Persistence, Biology and Business

Sing It, Fellow Monkey

This week at my gig, I found myself going over presentation decks for a couple of absolutely critical pitch meetings, and obsessing over... how to make the fonts and spacing more consistent, and delving into the extremely fidgety points over exactly how large the bullets should be.

Widow and orphan copy protection, column widths, trying to avoid to start a line with symbols over text, checking back and forth to see what was the more consistent usage, and so on. It's the kind of work that always takes longer than you think it should because any interruption that you get in your life will take precedence over this. At its core, this level of document control is stuff that your brain is just *trying* to be distracted from, no matter how many times you've done it.

There are tricks around editing and QA, of course, which you learn from painful trial and error and experience. First, to remind yourself of just how important the meetings are; that has a way to sharpen the attention. A second is to edit backward, so your mind doesn't fill in blanks that aren't there. A third is read all of the copy out loud, which is an old broadcast journalism tactic that's great for self-editors. I also like to do my rounds at different speeds, so that my double and triple check doesn't feel like I'm just going through the motions.

Sometimes when I'm doing this, my mind wanders as to why the edit is necessary in the first place. Persistence and attention to detail seems like something anyone can do, after all. But keeping a sharp point during what others might consider drudgery is a talent, and I work at a start-up; people are incredibly busy and need to move to other projects with speed. Having the eye to find these points seems like it's in shorter and shorter supply, especially as we get more and more used to machine learning that lulls us into thinking everything is OK..

Which leads the skeptical reader to wonder just how much value is being added through this level of due diligence, and the answer is, well, no one knows. When a prospect doesn't convert to a client, they'll never tell you that they aren't going to sign because of tiny errors that made them lose confidence in your brand. But just because they don't recognize these things at a conscious level doesn't mean that it didn't happen. What we're trying to do at my current gig is hard; it requires our clients to disrupt their current way of doing things, and to challenge assumptions that they've been living with for, in some cases, many years. Having everything just so is almost like, well, insurance.

Believe it or not, such things even have a basis in biology.

I've been fortunate enough to run into a few interviews recently from a Stanford professor, Richard Sapolsky, who will gladly give you way too much to think about. After a lifetime of study, the professor believes that free will is simply the biology that we haven't learned yet, and so much of the stuff that we think is a conscious choice is, well, anything but. Sapolsky cites the mathematical woes faced by prisoners trying to gain parole with hearings just before lunch (dramatically lower than any other time, but never, of course, in front of judges that would admit that they were too cranky before feeding to feel much in the way of mercy). He also talks about the historical culture of blame that society would give to epileptics, people with scurvy, dyslexia, and so on. All of these classes were blamed for their afflictions until the world knew more about what caused them, and then they weren't.

Sapolsky also notes, with the evidence of people answering questions while hooked up to various scanning technology, that we make decisions almost instantaneously, and then spend much of our time and gray matter justifying those decisions. How people of different political persuasions, or those with better backgrounds with parents who had lower amounts of stress, react and manage complex conditions, or more darkly, racial relations and class differences. It's all simultaneously depressing and empowering, as it points to how little we should feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments, and how seemingly intractable problems might have solutions, if only we can get past the conditions that are causing near hard-wired dismissal.

Which is all very far away from a presentation deck, until we get back to decisions made by individuals in micro-seconds, on near unconscious levels. On criteria that will never be stated out loud.

Persistence is in my biology. It might also be in our audiences.

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