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AI is Computerized Theft. Today, it’s Zoom

AI is Computerized Theft. Today, it’s Zoom

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Zoom, the video conference company, just updated their Terms of Service. Section 10.4 lets them use your meeting content to train machine learning and AI models.

  • They could use this to duplicate your expertise, if you deliver your expertise via Zoom.
  • This could put you in violation of the law if you’re in a privacy-regulated profession.
  • Zoom says they’ll asked for consent first, but they don’t say how. It could be as deceptive as “You must click Accept on our updated terms.”
  • I’m looking for privacy-protecting alternatives to recommend.

The background.

Does Machine Learning really duplicate expertise? Yes.Machine learning is the new hot topic in Silicon Valley. It is a statistical analysis method that uses large data sets to create computer programs that can predict things. For example, medical diagnosis systems would be given a huge number of medical cases. Each would be given the symptoms, the eventual diagnosis, and whether that diagnosis was correct.

With enough data, the system would be able to diagnose as well as (or better than) any of the doctors who provided the training data.

Getting enough high-quality data is the key to building a model that works.

Cloud services are using user data to create and “steal” those users’ product. Adobe has released truly astonishing new capabilities in their image processing program Photoshop. The latest Photoshop can fill in blank spaces in images, as if by magic.

How did the AI get that ability? By training on images that graphic designers had stored in the Adobe Cloud over the last decade.

The Terms of Service did say, buried somewhere in several dozens or hundreds of pages of legalese, that data stored in the Adobe Cloud could be used for the creation of new products and services.

I think it’s highly unlikely that (a) users knew that clause was there, (b) users understood the implications of letting Adobe train an AI on their images (implications that Adobe can now duplicate their work) (c) users thought that a cloud service, which is usually a storage product, would be used to train an AI for delivery in a separate product.

Is this theft? Legally, probably not. But morally and ethically, I use a different test: if the users of Adobe Cloud had been told “we will use any image you store with us to train an AI to be able to generate similar images without paying photographers or designers royalties of any sort,” I’m fairly sure most people would have opted out. They probably would have said “You mean you want to steal my images and design style? Hard pass.”

This is playing out right now in Hollywood. The actors’ and writers’ strike shows that when people understand that they’re being asked to give away their creative work for free, they refuse. The actors and writers are simply asking for protection against exactly this sort of AI duplication of their work and likeness.

Does one person’s data really matter? If Zoom is collecting data on billions of meetings, do my meetings really make that much difference in their machine learning models?

No. And Yes. If (as has happened) a bank accidentally charges 100,000 accounts an incorrect $10 fee, does that matter? $10 is unlikely to bankrupt anyone. But the bank just walked away with a million dollars. I think we would all call that theft.

AI companies are doing the same thing now, only with expertise rather than money.

How this affects you.

Legal effects. If you’re a doctor, trainer, consultant, therapist, lawyer, or anyone who delivers your product or service via Zoom, this means that your private conversations may be used to train a machine learning model.

Depending on your profession, there may be legal implications for you if this happens.

Ethical effects. If Zoom then releases that machine learning model in some form (or even just uses it internally), that model might produce output that is similar to the conversations you’ve had. It may use slightly different words, or omit proper names, but it may summarize your conversations or convey the gist of them. Depending on the summary, it might give enough hints that a reader could deduce the actual details.

Competitive effects. If you make your money from your advice giving, the model that Zoom builds might be used, as Adobe’s was, to produce a product that directly competes with you in the marketplace. Why hire an interior decorator when Zoom will let you pay $50 to work with an AI that’s been trained on a few hundred thousand conversations that real interior decorators had with their clients.

What to do next.

If you think there may be legal implications with your conversations being recorded by Zoom, check with your lawyer. Point them to sections 10,2, 10,3, and 10,4 of the Terms of Service. Also, the privacy policy.

If you’re concerned about your conversations being used to put you out of business, stop using Zoom and refuse to deliver your services over anyone else’s Zoom account (they may have given consent for their account to be used for training data).

Be vigilant. These clauses are becoming more and more common with cloud services. When you use any new high tech product, search “Terms of Service” pages for the phrases “Machine Learning” and “AI” and “artificial intelligence” and see what rights you’re giving up to your own work product.

