Workaround Quotes

but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

What I like about cooking is that, so long as you follow the recipe exactly, everything always turns out perfect. It’s too bad there’s no recipe for happiness. Happiness is more like pastry—which is to say that you can take pains to keep cool and not overwork the dough, but if you don’t have that certain light touch, your best efforts still fall flat. The work-around is to buy what you need. I’m talking about pastry, not happiness, although money does make things easier all around.

Schools kill time and creativity. Find ways to workaround these limitations

Wanderlust, the very strong or irresistible impulse to travel, is adopted untouched from the German, presumably because it couldn't be improved upon. Workarounds like the French passion du voyage don't quite capture the same meaning. Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly; it's something more animal and more fickle - something more like lust. We don't lust after many things in life. We don't need words like worklust or homemakinglust.

God is like “Look, dude, I made you a chick. She is made of your rib, so she might be kinda dumb I tried just making one out of clay, like how I made you but she was harboring all these problematic delusions of equality so I had to find a workaround anyway, she’s totally hot, so don’t worry about it.

Hearing "can't" dares a person to find a workaround. It's a basic psychological theory called reactance - telling someone "no" just makes them want it more.

Brain scans prove that patients who’ve sustained significant childhood trauma have brains that look different from people who haven’t. Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin. Women who’ve suffered childhood sexual abuse have smaller somatosensory cortices—the part of the brain that registers sensation in our bodies. Victims who were screamed at might have an altered response to sound. Traumatized brains can result in reductions in the parts of the brain that process semantics, emotion and memory retrieval, perceiving emotions in others, and attention and speech. Not getting enough sleep at night potentially affects developing brains’ plasticity and attention and increases the risk of emotional problems later in life. And the scariest factoid, for me anyway: Child abuse is often associated with reduced thickness in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with moderation, decision-making, complex thought, and logical reasoning. Brains do have workarounds. There are people without amygdalae who don’t feel fear. There are people who have reduced prefrontal cortices who are very logical. And other parts of the brain can compensate, make up the lost parts in other ways. But overall, when I looked at the breadth of evidence, the results felt crushing. The fact that the brain’s cortical thickness is directly related to IQ was particularly threatening to me. Even if I wasn’t cool, or kind, or personable, I enjoyed the narrative that I was at least effective. Intelligent. What these papers seemed to tell me is that however smart I am, I’m not as smart as I could have been had this not happened to me. The questions arose again: Is this why my pitches didn’t go through? Is this why my boss never respected me? Is this why I was pushed to do grunt work in the back room?

There's plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive workaround for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it―they simply aren't being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system.

IC, which tends to focus less on deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC contracting is much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring.

With repetition, a lot of mental functioning becomes automatic and effortless, as when you drive a car to work. Novel situations, however, usually require conscious thought and “workaround” solutions, which are slower to develop, more difficult to execute, and more prone to error.

When roles shift, ideologies have to shift, and ideologies hate to shift. The workaround is pragmatism—“a practical way of thinking concerned with results rather than with theories and principles.” The shift is deeper than moving from one ideology to another; the shift is to discard ideology entirely.

Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not “sex,” or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of “abstinence” (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin.

She preferred wearing the thong under the garter belt instead of over it because she thought it looked better, but that required unfastening the stockings in order to slip it off if he wanted to leave the garter belt on, and he always did. He didn’t mind, but it did slow down the process a bit. This time, he’d circumvented the issue by choosing a thong that tied on each side. Now he yanked on the strings and pulled it right off her, leaving the garter belt in place. He smiled because he always took satisfaction in coming up with a successful work-around.

There’s a workaround for encroaching phone stupidity. The first thing I did when I got to my place in Austin – an apartment rented for three days over the internet – was connect the thing to wifi. Just like that, my secondary brain got all its little grey cells back. The next few days were all about scurrying from wifi field to field, trying to keep the thing on life support. It’s a workaround. We live in a workaround culture. You have to jiggle the key in the ignition just right to start the car. You have to hold the TV remote at a certain angle. You know how it goes.

