres no sophistication in seeing this. Its an intuitive piece of human psychology. It has all the class of the grilled chicken at Dennys. But it works. And this sort of straightforward judgment, backed only by sheer human instinct, will seem sophomoric to those with more than a few days of experience with these debates for just the same reason that it will seem refreshing to those who are new to them. It was refreshing to me, too, once, to think that I could employ such instincts in addition to the muck of academic theories and empirical data I always muddled through in order to make my own arguments. But this can only be the start of a new way of thinking about things. Right now, though, thats the best that Dave Rubin can manage.

Probably nobody should buy this book. And definitely nobody should burn this book among other bad consequences, that would drive up sales. But nobody should deny Rubins appeal, either. In an overwhelming world where everyone is trying to seem like the expert with all the answers, Rubin bumbles along, wide-eyed, a daring escapee from his former friends on the left to the towering figures he now interviews for a living. Its a coming-of-age story about a man who hasnt yet come of age.

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On the Limits of Dave Rubins Cultural Politics - National Review

Many are optimistic about what the Arizona Cardinals can do in 2020. However, no one appears to be more publicly bullish about the team than cornerback Patrick Peterson.

He already recently declared that this roster of players is the best team, at least on paper, he has been on in his almost decade in the league.

After four postseason-less seasons and only eight wins combined in the last two years, he is putting no limits on what this team can achieve.

The sky is the limit for this football team, he said in a video conference with the media this past week. I truly believe we can go as far as we want.

Both in a previous interview he gave on a podcast and in this meeting with the media, he emphasized how it is on the players to perform and that they must have a common vision, trust each other and commit to the goal to be able to be as good as they can be, but he isnt shying away from giving lofty expectations for the potential of the team.

It started with the offseason, he said.

The offseason has been great for us. The draft has been great for us, he said. We really hit all areas in this offseason to give not only the fans something exciting to look forward to but also putting us in the best opportunity to win. I definitely think this is a championship-caliber team from top to bottom.

The trade to acquire receiver DeAndre Hopkins got Peterson excited. General manager Steve Keim started with a bang.

The acquisition of DeAndre, that was huge for us, Peterson said. To add a top-two receiver to your roster, that just doesnt happen. That just doesnt fall in your lap. For that trade to be pulled off, I thought (it) was a great sign and a great start to the offseason.

So what makes this team so potentially special?

He described both the defense and the offense.

He began with the defensive backfield, where he plays.

The youth we have in the back end, I believe that speaks for itself, he said. We have young talented players that love the game that can cover sideline to sideline, that can be the enforcer. I believe that is very important for a football team.

Peterson himself returns for a full season after missing six games to suspension. Cornerback Robert Alford comes back after missing the season with a broken leg, which is going to be huge, Peterson said.

At safety, they have Budda Baker and Jalen Thompson. He called Baker the enforcer and a Tasmanian Devil. He raved about how Thompson played late in the season when he saw Thompsons confidence go through the roof.

He then moved to the defensive front seven, noting the presence of linebacker Jordan Hicks, the addition of rookie linebacker Isaiah Simmons and the pass rushing of Chandler Jones.

With the signing of Jordan Phillips, the return of Jonathan Bullard and the selection in the draft of Leki Fotu and Rashard Lawrence, youve got pass rush, youve got D-line, youve got rotation now.

Then, on offense, he spoke of quarterback Kyler Murray.

I believe its going to be a huge year for him, he said. We all know he hasnt even scratched the surface yet.

With running backs Kenyan Drake and Chase Edmonds, Murray has a great backfield to help him out.

Then, with the addition of Hopkins to the receiver room with Larry Fitzgerald and Christian Kirk, the Cardinals have three receivers that you pretty much cant double.

Kylers going to be like a kid in a candy store, Peterson added. Hes going to be able to pick whatever candy he wants. Youve got the opportunity to throw touchdowns to red-zone Fitz, take shots with DeAndre, anddownfield shots with Christian as well.

When you look back at the teams that Ive been a part of, thats everything we had, he said, thinking back to the seasons from 2013-2015 when the Cardinals won 10 games or more a year. But I believe the only thing different in this group is were a little bit faster and we got younger and having that youth in this day in age is big for us.

It isnt a prediction for what will happen, but it is a declaration of what is possible.

If we all come together, focus on our one goal, we can take definitely take it the distance, he said.Im very optimistic about where we can be at the end of the year, but right now were just a good team on paper.

It gives Cardinals fans a reason to get excited.

We have everything that you need, and if youre trying to build a championship-caliber football team, we have the players, he said. This is that type of roster.

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Ep. 267

Ep. 266

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Patrick Peterson sees 'championship-caliber team from top to bottom' in Cardinals - Cards Wire