(Cars are now a high-tech product, by the way. Pay particular attention to whether the car company can monitor and record everything you do and say inside your car. Some car companies have you grant that right as a condition of buying the car.)

Stay safe out there. Because now, it’s your very own productivity tools that are trying to take you down.

Skype is better, but still problematic

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My article on Skype exposing address books to the world has gone mini-viral. Written in 2017, it’s gotten dozens of citations in early 2019. A reporter approached me, asking if the problem still exists. After doing some research, here’s what I’ve found.

Microsoft’s article is incorrect (probably by accident)

Microsoft explains how People You May Know suggestions are generated in this article. At the time of this writing (February 14, 2019), the article is incomplete. The article claims you or the contact must both take action to be visible to each other through People You May Know. For example, you must add each other in your address books. Or you must exchange an invite and acceptance.

Microsoft doesn’t mention the problem case: mutual connections

The problem case exists, but is not listed here: if you have a mutual connection, then you’ll show up in each other’s People You May Know list. The mutual connection is someone who fits the you-both-take-action criteria.

So if Sam is connected to Ash, and Ash is connected to Stacy, then Sam and Stacy will show up in each others’ People You May Know list even though they’ve never taken any action with respect to each other.

Sam and Stacy will see each other without a direct connection

Deleting Still Doesn’t Solve The Problem

I deleted all my contacts. Skype is still suggesting dozens of people. I don’t know any of them. As mentioned on Microsoft’s list above, Skype remembered my past connections and is still suggesting their people to me. I don’t know any of these suggested people, but now I know one of my prior contacts knows them.

This no longer works for strangers, thank goodness

When I first found this issue (Dec 2017), I created a new test account. Browsing a stranger’s profile was enough to get suggestions of people with the same last name who looked the same (presumably family members). As of today (Feb 2019), it seems like Microsoft has reined this in a bit … from my very brief testing, it seems you need a common contact to start the suggestion engine.

I still consider this a security problem, though not as bad as it was before.

You can only figure out the contacts of someone you are or have been connected with. You can’t do it to a complete stranger, you need to have one contact—invite, connection, or chat—with them first. This isn’t as big a hurdle as you might think.

Journalists still shouldn’t use Skype

Journalists beware! If you’re a journalist, using Skype can compromise your sources. JournalistChris interviews source LittleSnitch on Skype. If JournalistChris later interviews source MafiaDon, MafiaDon will have LittleSnitch suggested as a contact. After all, they both have you as a mutual contact. If MafiaDon knows about this bug, then MafiaDon may agree to Skype with you precisely to see if LittleSnitch then shows up on MafiaDon’s People You May Know list. You really don’t want MafiaDon knowing you’ve been talking with LittleSnitch.

Even with strangers, you can get some information. When you browse random profiles, Skype will tell you how many mutual contacts you have. If you only have a few contacts in Skype, you can guess with some certainty who the mutual contact is.

if MafiaDon did your interview and then immediately looked up LittleSnitch‘s profile, MafiaDon would see that they have one mutual connection—you. That might be enough to tip off MafiaDon that LittleSnitch has been talking to the press.

Lawyers and Consultants, you beware too

The problem I outline for consultants and lawyers in my article remains. If you’re BankruptcyLawyer and you chat with MicrosoftCEO, then later chat with LogitechCEO, LogitechCEO will start seeing MicrosoftCEO as a suggested contact. LogitechCEO might even Skype with you deliberately to see who else gets suggested after the chat.

Indeed, you can imagine someone doing this very deliberately. If EvilBoy seriously wants to do research they could do this:

  1. EvilBoy creates a new skype account, live:innocent_journalist2
  2. EvilBoy approaches BankruptcyLawyer and says “I’m a journalist. I wish to interview you for an article. Connect to me on Skype as live:innocent_journalist2”
  3. EvilBoy interviews BankruptcyLawyer
  4. Because BankruptcyLawyer is now the only contact in the live:innocent_journalist2 account, the People You May Know will suggest BankruptcyLawyer’s contacts to EvilBoy
  5. Furthermore, EvilBoy can now look up anyone’s profile on Skype and see if they have a mutual contact. If so, they know that person is in BankruptcyLawyer’s addressbook

This requires a concerted effort on the part of EvilBoy, and it also requires that BankruptcyLawyer add EvilBoy as a contact, accept a connection request from EvilBoy, or chat with EvilBoy at least once.

