Good Spreadsheet Quotes

Business is supposed to be fun. We're supposed to love what we're doing. Don't let these old folks convince you that business is about spreadsheets and MBA's and metics and all that stuff. That's all good, but ultimately business is just about adding value to other peoples lives and getting them to pay you for it.

Business is supposed to be fun. We're supposed to love what we're doing. Don't let these old folks convince you that business is about spreadsheets and MBA's and metrics and all that stuff. That's all good, but ultimately business is just about adding value to other peoples lives and getting them to pay you for it.

Call me anal retentive, but I like nothing more than trying to solve life’s problems with a good spreadsheet.

Good Stories Always Beat Good Spreadsheets” “Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

I created an Excel spreadsheet full of golf terms like eagle and birdie. I’m surprised one under isn’t called duck, because isn’t that what you do when you go under, duck?

We’re told by this system that you are the car you drive or the size of your house or the number in your bank account. We’re taught from an early age by advertising agencies that we’re only as good as the wealth we have. It isn’t true. We’re not their slaves. We’re people. We’re not numbers on a spreadsheet. We aren’t disposable if we don’t make enough. This is our country, not theirs.

If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad…forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

Brokenness exists within each channel of culture. Our role isn't merely to run reports, create spreadsheets, and show up on time. We are called to find the things that are broken and affect them in some positive way.

It’s the difference between utility and virtue. Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment—such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit?

Like any good analyst, the brain carefully evaluates these neural spreadsheets of unprocessed information to reach conclusions about the state of the visual and tactile world and the position of the body in it. And this is not as straightforward as it may sound.

Four years of fussing over spreadsheets until my eyes hurt and kissing egotistical traders’ asses in hopes that I could count on a good word come promotion time, staying late to cover for other risk analysts, planning team-building activities that didn’t involve used bowling shoes and all-you-can-eat MSG-laden buffets, and just like that, none of it matters. With one impromptu fifteen-minute meeting, I’m officially unemployed.

If this doesn’t make sense, once again, don’t worry. It doesn’t. It’s a plan designed by nerds who like looking at spreadsheets so much that they figured everyone else would enjoy it as well,*81 and that it might be a good way to determine who is permitted to live and die in America. It isn’t a plan designed by anyone who has ever gone hungry to feed their kids or anyone who lives in Section 8 housing or anyone who has ever been to prison.

But our general attitude was: The FBI’s not afraid of haystacks. We’re that good, we’re that strong, that is who we are—we do hard stuff better than anybody. If FBI agents have to take each stalk of hay off that stack, inspect it individually, and replace it precisely where it was before, we will goddamn do that, and for your convenience also provide you with a spreadsheet by four o’clock this afternoon that tallies all stalks of hay that were inspected in the last twelve hours.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good. And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human welfare on a global scale, but it’s effective where our ancestors needed it to be: at finding mates and building a strong network of allies.

The Seven Rules Spreadsheet — Being polite and respectful is always a good idea — If you look or sound different you won’t fit in — Conversation doesn’t just exchange Facts – it conveys how you’re feeling — You learn by making mistakes — Not everyone who is nice to me is my friend — It is better to be too diplomatic than too honest — Rules change depending on the situation and the person you are speaking to And, Rule Eight: Use the Rules to help with difficulties, to make life easier, to understand what’s acceptable, to enhance your strengths, but after that . . . do things your way.

We’re overconfident. “People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.” Our frame is too narrow. “This is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms. We ask, ‘Should I break up with my partner or not?’ instead of ‘What are the ways I could make this relationship better?’” We rely on short-term emotion. “When we’ve got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn. We replay the same arguments in our head. We agonize about our circumstances. We change our minds from day to day. If our decision was represented on a spreadsheet, none of the numbers would be changing—there’s no new information being added—but it doesn’t feel that way in our heads.” We have confirmation bias. “When people have the opportunity to collect information from the world, they are more likely to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs, and actions.” We pretend we want the truth, yet all we really want is reassurance. So what are your barriers to making good decisions?

Last, and perhaps most important, professional services socialize individuals in ways that are not conducive to their ability to contribute in other ways. All of us, and particularly young people, have a tendency to view ourselves and our natures as static: you’ll choose to do something for a few years, and you’ll still be the same you. This isn’t the case. Spending your twenties traveling four days a week, interviewing employees, and writing detailed reports on how to cut costs will change you, as will spending years editing contracts and arguing about events that will never come to pass, or years producing Excel spreadsheets and moving deals along. After a while, regardless of your initial motivations, your lifestyle and personality will change to fit your role. You will become a better dispenser of well-presented recommendations, or editor of contracts, or generator of financial projections. And you will in all likelihood become less good at other things. You will not be the same person you were when you started.