ASIO turned up on Hamza's doorstep a year ago, after he and his mate, both in their mid-twenties, returned from Yemen. They weren't charged with anything but they were placed on no-fly lists. Hamza is convinced ASIO is monitoring their phones and watching their homes. So, as a workaround, he, the paladin dwarf, and his mate, a gnome, skip through forests in World of Warcraft, chatting business over their headsets. I ask him what he was doing in Yemen. 'Okay, now this... what you're getting to now, is a dangerous area.' He pauses. 'I was eating pizza.' He asks for a selfie with me. He says the gnome will be stoked because they had to lie low at one point and were confined to a small apartment in Yemen. They passed the time watching Breaking Bad and John Safran vs God. Pretty chuffed by the inroads I've made into the jihadi demographic.

The company’s most effective marketing tactic (besides making a great product) would never have been conceived or attempted by a pure marketing team. Instead, the engineers coded a set of tools that made it possible for every member to seamlessly cross-post his or her Airbnb listing on craigslist (because craigslist does not technically “allow” this, it was a fairly ingenious work-around). As a result, Airbnb—a tiny site—suddenly had free distribution on one of the most popular websites in the world.

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code.

Due to the various pragmatic obstacles, it is rare for a mission-critical analysis to be done in the “fully Bayesian” manner, i.e., without the use of tried-and-true frequentist tools at the various stages. Philosophy and beauty aside, the reliability and efficiency of the underlying computations required by the Bayesian framework are the main practical issues. A central technical issue at the heart of this is that it is much easier to do optimization (reliably and efficiently) in high dimensions than it is to do integration in high dimensions. Thus the workhorse machine learning methods, while there are ongoing efforts to adapt them to Bayesian framework, are almost all rooted in frequentist methods. A work-around is to perform MAP inference, which is optimization based. Most users of Bayesian estimation methods, in practice, are likely to use a mix of Bayesian and frequentist tools. The reverse is also true—frequentist data analysts, even if they stay formally within the frequentist framework, are often influenced by “Bayesian thinking,” referring to “priors” and “posteriors.” The most advisable position is probably to know both paradigms well, in order to make informed judgments about which tools to apply in which situations.

His latest theory about his dealings with women isn't that he's lost his reason or that women are illogical (Deb, for instance, displays exemplary thought processes;) it's just that a certain vital part of the interface between them is strongly encrypted and requires some workaround.

BUILDING RENEWAL INTO YOUR WORKDAY – Tony Schwartz Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7:30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. Zeke’s days were mostly about meetings. They were usually scheduled one after the other with no time in between. As a result, he would race off to the next meeting without digesting what he’d just taken in at the last one. Lunch was something Zeke squeezed in. He usually brought food back to his desk from the cafeteria and worked while he ate. Around two or three in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night, Zeke began to feel himself fading. Given his company’s culture, taking even a short nap wasn’t an option. Instead, for a quick hit of energy, he found himself succumbing to a piece of someone’s leftover birthday cake, or running to the vending machine for a Snickers bar. With so many urgent demands, Zeke tended to put off any intensive, challenging work for later. By the end of the day, however, he rarely had the energy to get to it. Even so, he found it difficult to leave work with so much unfinished business. By the time he finally did, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m., he was pretty much running on empty. After dinner, Zeke tried to get to some of the work he had put off earlier in the day. Much of the time, he simply ended up returning to e-mail or playing games online. Either way, he typically stayed up later than he knew he should. How closely does this match your experience? To the extent that it does resonate, how did this happen? Most important, can you imagine working the way you do now for the next ten or twenty years? YOUR CAPACITY IS LIMITED The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.