This Can Still Be Awkward Personally

This is still a problem. Let’s say Ashley uses Skype to meet people for online dating. Ashley might answer personal ads and chat with Syd and Alex. Ashley probably doesn’t want Syd and Alex to start showing up in each other’s contact lists. That could be awkward, especially if one (or both) of the relationships goes farther than a Skype chat. It seems like the privacy problems here are pretty evident.

In summary: the hurdle has risen since I wrote that article. Instead of being able to reverse engineer a stranger’s address book, you can only reverse engineer someone you’re connected to or have chatted with. Once. EvilBoy can still use Skype to work mischief, but now it takes a bit more work. For some people, this may still be too much of a privacy breach from a product that was founded on the premise of confidentiality.


Quit Facebook & Change Your Life (for the better?)

Quit Facebook & Change Your Life (for the better?)

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It’s holiday time! My gift today is the story of a recent decision. You may want to try it. It’s made life a bit more effortful, but it’s produced real results. It has paid off in both expected and unexpected ways.

Whoa! I quit Facebook.

I quit Facebook. Yeah, it’s made a big difference, but not in the ways you’d think. Here are some not-so-obvious reasons why.

I’d long felt that Facebook wasn’t a particularly ethical company, and have used it with great ambivalence. Even apart from my moral doubts, I’d gone on holiday with no Facebook access. I returned centered, rested, and stable. Turning on Facebook jolted my addiction centers so noticeably that I could watch myself sliding into anxiety, distraction, and confusion.

But even with its bad effects starkly highlighted, I stayed online. Why? The same reason we all do: many social events are now advertised only on Facebook. And it’s one of the only ways I stay in touch with many of my friends.

But then last month, the New York Times investigative journalists exposed wrong-doing, coverups, and lies coming from Facebook’s top management. Morally, I just couldn’t continue to support the platform. Every post and comment is giving Facebook content to use to hook my friends and family.

So took a deep breath and committed to pulling the plug. I’ve been keeping careful track of what’s happened since then. It’s been surprising what’s happened. Social media was controlling my life in ways I’d never imagined until leaving.

Dropping social media makes you a better person

I used to see lots of stuff on social media about how to be smarter. Ironic, since social media itself probably dumbed me down by 20 IQ points.

Now, I’m thinking better. Social media fragments thoughts. It encourages thinking 140-280 characters at a time. But we’re smarter than that! Unless we train ourselves to be dumb 🙁

"Scientists discover real space aliens!" is a shareable headline that might appear on Facebook. But it makes us stupid. The intelligent reality—that we’ve found molecules that are the precursor to life—won’t generate shares.

Without social media, I’m regaining the ability to read long-form articles and think smart.

Interpersonal stuff gets way better!

Conversations are better. Social media makes conversation brief and scattered. Online conversations take a long time and seem extensive. But usually, they aren’t. Try reading one out loud, as if it were a script. You’ll find most "long" social media threads are just a few minutes of speech. They took a long time because typing and reading are slower than talking. And with a dozen people chiming in, actual interaction between you and any one person is minimal. It’s not real conversation.

Two board members of a non-profit I’m part of had a big fight on social media. The whole community jumped in. Accusations! Insults! Calls for resignation! It went on for weeks and almost destroyed the annual 4,000-person event. But it was actually only 20-30 paragraphs of interaction. It could have been resolved more quickly, more peacefully, with a single evening’s in-person meeting.

Without social media, I’m choosing my battles more wisely. I’m considering what I want to say before opening my mouth. Conversation is higher quality. It lasts longer and a lot gets said. It’s pretty awesome!

Less social media, means better social-izing!

My fears about losing my social life? They’re real, sort-of. Now, it takes effort. I need to make a conscious choice: who do I want to spend time with? Then I need to reach out and make sure we connect.