Whereas public sector services often bring a plethora of hidden benefits, the private sector is riddled with hidden costs. “We can afford to pay more for the services we need – chiefly healthcare and education,” Baumol writes. “What we may not be able to afford are the consequences of falling costs.” You may brush this aside with the argument that such “externalities” can’t simply be quantified because they involve too many subjective assumptions, but that’s precisely the point. “Value” and “productivity” cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite: “We have a high graduation rate, therefore we offer a good education” – “Our doctors are focused and efficient, therefore we provide good care” – “We have a high publication rate, therefore we are an excellent university” – “We have a high audience share, therefore we are producing good television” – “The economy is growing, therefore our country is doing fine…” The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.

The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”31 Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.

It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain. If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad…forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no. [10]

As I was to learn, the process for creating the digital media business would be quite different because there was so much more to creating a great digital media customer experience than simply adding the next retail category to the Amazon website. The first part of the process went as normal. Our team of three or four people developed plans using the tried-and-true MBA-style methods of the time. We gathered data about the size of the market opportunity. We constructed financial models projecting our annual sales in each category, assuming, of course, an ever-increasing share of digital sales. We calculated gross margin assuming a certain cost of goods from our suppliers. We projected an operating margin based on the size of the team we would need to support the business. We outlined the deals we would make with media companies. We sketched out pricing parameters. We described how the service would work for customers. We put it all together in crisp-looking PowerPoint slides (this was still several months before the switch to narratives) and comprehensive Excel spreadsheets.

Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

Mike’s goal with his spreadsheet is to become more “intentional” about how his workday unfolds. “The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day,” he explained. “But that is not the most strategic way to spend your time.

Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment—such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit?

Over the past year, as I have been working with the global tax-accounting firm KPMG to help their tax auditors and managers become happier, I began to realize that many of the employees were suffering from an unfortunate problem. Many of them had to spend 8 to 14 hours a day scanning tax forms for errors, and as they did, their brains were becoming wired to look for mistakes. This made them very good at their jobs, but they were getting so expert at seeing errors and potential pitfalls that this habit started to spill over into other areas of their lives. Like the Tetris players who suddenly saw those blocks everywhere, these accountants experienced each day as a tax audit, always scanning the world for the worst. As you can imagine, this was no picnic, and what’s more, it was undermining their relationships at work and at home. In performance reviews, they noticed only the faults of their team members, never the strengths. When they went home to their families, they noticed only the C’s on their kids’ report cards, never the A’s. When they ate at restaurants, they could only notice that the potatoes were underdone—never that the steak was cooked perfectly. One tax auditor confided that he had been very depressed over the past quarter. As we discussed why, he mentioned in passing that one day during a break at work he had made an Excel spreadsheet listing all the mistakes his wife had made over the past six weeks. Imagine the reaction of his wife (or soon to be ex wife) when he brought that list of faults home in an attempt to make things better. Tax auditors are far from the only ones who get stuck in this

Accountability With Friends   In many areas of life there's a battle between doing the thing that will work very effectively to solve a specific problem in the short term versus doing that which will take longer to become effective but will solve many problems in the long term. For example, building up willpower is extremely slow, but once you have a high capacity for it, you can do a lot of difficult things outside your routine. If you have low or normal willpower, you will rely exclusively on habits to get a lot done.   Similarly, it's a good practice to build up the ability to be accountable entirely to yourself, but if you're unable to do that, or for habits that are very long term or very difficult, you can ask a friend to help you be accountable.   A good friend of mine, Leo Babauta, who is a master of habits and is excellent at being accountable to himself, asked me to help him stay accountable for his diet because he was trying to eat a perfect diet for a full six months. That's a very difficult challenge, but having someone to stay accountable to makes it slightly easier.   Earlier this year I wanted to completely eliminate all non-work web browsing for three months, so I asked a friend to hold me accountable. It worked, and I'm not sure I would have been able to do it without him.   When asking a friend to hold you accountable, make it concrete and easy for him. It must be concrete, because you don't want to impose on him to constantly evaluate your progress. Either Leo ate sugar or he didn't. Either I visited a web site or I didn't. You must also report your progress at regular intervals. Leo created a shared spreadsheet where I could see whether he ate properly each day.   Last, there must be consequences for failure. The primary purpose of having consequences is that they make the agreement official and definite. People remember bets, but forget offhand claims. My friend bet me $50 I couldn't stay off the web sites for three months. Without the bet, I doubt he would have kept track of it if he had just said, “I don't think you can do it”. Since your friend is doing you a favor, be willing to make a one-sided bet where he has no downside.   Reserve accountability for only the most difficult and important of your habits. It increases compliance, but at the cost of coordinating (albeit minimally) with someone else. It's also a missed opportunity to build the habit of self-reliance, so use it only when there's serious concern that you may not stick with the habit without it.   Habitualizing

When you look at Mike’s spreadsheet, you also notice that he restricts the hours dedicated to required tasks that don’t ultimately make him better at what he does (eighteen hours). The majority of his week is instead focused on what matters: raising money, vetting investments, and helping his fund’s companies (twenty-seven hours). Without this careful tracking, this ratio would be much different.