People are innately prepared to act as members of tribes, but culture tells us how to recognize who belongs to our tribes, what schedules of aid, praise, and punishment are due to tribal fellows, and how the tribe is to deal with other tribes — allies, enemies, and clients. […] Contemporary human societies differ drastically from the societies in which our social instincts evolved. Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies were likely comparatively small, egalitarian, and lacking in powerful institutionalized leadership. […] To evolve largescale, complex social systems, cultural evolutionary processes, driven by cultural group selection, takes advantage of whatever support these instincts offer. […] cultural evolution must cope with a psychology evolved for life in quite different sorts of societies. Appropriate larger scale institutions must regulate the constant pressure from smaller-groups (coalitions, cabals, cliques), to subvert the large-group favoring rules. To do this cultural evolution often makes use of “work arounds” — mobilizing tribal instincts for new purposes. For example, large national and international (e.g. great religions) institutions develop ideologies of symbolically marked inclusion that often fairly successfully engage the tribal instincts on a much larger scale. Military and religious organizations (e.g., Catholic Church), for example, dress recruits in identical clothing (and haircuts) loaded with symbolic markings, and then subdivide them into small groups with whom they eat and engage in long-term repeated interaction. Such work-arounds are often awkward compromises […] Complex societies are, in effect, grand natural social-psychological experiments that stringently test the limits of our innate dispositions to cooperate.

If a future judge excluded the watchband, he or she might also exclude all downstream evidence derived from the band. The downstream evidence was called “fruits of the poisonous tree,” under the principle that evidence derived from bad evidence was also bad. If investigators knew they had a piece of bad fruit, they tried to find a path around the bad fruit by using unrelated evidence to reach the same result. This was called a work-around. Mills

Finding and Fixing the “Hidden Factory” 1.​Map out your existing process step by step from beginning to end. 2.​Map common workarounds in case of problems. 3.​Optimize your process and involve end users. 4.​Confirm that the new processes are more efficient and improve results for end users.

Describe the workarounds they employ to complete certain tasks. Lay bare their thoughts, dreams, motivations and hidden beliefs that explain why they are not making so-called rational choices.

government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority. Pursuing workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled.

Hacks. When consumers or companies are creating off-label uses for something such that it becomes more useful; or when someone finds an experience related to technology or digital media so frustrating that she builds something smarter, more intuitive, and easier to use. Although Twitter was invented to make it easier for people to connect with each other, in the beginning users had no easy way to tag topics or follow conversations as they did within chat and message boards. Early adopter Chris Messina proposed using the number sign, or hashtag, as a workaround.25 His hack not only completely transformed how we aggregate and share content across social media

a workaround to restore your nasal microbiome is to swab your nose with kimchi juice.

Trump, however, had no intention of repaying the loan on time. He asked his lawyers to figure out a work-around. One of them dissected each of the loan documents and, on a conference call with his colleagues to brainstorm how their client could wriggle out of his obligations, mentioned the existence of a so-called force majeure—act of God—provision in the loan agreement. That meant that in the event of an unanticipatable catastrophe, like a natural disaster, the contract wasn’t enforceable.

Stop throwing bodies at a problem and look for the smart solution. There is a legacy in business of ‘work-arounds’. Often these involve the manual re-keying of data, or the manual manipulation of data in spreadsheets, or the manual building of reports. All of these processes draw in more and more bodies, often cheaper offshore bodies. This is not only an ongoing overhead but a potential root cause of errors in data and the information produced

My love is slightly misshapen. My love is nonstandard. It requires work-arounds. Is it the same love then? Does it matter? I have no idea. I’ve never been in love.

Another of the premises of our friendship was that we loathed emotional intimacy even as we understood its necessity. Speaking with casual nonchalance about subjects that caused us great pain was our preferred workaround.

From now on, if you see a multisig unlocking script, you should expect to see an extra 0 in the beginning, whose only purpose is as a workaround to a bug that accidentally became a consensus rule.