On Facebook, posts come pictures of friends. That’s a reminder to reach out to whoever social media happens to put in our path. There’s no reason to think that the people in our timeline are the people we’d most like in our close circle. They’re simply … the people who end up in our timeline.

Since quitting social media, it takes work to keep a friend. This is a good thing! I need to be deliberate about who I reach out to. I need to work to reach out to them. But perhaps that’s good. Because who your friends are, matters. Good friends take investment of time and energy. You want friends who enrich your life.

If it’s not worth the effort to connect with someone, that’s a message: maybe they’re not valuable enough to take up time in my life. Harsh, but true.

I get to be me, a meeple, not a compliant sheeple

I never realized how much my timeline directs my attention. A dozen great articles appear daily. Genuinely great. High-quality. I read them. But … they don’t add up to anything. They feel useful because they’re interesting, but they’re scattered. They’re all over the place. Rather than reading about a few topics deliberately, and getting deep learning, I’m just stimulating my brain’s reward centers with the feeling that just because an article is good, I’m better for having read it.

Deliberate or not, social media shapes our beliefs and attitudes through what it shows us. And its algorithms are tuned towards getting us emotional enough to click a link. They aren’t tuned towards getting us to be better, clearer people along any dimension whatsoever. Think about that.

Now, I’m deciding what I want to be educated about and seeking out the high-quality articles on those topics.

On Facebook, my social group, my attention, and my learning all happen by reacting to whatever the algorithm throws in my face. Off Facebook, my social group, my attention, and my learning all happen because I make them happen.

Yes, it’s more effort. That’s the cost. But the benefit: control and direction of who I am and who I’m becoming.

Regain control of who you are in the world

How about you? Try a Facebook holiday for a month. Make it long enough so you reinstate your offline systems. You’ll figure out how to keep in touch with people. You’ll find ways to stay informed.

And ultimately, you’ll be building a life where you get to hang out with the people you want, learn the things you want, and become the person you want to be. Do you really want social media deciding who you’ll become?

GE leaves the DOW. Is that market manipulation?

GE leaves the DOW. Is that market manipulation?

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It’s an old adage that “What gets measured, gets managed.” I’d like to add, “what gets managed, gets manipulated.”

That adage is usually used to discuss how people are paid. If you pay a bonus based on quarterly results, some people will manipulate the timing of sales to generate low-quality sales so they can get a bonus.

Broader economic measures have a tremendous effect, too. When the political party in power cries, “The economy is doing well/poorly,” they usually are referring to a very, very narrow set of financial measures. Generally “the stock market,” which translates into the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or the S&P 500, or aggregate corporate profits of public companies. Economic news virtually never includes any measure of well-being of individuals, so it’s not too surprising that an economic-indicator-based measurement system will give the well-being of companies a lot of weight.

GE was just booted from the DJIA

I’m genuinely puzzled. GE has been removed from the Dow Jones. This matters because inclusion in an index boosts a stock, since index funds all buy the stocks that are in an index. So GE will lose that boost. But also, it will change the actual DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average).

The article says, “The committee that runs the Dow prefers no more than a 10-to-1 ratio between the high and low stocks in the index.”

If something purports to be a measurement, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average purports, it seems like establishing price standards is, you know, simply manipulating that measurement to get the numbers you want.

Yes, the article says that GE had little impact on the DJIA, because its stock price was so low … but isn’t that the point? It had a low stock price, and that price should affect the average as much as the high prices affect the average.

They also say that GE doesn’t represent the economy any more. That argument makes more sense. If you’re purporting to measure the economy, then changing the mix based on the economy, makes sense. I can buy into to some degree, but manufacturing DOES still exist in the US, and wouldn’t GE be our most significant representative of that sector?

What is “the economy?”

How do they decide what “represents the economy.”

Is it simply who has the most money? If so, trash the whole index of companies and simply replace it with today’s measure of the wealth of the top 10 people in the Forbes 500, or the top 10 institutions that hold the most equities.

Since the purpose of the economy is to create jobs and lift up the country as a whole, perhaps the DJIA should more heavily weight the companies according to the number of full-time, individual living-wage jobs they provide for the economy?

