Randomness and our Feedburner stats

This is a guest post by Brian Lash who can be found at his entrepreneurial blog BrianLash.com (feed).

I looked at my Feedburner subscriber numbers today.  Yesterday, too.  And the day before.

If you maintain a blog I bet you did the same.

Then I remembered an interesting passage from a book I read a few months back titled Fooled by Randomness.  In it, mathematician and stock broker Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells a surprising story of the role randomness plays in the stock market.

He writes, “A 15% return with a 10% volatility (or uncertainty) per annum translates into a 93% probability of success in any given year.”

He then shows these same numbers, but on a narrower time scale.  Note that the following chart contains the same information as the previous statement (keep the 93% chance of success in the back of your minds):

Source: Taleb, Nassim N. Fooled by Randomness. New York: Random House, 2004. 65-67.

Remarkable.  At the smallest increment (a second in this example) the probability of success that corresponds to a 93% chance of a 15% annual return is a mere .5002.

Half.  Well, about that. 

Let’s take a step up to the day increment.  Using a 365 day calendar year, this implies an expected 197 pleasurable days relative to 168 unpleasurable ones.

Consider what this means for our subscriber numbers (which, like stock portfolios, are a function of human behavior.  Do you get upset when your numbers are up one day, down the next?  So do I.  But this example illustrates that daily changes don’t mean much of anything in the grand scheme of things.

We can still have a 93% probability of, say, a 15% increase in subscribers by “succeeding” just a little more than half the days in a given year.

The lesson: Don’t worry so much about your subscriber numbers.  They don’t mean nearly as much as we’ve assumed they do.

How to deliver a Powerpoint presentation

This is a guest post by Brian Lash who can be found at his entrepreneurial blog BrianLash.com (feed).

Most of you guys run Internet-based businesses.  At least that’s my suspicion, because that’s what brought me to Blogtrepreneur.com – the great content about SEO and RSS and every other three-letter acronym that characterizes Web 2.0.

So what place does a post about presentations, you may be asking, have on a blog that emphasizes e-commerce?

The logic is that, Internet age or not, every one of us needs to win buy-in for our ideas.  Whether fundraising to finance a new project.  Or trying to win the favor of a new client.  Or team-building for a startup project.

And many times the medium we use is the Powerpoint presentation.

Unfortunately most of us don’t know a whit about making – much less about delivering – effectivce presentations.

But it’s not our fault – we’ve been ill-trained.

Professionals today encourage us to follow a few simple rules when developing an effective presenation:

• Limit the number of words per slide:  Different people interpret this point in different ways.  Seth Godin sets the limit to six words.  Others are less rigid about length parameters.  All discourage full sentences.
• Use BIG fonts:  People should be able to see your words, plainly and clearly.
• Don’t write what a picture can say:  Graphs, charts, and other statistics are interesting… in a report.  But when using Powerpoint, why not leverage its strengths – the ability to convey emotion.  Grab your audience with a graphic that reinforce your words (re: your message).
• Don’t get cutesy:  No slide transitions.  And no moving graphics and/or audio unless they are undeniably relevant to your message.
• Dark text, light background:  Perhaps the easiest of the Powerpoint principles to adopt.  Do it in the interest of visibility - Anything else is hard on the eyes.

Writes Guy Kawasaki, founder and managing directory of Garage Technology Ventures, “I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

That’s advice all of us online entrepreneurs would do well to consider.

Have you given a presentation recently?  Did you adopt the principles presented here?  If so, share how it worked out for you.

Brevity counts.

This is a guest post by Brian Lash who can be found at his entrepreneurial blog BrianLash.com (feed).

When it comes to professional commication, brevity counts.  In writing, in speech.  Always.

It’s a valuable lesson I’ve learned over the years – That people appreciate concision.  Because when you’re brief, when you use precise words and adopt a to-the-point tone, people recognize that you aren’t going to waste their time.

But concision shouldn’t be confused with imprecision.  A quick message doesn’t imply a message that was developed haphazardly.  Instead, the emphasis is on clear-headed thinking; It takes an incisive mind to say in a few words what others tell in a paragraph or a short speech.

Following are three simple rules that have helped me to internalize this lesson as it relates to my professional life as an entrepreneur.  I emphasize writing here, but they apply equally to the spoken word:

1. Put every line you write on trial for its life.  Ask the question, “Can I deliver my message effectively without using these words?”  When they answer is Yes, you’ll know what to do.
2. Abandon your middle school grammar lessons.  Okay, not all of them.  But there’s a curious truth to the writing skills we learn through formal schooling – they sap us of our creativity.  And they allow (encourage?) us to be long-winded.
3. Take a few risks.  It’s tough to change a writing style.  I know it.  But it becomes easier as you take more risks.  You’ll soon find that you’re stringing words together in fun, new ways.  And that you’re finding clever shortcuts to convey your meaning – simply and clearly – with far fewer words.

I admit that these aren’t universal laws – that some professional messages need to be redundant in the interest of clarity, or long-winded in the interest of protecting parties to a legal agreement, or…

But they’re useful guidelines when sending e-mails.  When writing blog posts.  And more genearlly, when delivering a message to a sharp but busy audience.

Your suppliers, your distributors, your customers, your collaborators: all will appreciate your thoughtfulness when you show some respect for their time.

So say what you need to say.  Then get on with it.