Regress to the Mean

People spend a lot of time wondering about celebrities, about what they’re like in real life – just witness the success of People, Gawker, or TMZ.

But, from my experience, they could save a lot of reading time. By and large, if you average out the characters an actor plays, that average is the actor in real life.

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Max iPad

Back in my tech days, I used to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And it was there, in 1999, as I was walking past the smaller booths towards the back of the show, that I came across a little Canadian company called Research in Motion. The RIM booth wasn’t pulling many people in, but for some reason I stopped to check out their product. It was called a Blackberry.

The pager looked just like the Motorola two-ways that were all the rage at the time, but this one didn’t send pages – instead, it sent and received email. Crazy!

I looked at the thing. I played with it a little bit. Then, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I plunked down a credit card, and bought one right there.

In those days, I was still a student, and I knew better than to show something that dorky to college friends. But I was also running a company, and I made it down to New York City two or three times a week for meetings. The people I was meeting were largely in the finance world. And I’d show them the Blackberry.

Invariably, their reaction was the same: “I’d never carry something like that. Not in a million years.”

A few years later, when the iPod came out, I convinced my parents to buy me one as a birthday gift. At that point, people told me similar things: it would never catch on; they would never buy one; shouldn’t I have asked for a Nomad instead?

And now, as I eagerly await the 3G-enabled version of the iPad dropping later this month, I keep hearing the same complaints. That people aren’t buying one. That I shouldn’t bother. That it doesn’t do anything, does too much, is too big, too small. That, in short, it’s an overpriced and essentially pointless toy.

But the thing is, they’re all wrong. I don’t know why I think so. I’ve barely even had the chance to play around with an iPad directly. But I’m sure. The iPad is the future. And I’m looking forward, in five years, when the next big thing hits, to gloating about this one, too.

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Cheers, Count ‘Em

Last night, I attended my friend Nic Rad’s gallery opening for his awesome PeopleMatter series of blogger and media personality portraits.

Then, once the gallery kicked us out, a slew of us headed down to The Half King for drinks.

We started out with a dozen people at the table, and as folks bid the crowd adieu, they left cash on the table to cover their drinks and tips.

Eventually, the bill came, and everyone tossed dollars into the pile. And I said to Nic, “I bet we have $90 of cash here.”

I was close. We had $92. Which, including tip, was slightly less than half of the $190 bill.

My guess wasn’t based on eyeballing the money pile. It was, instead, based on the First Law of Large Groups going Dutch: even when all the people there believe they’ve put in more than their share of the bill, the total falls $100 short.

And, of course, the corollary: the person who counts the money somehow gets stuck covering the shortfall.

In this case, Nic and I split it. But, really, I’m not entirely sure why this always happens. Do people not factor in tax and tip? Do they just suck at math?

Or, perhaps, have they caught on to a cheap living secret I never did? That if you stiff the group a bit, and then pretend you can’t count well enough to collect the dollars, some sucker like me will essentially pick up your first round.

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Spare Some Change

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”
-Mark Twain

After thirty years of life, I’ve picked up a slew of bad habits – persistent behaviors that I don’t like at all, that serve me in the moment, perhaps, but never in the long-term.

And what I’m finding is, almost tautologically, those bad habits are bad habits because I revert back to them without thinking, without even realizing what I’m doing. I catch myself in any of them, and it almost seems a surprise – how did I end up here?

So, recently, and on more fronts than I can count, I’ve been trying to break those habits. Trying hard. And, frankly, I’m still doing a mediocre job overall. On many days I make the same mistakes I’ve made on many days before.

But now, increasingly, I see the mistakes as I make them. Not always. And even when I do, I can’t stop myself 100% of the time. Still, I’m starting to see those habits with new eyes. To really pay attention to them. To puzzle over how I built them, and how I can unbuild them.

Imperfect as my attempts still are, I take them as big progress. Because Twain, I think, is right: the only way to leave a habit behind is the way it was built up – one step and one step and one step at a time.

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