What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed, gets manipulated.

Or perhaps the DJIA should contain only companies that have never been involved in scandals, since surely we don’t want our economic measures to reward bad actors.

If, as the article states, the financial sector are considered one of the major (if not the major) sectors of the economy, then the financial measures they use will have broad implications for us all. If the DJIA no longer contains GE, that will certainly alter a great many actions somewhere, on some plate.

We just won’t know whose, and whether those actions are bad for the economy, or whether they give us some kind of boost. The one thing we can be fairly sure of: when you change what gets measured, you will change what gets managed.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/19/investing/ge-dow-jones-walgreens/index.html

Cryptocurrencies for Investors and Entrepreneurs

Cryptocurrencies for Investors and Entrepreneurs

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How ICOs and Cryptocurrencies Work for Entrepreneurs and Investors

With Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies all the rage, I was recently invited to participate in an ICO (an “initial coin offering”). Warren Buffett made his fortune by limiting his investments to businesses and investments he understood deeply. That seems sensible, so I’ve been delving into the ICO world to understand if it’s for real, if it’s a scam, or if it’s something genuinely new.

Much to my surprise, it doesn’t seem to be a complete scam. ICOs are a fund-raising play for a business. Coin-based entrepreneurship has aspects of equity, and aspects of … something new. It decouples the value of the organization from profit. If it’s sustainable, coin-based organizations could become a way to create markets whose bottom line is genuine societal value. The “triple-bottom line” could be an actual market reality. That’s exciting!!

Or, it could turn be unsustainable, and a fancy way for unskilled or unethical entrepreneurs to walk away with lots of investor cash and no obligation to do anything with it.

As you’ll read below, while the ICO mechanism has been invented in the context of crypto currencies, there’s no inherent reason that this has to be done with cryptography. The same structures could be put in place in the physical world, without needing to buy into blockchain or virtual currencies.

What I’ve Learned so Far About ICOs

Here’s my current understanding of “coins” and initial coin offerings (ICOs). While the concepts are being developed in the context of crypto currencies, as I mention below, they can be (and have been) implemented in ways that are totally independent of crypto, or even computers.

PLEASE CRITIQUE AND COMMENT! This understanding is about two or three hours old, so it’s my very first attempt to understand.

ICOs make a different bet than stock investments

The ICO model is fascinating. Instead of betting on the success of a company, as you would with a traditional corporation, you’re betting on the creation of a market. The entrepreneur is then pitching their ability to create a market for the coin, which can be done in many different ways, depending on the company issuing coins.

This means that an ICO has two cases to analyze. While a traditional startup only needs to make a business case, an ICO needs to make a case for the creation of the coin market, and a case for the success (however that’s defined) of the organization being funded with the ICO.

There must be a market-making mechanism

The entrepreneur needs to present a compelling case:

  • that their endeavor can create a market
  • that the market created makes sense (that there’s a reason want the coin)
  • that there’s a way coins are exchanged for dollars or other value that is valuable enough that people will want to trade the coins

The primary function of the business being financed with the ICO is to create a market for the coins, rather than to make an economic profit. For example, an organization issuing an ICO may not do anything on an ongoing basis, as long as they can kick-start the market for their coin.

(There’s no inherent reason that any of this has to involve blockchain or crypto, by the way. You could be issuing frequent flyer points that are tracked in a spreadsheet in an “IFFPO” and it would basically be the same thing.)

For example, an airline could simply rename their frequent flyer points as “coins” and sell a bunch of those coins rather than issuing stock. People would want the coins because they could be exchanged for flights. If the only way to fly were by paying in frequent flyer points, then the market for the points would be created by anyone who wants to travel by air. Frequent flyer points would then be convertible to and from dollars based on the price in coins the airline charges for a flight, and the overall market demand for air travel.

But the airline would not rise and fall based on its ability to generate a profit; it would rise and fall based on its ability to keep the market for FFCs boosted. It would then presumably pay its employees in FFCs, which they could convert to cash.

Coin-based financing may resemble ongoing equity financing

This scenario resembles a company that is financing itself on the strength of its equity, by selling stock to pay any ongoing expenses, rather than financing itself on its underlying business fundamentals.