Once you’ve narrowed down your list of potential approaches, you can use any prioritization framework to sort them. I’ve found the ICE framework helpful for this purpose. ICE stands for: Impact: If this works, how big will the potential impact be? Confidence: How likely is this to succeed? Ease of implementation: How easy is this to execute? ICE is often used to prioritize feature development, but it’s also a good tool for prioritizing marketing. To do this, list potential approaches in a spreadsheet and rate them on a scale of one through 10 for each of the above characteristics. I’ve seen people use several methods to get the score. Score = Impact x Confidence x Ease: This gives you a score with an exponential impact. In other words, the higher you rate any one area, the more confident you need to be. Score = (Impact + Confidence + Ease)/3: This gives you an average of these three scores. However you rank those facets, using the ICE framework is a way to get your approaches into a spreadsheet and figure out which are the best to start with. You can list things by high-level approaches (content marketing, PPC) or by individual tactics (ebook, blog post, guest posting, YouTube ads, Facebook ads). You can also start by ranking high-level approaches, then start a new tab in the spreadsheet to break down the top approaches by individual tactics. Then tackle the highest-rated approaches and tactics first.

TODAY IS A GOOD DAY. TOMORROW IS ALWAYS LATE. 16 Oct National Spreadsheet Day 17 Oct National Edge Day 17 Oct National Sweetest Day

To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, "Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring." Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.

The type of work you do can affect the size and type of screen that works best for you. If you're not worried about graphics, a 12-14 "screen size is acceptable. If the work you're doing is graphically intensive, a 15-17" is best. Screen sizes range from 12 to 19 inches. A laptop with a smaller screen is a great option if you don't plan on using a laptop too much. Upgrading from 256MB of RAM to 512MB of RAM will speed up your laptop. If your needs are somewhat mundane: email, spreadsheets, word processor, etc. 512 MB of RAM should suffice. RAM is for a computer what is the location of real estate. You should also think about the hard drive of the laptop you are considering. The hard drive is also a very important specification to keep in mind when buying a laptop. The speed of a hard disk is normally calculated in rotations per minute. A hard drive of around 50 GB or more is a good rule of thumb.

On the job, the simplest way to protect yourself is to play the role of a boring person who is all work and no fun. When you see a Ham-it-up vampire coming, conspicuously pay attention to the nearest computer screen or spreadsheet. It’s kind of like not making eye contact with a panhandler. If you talk, stick to business. Turn yourself into one of the extras on the set, just doing your job and not worthy of notice. Your primitive brain may be screaming “notice me,” but the rest of you will fare better for not listening. It may take a good deal of effort to stay in character, especially if you are a charming and friendly person yourself. Imagine being one of those stone-faced guards at Buckingham Palace.

Online Customer Service Jobs Can Be the Best Work from Home Opportunities Provided that this is true, at that point a pursuit into online client benefit employments would be ideal for you. There are some of these employments that are holding up to filled at this moment. Having a full time assistant or secretary can cost an organization several dollars every week. For a considerable measure of independent ventures, this is a cost that they cannot manage. Therefore, numerous private ventures are beginning to outsource these obligations to people who can telecommute. The procedure is in reality exceptionally basic. Every single approaching call would get steered to your home number, and you would answer the require the organization, similarly as though you were sitting in your office at a work area. You take and forward messages and answer general inquiries. The following are a couple of the most prominent online client benefit employments being offered today. An online client benefit proficient can make a better than average salary, particularly on the off chance that you handle requires various diverse customers. Astounding Jobs as a Work At Home Call Center Indeed, you can set your home office up to be a completely working work at home call focus. Home call focuses is a locally situated business opportunity that is extremely lucrative, in light of the fact that you handle a huge volume of approaching calls. Furthermore, it’s anything but difficult to begin. online customer service Simple Work from Home Telemarketing Jobs Provided Roku phone number this is true, at that point a Work from Home Telemarketing Jobs is the open door for you. Numerous organizations from everywhere throughout the world will pay somebody to give telemarketing administrations to them. These are online client benefit occupations that expect you to make outbound telephone calls in regards to everything from general item studies to family unit investigation. In the event that you can have a second telephone line in your home, at that point this open door is for you. Honest to goodness Clerical Work at Home Jobs you like writing, documenting, faxing, and making spreadsheets. Assuming this is the case, there are Legitimate Clerical Work at Home Jobs that you would be ideal for. Organizations outsource genuine administrative occupations each and every day. Get paid continuously, or by the task, which ever you favor. Basic Work at Home Phone Jobs There are various online client benefit occupations and telephone employments that all should be possible from the solace of your own home. About a telephone work as a work from home arrangement setter for a protection specialist. There are more than 400,000 protection specialists in the only us who procure low maintenance telecommute name setters. You can get paid per arrangement, and get paid a commission of the real deal. Would you be able to state lingering salary! If you get a kick out of the chance to set arrangements, at that point this online client benefits employments if appropriate for you.