It was her idea to start texting Kit in the first place, and I have to admit now that I’ve started doing it I’m not sure why I was ever opposed to the idea. I no longer have to suffer through that thick silence while I translate what people are saying into what they mean and then wait again while I process the appropriate thing to say next. Leave it to modern technology to find a brilliant work-around to my social problems. With the obvious exceptions of my parents, Miney, Kit, and Siri, whose hands-free capabilities are helpful when driving, if I could I would text all the time and never speak out loud again. 

Pence also called Lindsey Graham, just in case the senator saw any workaround. “No,” Graham said. “Really?” Pence asked. “I’d tell you if I could, but I don’t. I’ve had my people look at it,” Graham replied. “Mike, I’m no constitutional lawyer, but common sense tells you you can’t do this.” Some of the professionals working for Trump, including Pat Cipollone, tried to talk sense into the boss. “Tell the vice president he needs to send the votes back. He needs to do it,” Trump told Cipollone during a meeting in the president’s private dining room in early January. “He can’t do that,” Cipollone said.

When Phil Knight was building Nike, he hired other distance runners to work with him because he knew that whatever they lacked in terms of business knowledge, they made up for in stamina. They would never give up. They would take the pain and make it to the end of the race despite the difficulties. When you start a company, you are usually happy to find anyone of quality willing to go on the journey with you. But as you grow, you realize that some people are like wide receivers in football with hands of stone. You throw to them, and the ball just bounces off them. Others have hands like glue. As a decent person you think your role is to coax the bad ones along, to find workarounds. As employees, these are 6s and 7s out of 10. If you keep them, you will end up with a dysfunctional company, where you do all the work, staying up all night with the few people who can make it happen. You have two options: either run a middling company going nowhere or clear out the mediocrity you created so you can grow. If you are ambitious, you have to fill your company with 9s and 10s, and give them the difficult tasks to do. Finally, to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to be paranoid. You always have to believe your company, regardless of size, is a little company. The moment you start to become big and successful, challengers will appear and do their best to take your customers and defeat your business. You are never more vulnerable than at the moment you think you have succeeded.

I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It’s limiting. Maybe whatever’s out here doesn’t even use it.

It was partially down to Elton and David. At the end of our recent visit they’d introduced us to a barrister, an acquaintance of theirs, a lovely fellow who knew more about the phone-hacking scandal than anyone I’d ever met. He’d shared with me his expertise, plus loads of open-court evidence, and when I told him I wished there was something I could do with it, when I complained that we’d been blocked at every turn by the Palace, he offered a breathtakingly elegant work-around. Why not hire your own lawyer? I stammered: You mean…are you telling me we could just…? What a thought. It had never occurred to me. I’d been so conditioned to do as I was told.

you unpack and settle in.” The program proved a major source of learning about the small, irritating “workarounds” that hotel customers faced, such as having to place the suitcase of a traveling companion on the floor because the hotel only provided one luggage rack, having to unplug and find a place for hotel-provided hair dryers when guests bring their own, and much more. By “listening with their eyes,” hotel employees found ways to enhance the customer experience that guests may never have suggested on comment cards.

[T]he heart always has a workaround.

Push to Completion Responsibility or accountability isn’t about starting a task or a project. It happens when we carry it to completion. For example, every now and then I ask someone to help me find something or get a hold of someone. A few days go by and I don’t hear back, so I follow up on my request. “I looked it up but couldn’t find anything” is the answer I get, or “I e-mailed him but haven’t gotten a reply back yet.” Those who are brilliant at pushing to completion do all the things the rest of us do to start a task and when they run into a roadblock, figure out all the other ways they can continue to make progress. They don’t simply repeat what they’ve done. When asked about their progress they don’t reply, “I’ll try to e-mail him again.” The really gifted Completers start thinking about what workarounds they can use if whatever they tried before isn’t working well enough or quickly enough. Even if they never end up having to use that next step, it’s already been considered. The gift of this practice is that the next time a similar challenge comes up, ideas are already generated, and new relationships already exist thanks to the way they handled things the previous time. This is what makes them so resourceful. It’s not how they solved one problem, it’s how prepared they are to solve the next problem.