For an airline, which needs to pay salaries and has high ongoing expenses, it probably wouldn’t work. But as Amazon shows, a company can consistently generate lackluster business results and have its “coins” (shares of AMZN stock) continue to be valued quite highly.

Coins can fund one-time projects as long as they create ongoing markets

The thing about coins is that the organization that did the ICO might not be an ongoing business at all, but a one-time fund raise, as long as it kick starts the market. For example, if the coins created are done so as the only currency that can be used to access some resource, like time on the Hubble telescope, then one organization can create the coins and the protocol that requires them, while completely separate organizations accept the coins and thus generate demand for them.

[One historical example that comes to mind is the currency of green stamps, which survived for decades but eventually failed. An ICO could be likened to an Initial Green Stamp Offering.]

Coins dilute … the market

Coins are like equity in that issuing additional coins dilutes the value of the coins already in circulation. The one ICO I’ve seen closely puts a cap on the number of coins that can ever be issued, to preserve the coin scarcity. That makes sense for an ICO that finances a one-time, transient organization. But if coins will be used, rather than profit, as an ongoing source of an organization’s funds, then having a hard cap on the number of coins will put a cap on the total amount the organization can raise over its lifetime.

In the social enterprise world, coins could be issued to finance social good, as long as there were some mechanism to drive the demand and market for the coins. Rather than having social enterprise rely on constant begging, a social enterprise could drive demand for their coins by striking agreements with businesses or other organizations to use the social coins as a currency. To fund a social enterprise for years on coins, however, would require a substantial initial ICO or the ability to keep issuing coins when funds are needed, so the coin used for the funding probably shouldn’t be capped.

It’s fascinating! And I have no idea how to value a coin, or whether this will prove to be sustainable in any meaningful way.

Safety warning: if you use Skype, your contacts may now be exposed

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UPDATE: February 14, 2019: Since writing this article in late 2017, Microsoft seems to have made a change that makes it a bit harder to reverse engineer someone’s address book, but most of the problem remains. You can read my update on how Skype still exposes your contacts in problematic ways.

A quick public service announcement for anyone who uses Skype. Executives, VCs, journalists, researchers, and anyone who cares about the privacy of their contact list should read this.

I don’t usually post about computer security, but in this case, it seemed quite serious. It’s also the kind of thing we’re used to from Facebook and LinkedIn. But it could have very serious consequences, since people use Skype differently from those social platforms. People use social media with an expectation of public transparency, while many use Skype with an expectation of privacy.

As of a couple of days ago, the new Skype tells other people how many contacts you have in common. It also offers your contacts as potential new contacts to everyone else in your contact book. This is a surprisingly serious privacy breach.

This means if you use Skype for anything where your contact list is sensitive (conference calls with clients, planning a protest over the skyrocketing price of kitty litter, coordinating your monthly meeting of people relax by knitting exciting underwear), your contacts can quite possibly deduce who other contacts are. Furthermore, if they know about this new “feature,” they can make some smart deductions.

For example, you’re a mergers & acquisitions consultant. You are in talks with MergeMe, Inc. A prospect from WeMergeToo calls you. Immediately after you accept their contact request, they start seeing suggestions that they might know the MergeMe Inc CEO. They don’t, but they know they just connected to you —> they can quickly figure out MergeMe Inc is talking with you also.

I also just discovered I can look up a profile of someone I don’t know (they’re neither a contact nor a friend), log out and back in, and Skype will start suggesting their contacts to me as potential contacts of my own. (I can tell because those contacts have the same last name, physical resemblance, etc.) So this can be used by stalkers, bullies, harassers, and people who wish to research someone and learn who they know.

(This feature can be used for much more targeted research. I won’t go into details here. Suffice to say that you can get pretty specific.)

Microsoft’s support page says they’re considering changing this behavior someday. Of course, by that time, much damage will have been done.

I went through and deleted some of my contacts by hand this morning (it takes forever… in a triumph of “good for Microsoft, bad for the user” they make it super easy for you to give them your social graph, and super hard for you to take it back). Even deleted, Skype kept suggesting prior contacts to me. That suggests that they continue to keep that data — and probably call history and chat history as well — for use in “helpfully” building their social graph.