In a tiny company like mine, it’s up to the owner to invent the way the company operates and to design the systems that keep track of what is happening. Fortunately, I find this to be an interesting challenge. If I had wanted to build only furniture, I could have kept myself very busy, but the company would not have grown. Without a rational way to handle information, we would have descended into permanent chaos. Thinking about information is different from ordinary work. The challenge is to find good ways, using data, to describe what’s happening in the real world. It’s aligning the description of the company with the activities of the company. My job as boss is to monitor both of these and to continually modify the description to fit the reality. My employees can’t do it—they each work on their piece of the process. I’m the only one who sees everything. I decide what to keep track of, and how to do it. I have two information systems. First, there’s my subjective impressions of the state of the shop, the mood of the workers, the eagerness of the customers, drawn from my observations and conversations. The second is objective, actual data that lives in separate fiefdoms: the accounting system, in QuickBooks; the contract and productions system, in FileMaker; e-mails and customer folders sit on our server; AdWords data lives in the cloud. So do our shared Google Docs spreadsheets, which act as supplementary databases. There are also a bunch of Excel sheets, dating back to 1997, when I first computerized (twelve years after starting the company). None of these subsystems talk to one another. Information passes between them via the people who use it. I’m the only person in the company who knows how it all fits together.

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors. Furthermore, few students showed any interest in working for a company that actually makes products. . . . [C]ommunity service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service. . . . In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. . . . Furthermore . . . [a]round what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? . . . You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job. 110

I was in charge of decisions and marketing, and Sean was in charge of research and operations. When we were trying to identify our target customer, he spent a ton of time putting together spreadsheets comparing all the different markets we should consider. When he showed them to me and asked me what I thought, I replied, “Yoga.” Huh? “We could easily do multiple products serving people who do yoga,” I told him. “It’s an emerging trend. And I know a ton of those people; I can ask them what they want. Let’s start a yoga business.” Sean’s initial response was, “That’s not a quantitative analysis, Ryan!” I’ve never been one to overthink things—most people spend way too much time in the research period. I make decisions fast and adjust later. With our target customer identified, we made a list of possible products and chose our gateway product—a yoga mat. With that, we began the process of product development. We looked up the top-selling yoga mats on Amazon and read through the reviews; we asked questions on Facebook groups, subreddits, and Instagram influencer accounts. It didn’t take long before we had an idea of the main pain points we needed to address with our first product. I remembered Don’s advice and began looking for people to make the product. With a quick scroll and a click, we could choose between a wholesaler in China, a private label supplier out of India, or a contract manufacturer in Vietnam. For about fifty bucks, we were able to order a set of yoga mat samples that had the exact features we were looking for. It was that easy. Samples in hand, we needed to refine our product idea to make sure we were really hitting the pain points we’d identified. At that time, I’d done yoga maybe two or three times in my life, and I wasn’t nearly the right demographic for our mats anyway. That forced me to ask questions. We were targeting yoga-loving millennials, so I went where they often congregate: Starbucks. There, I did the kind of tough field work that really makes an entrepreneur sweat: asking young women questions over coffee. “Which yoga mat do you prefer? Why?” “What makes the difference between a bad yoga mat and a good one?” “What’s wrong with your current yoga mat?” “What do you think of this one? And what about this one?” Next, I headed over to local yoga studios to see how our samples stacked up against the strenuous demands of a yoga class. A few classes later, Sean and I had everything we needed to narrow down our product development. Armed with all our data, we went back to the manufacturers. From a couple yoga-clueless guys, we’d become knowledgeable enough to know not just what a good yoga mat looked like, but how it had to feel and perform. We knew what we needed our yoga mat to do. Now we just had to find the manufacturer to supply it.

Value' and 'productivity' cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite... The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet... Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia.

Spreadsheets are good at telling you when the numbers do or don’t add up. They’re not good at modeling how you’ll feel when you tuck your kids in at night

To me it’s obvious that the one thing you can’t measure, can’t predict, and can’t model in a spreadsheet is the most powerful force in all of business and investing—just like it’s the most powerful force in the military. Same in politics. Same in careers. Same in relationships. A lot of things don’t compute.