Important note: deleting your contact book isn’t enough. If your associates have you in their contact book, someone can still use the same mechanism to figure out the connection.

My reaction was to cancel my Skype account altogether. But because Microsoft cares so much about me, the best I can do is schedule it to be closed in 60 days. So for the next 60 days, like it or not, my contacts are going to continue to be exposed.

See: the Microsoft Skype support article

Also note Danida_U’s response from Microsoft: there’s no way to disable this short of opting out from being contactable at all. And no, there are no plans to remove the “feature.” They want to make it easier for friends and family to find you. My suggestion: if you want your friends and family to find you, tell them your Skype ID. Problem solved.

I recommend http://zoom.us or http://appear.in as alternatives that don’t “help” you by exposing your contacts to the world.

Ten Cultural Career Lies

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Things “they” told us that just might not be true.

Related article: How to write a good cover letter.

Download Ten Cultural Career Lies as a PDF

In April 2008, I gave a talk at Harvard Business School on the Ten Cultural Career Lies. These are things I believed for most of my life. Recently, the conventional wisdom started seeming suspect. I called several of my classmates who are all mid-career and asked what had led to their successes and failures. Upon close examination, much of what I had believed to be true about careers did not seem to hold.

This is one man’s experience. I invite you to decide if it matches your experience.

1. You can plan your career (or would even want to).

  • That’s not my experience, nor is it the experience of anyone over 35 I’ve talked to.
  • Maybe it worked in the 1950s…
  • Maybe it works in careers driven by successive degree requirements (e.g. medicine)
  • We get trained to think in terms of one-step-leads-to-another by 18 years of linear schooling.
  • So: plan less and be more. Hang out with good people doing good stuff and grab opportunity as it passes by.

2. Being the boss makes for a good life.

  • Have you ever worked closely with a CEO? It can be a great job, but it can also suck. Like any job, it requires a certain temperament and set of skills.
  • So: find jobs that suit your skills and temperament, don’t assume that the “oooh! isn’t that amazing” jobs will be good for you.

3. “Self-made” people exist.

  • The most self-made person alive still relied on millions of others to provide financial markets, schools, sewers, and the infrastructure that allowed them to go off and become “self-made.”
  • So: Recognize interdependency and build your life around positive interdependency. And when you want to learn to emulate a “self-made” person, pay attention to all the ways they weren’t self-made; that’s where the learning is. (And by the way, they may not be helpful in pointing out ways that contradict their myth.)

4. Hard work and skill will be appropriately rewarded.

  • Bear Sterns CEO cashed out for “only” $60 million. Cleaning lady @ $8/hour must work two jobs just to pay rent and still doesn’t make enough to save anything. ‘Nuff said.
  • So: understand what is rewarded (by money, power, respect, affection, time off, flexibility, freedom) and do that. If you want money, finance is the surest way to get it.

5. Do a good job and you’ll get ahead.

  • So: See #4. Pay special attention to what the people who will promote you want to see. Don’t assume it’s results.

6. I’ll work now and do what I love when I’ve made my first million, cured cancer, etc.

  • Management consulting firms and investment banks use this lie as a recruiting tool.
  • Dangerous strategy, and I know very few who’ve pulled it off. If you don’t do it, you’re left at mid-life trapped in a career you don’t like, with a non-transferable resume, and a network composed of people who are the last ones in the world who could help you do what you love. But boy, could they help you get even further in the career you despise.
  • So: Factor in your passions and ideals from day one.

7. Intelligence matters.

  • Up to a point. After that point, it can threaten people. It’s only useful insofar as you have the people/political/marketing skills to get your ideas in play. Even then, unless you’re perfect, you run the risk of overconfidence.
  • So: take classes when you need them, but stop assuming more knowledge is the answer to every problem. As a Fortune 500 ceo once confided: “business really just isn’t rocket science. In fact, to a smart person, it’s kinda boring…”

8. Achievement matters.

  • Actually not. Who you know and who thinks well of you probably matters at least as much as what you’ve achieved, if not more.
  • So: don’t get too caught up in building that great company, finishing that piece of art, or whatever. Yes, getting things done can be good. But if you enjoy and learn from the things that don’t get done, that may be enough.

9. We can control our lives.

  • Sickness, death, lotteries, luck, and love all happen. My friend just moved from Washington D.C. to Las Cruces, NM, where his snuggle-bunny has a job. That sure wasn’t planned for.
  • So: go with the flow. Learn to accept the things you can’t control. Be o.k. with that. Enjoy the process and don’t sweat it if you don’t reach the outcome. (That said, give it your best shot if you really want it.)

10. Success (money, power, achievement) brings happiness.

  • This has been disproven by tons of research. See the books Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff, Are You Ready to Succeed by Srikumar Rao, or Authentic Happiness by Marty Seligman.
  • This lie causes great unhappiness. See The Happy or Successful diagram below.
  • So: orient your life around happiness and look for success, not the other way around.

Happy or Successful Decision Tree

Click to view the image in full-page size.

Decision tree showing the difference between a life based on happiness and one based on success.

Decision tree: living for happy vs. living for success.

The ongoing joke that is Silicon Valley Privacy

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SnapChat just revised their privacy policy. I decided to read it. It looked pretty good. Then I got to the section How We Use Your Information. How does SnapChat use the information? To provide services. To communicate with me. To monitor trends. And so on.

The final bullet point? Carry out any other purpose for which the information was collected.

In other words: SnapChat has no privacy policy, and places no limits on what they can (and presumably will) do with your information.

Google’s privacy policy is similar. It sounds really grand, but if you read it carefully, in critical areas it exempts Google from any actual restrain on behavior by including similar clauses to the SnapChat clause.

Please face it: Silicon Valley, that supposed bastion of libertarian respect for individual rights, is no such thing. It’s a collection of disingenuous, deceptive, liars who are happy to write multipage privacy policies for PR purposes, which have no teeth whatsoever.

Be very, very careful of anything you put on a computer you don’t own. And I’m sure that the license agreements we agree to when we buy our computers and install Windows or Mac OS X will contain similar escape clauses if they don’t already.

If a policy does not have genuine, real teeth (“Corporation agrees to pay $1,000 for every violation of our privacy policy”), then over time, all such policies that supposedly protect consumers will be eroded. It seems to be a natural law, and it makes me believe more and more in regulation. I would rather slow progress than have process come at the expense of the well-being of consumers. Business was invented to serve us, not the other way around.

Corporations seem to be nothing if not explicitly immoral. It is very sad to watch.

Brainpower boosters? Not so fast…

Happy BrainBeing in the self-help space to some degree, I see an awful lot of products designed to “boost your brainpower.” This is an interesting value proposition, but it’s incomplete. You need to ask: how will you use the boosted brainpower? What will you expect it to do that your current brainpower isn’t doing?

This is an extremely important question. In my experience, brainpower is NOT what holds people back. What holds people back is not brainpower, it’s how the brainpower they have is organized. Brainpower is secondary to the ability to take action, align actions in mutually reinforcing ways towards a goal, and use feedback from the world to make mid-course corrections.

For example, if your primary attitude towards life and the world is a “victim mindset,” do you really want to boots your brainpower? You’ll be that much more effective at finding ways to explain why you’re a victim and not in control of your own life.

Boosting brainpower without making sure you’re using it for something worthwhile is like putting in a high-horsepower engine without making sure your car is pointed in the direction you want to go. What determines where you end up is the direction of the car. The horsepower only affects how fast you’ll get there.

FIRST choose a worthwhile direction.
THEN boost your brainpower.

Social Media and “The Good Life”

I just spent a week camping at a festival. We were in a far away place, with no power outlets and only spotty cell phone coverage. It seemed best to put my iPhone away and spend the entire time disconnected.

Logging into Facebook, checking my email, and returning to the online world, it’s once again glaringly obvious how little it seems to add to my life. The quiet and serenity was lacking in reaction-driven seratonin hits, but it was wonderful for just enjoying being in the here-and-now.

Try disconnecting for a while. It’s really fun!