No. And don’t say you don’t care, because that’s bullshit. I didn’t tell you about that so you could say it’s fine, or figure out some sort of work-around.” She flung the blanket off her and got up. “We’re not seeing each other anymore. I let you stay with me last night so you wouldn’t be alone. That’s it.

I’d proffer the thought that this is all too common, that companies built for the past may offer glimpses into the incredible, but are mired in vulnerabilities in other places. Modern-day businesses are asymmetric constructs: a legacy of patches, quick fixes, hacks, workarounds, and hope.

1. Break Down Big Goals into Manageable Next Steps Don’t fall for the old “eat that frog” trap. While your goal should begin in the Discomfort Zone, your next step should be in the Comfort Zone. Do the easiest task first. If you get stumped or stuck, seek outside help. You want to build momentum early with quick wins. 2. Utilize Activation Triggers Brainstorm the best Activation Triggers for you. Remember to leverage what comes easy to do what’s hard. Don’t rely on your willpower in the moment. Instead, optimize your Activation Triggers with elimination, automation, and delegation. You’re going to face obstacles, so anticipate those and determine the best if/then response in advance. The idea is to plan your workarounds before an obstacle derails you. If you don’t have it right to begin with, experiment until you nail it. 3. Schedule Regular Goal Reviews For your daily review, scan your list of goals. You want to keep your goals fresh in your mind and also think through a few specific tasks for the day that will bring you closer to achieving them. I call these my Daily Big 3. For your weekly review, scan your goals with a special focus on your key motivations. Conduct a quick After-Action Review of the prior week. Review the next actions for each of your goals and determine what three outcomes you must reach in the coming week to achieve them. I call these my Weekly Big 3, and I use them to determine my Daily Big 3. For the quarterly review, I recommend walking through the five Best Year Ever steps again. But the key is to (1) rejoice if you’ve completed your goal or passed a milestone, (2) recommit if you haven’t, (3) revise the goal if you can’t recommit to it, (4) remove the goal if you can’t revise, and finally, (5) replace the goal with another you want to achieve.

Richard Joseph’s seminal work on Nigerian governance—to which this book owes an intellectual debt—appeared in 1987 and a lively academic discussion of “prebendalism,” its core idea, continues right up to the present, though mostly in academic rather than policy circles.[5] Prebendalism and neopatrimonialism can exist anywhere; their essence is the privatization and exploitation of public resources by those who control the government and its bureaucracy.[6] By origin, “prebendal” refers to Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy assigned to cathedrals that were entitled to a share of the foundation’s income by virtue of their position—not as a return for the services they might or might not perform. The income itself is called a “prebend” and the recipient is called a “prebendary.” In the Nigerian context, prebendal describes the behavior of elites that access and share the government’s oil revenue, not because of their services to the state, but because they are entitled to do so. There is the expectation that prebendal beneficiaries will share their prebend with their patrons and their clients. This relationship, in which patrons distribute wealth to their clients, is often described as neopatrimonial.[7] Hence, prebendalism is intimately related to the neopatrimonial patronage-clientage organization of Nigerian society. Prebendal behavior is most salient among elites, but its spirit and that of neopatrimonialism extend throughout society. A policeman at a checkpoint is salaried. But because he controls the checkpoint, he is entitled to ask for a bribe, and does so: “What do you have for me today?” He is expected to share a portion of the bribe he receives with his boss or patron and with subordinates and family. The system is partly a product of poverty: the policeman at the checkpoint may not have received his salary for months, and, if he had, it is too small to support a family. So, his bribe collection is part of a system of work-arounds. This system of entitlements and sharing is unregulated except by various local customs and wide open to abuse.

workarounds delay or prevent process improvement. The problems that trigger workarounds can be seen as small signals of a need for change in a system or process. The workaround bypasses the problem, thereby silencing the signal by getting the immediate job done – but getting it done in a way that is inefficient over the longer term.

Workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system.

As a child she had imagined workarounds for stories where maidens needed rescue, had never understood why Rapunzel, for instance, didn’t engineer her own escape. If Rapunzel’s hair was capable of sustaining a man on the ascent, then surely she could have cut herself free from her hair with utensils or sewing implements or broken-off bedroom furniture and then used it to rappel herself down from the tower. Helen had even drawn up several viable contingency options for Rapunzel, should things not go as planned.

Crossroads On the call, use this checklist: Do you perform a demo for this prospect and spend 30–60 minutes with him or her? Do you add the user to a drip campaign and follow up later? Do you disqualify the user? Is the user willing to change their business requirements to make this software work? Some of our users change how they process orders to make Connex work for them. Avoid scope creep with the 15-minute call. Trial users are usually disrespectful of your company’s time. Find a way to “yes” If your software lacks a feature and there is a workaround, suggest it. For example, customers would ask us if we had an Etsy integration. We said we can sync with it if the they purchase a 3rd party add-on. If your company plans to build a feature, alert the trial user. Systems like UserVoice and UpVoty can ask users to subscribe to a feature request and receive an alert when it is made.

to find workarounds. As employees, these are 6s and 7s out of 10. If you keep them, you will end up with a dysfunctional company, where you do all the work, staying up all night with the few people who can make it happen. You have two options: either run a middling company going nowhere or clear out the mediocrity you created so you can grow. If you are ambitious, you have to fill your company with 9s and 10s, and give them the difficult tasks to do. Finally, to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to be paranoid. You always have to believe your company, regardless of size, is a little company. The moment you start to become big and successful, challengers will appear and do their best to take your customers and defeat your business. You are never more vulnerable than at the moment you think you have succeeded.

No sequence In a relational database, sequences are usually used to generate unique values for a surrogate key. Cassandra has no sequences because it is extremely difficult to implement in a peer-to-peer distributed system. There are however workarounds, which are as follows: Using part of the data to generate a unique key Using a UUID In most cases, the best practice is to select the second workaround.

Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive. Like those with dyslexia who have become high achievers, develop workarounds or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your aptitudes.

Imagine the economic and social impact if the talents of people age 50-plus were unleashed via entrepreneurship. I'm just trying to do my bit to help that happen with "Workarounds.

Results of a good meeting: Facts — concrete, specific facts about what they do and why they do it (as opposed to the bad data of compliments, fluff, and opinions) Commitment — They are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as meaningful amounts of time, reputation risk, or money Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer to a sale Signs you’re just going through the motions: You’re talking more than they are They are complimenting you or your idea You told them about your idea and don’t have next steps You don’t have notes You haven’t looked through your notes with your team You got an unexpected answer and it didn’t change your idea You weren’t scared of any of the questions you asked You aren’t sure which big question you’re trying to answer You aren’t sure why you’re having the meeting Writing it down — signal symbols: :)Excited :( Angry :|Embarrassed ☇ Pain or problem (symbol is a lightning bolt) ⨅ Goal or job-to-be-done (symbol is a soccer/football goal) ☐ Obstacle ⤴Workaround ^Background or context (symbol is a distant mountain) ☑ Feature request or purchasing criteria ＄Money or budgets or purchasing process ♀ Mentioned a specific person or company ☆ Follow-up task Signs you aren’t pushing for commitment and advancement: A pipeline of zombie leads Ending product meetings with a compliment Ending product meetings with no clear next steps Meetings which “went well” They haven’t given up anything of value Asking for and framing the meeting: Vision — half-sentence of how you’re making the world better Framing — where you’re at and what you’re looking for Weakness — where you’re stuck and how you can be helped Pedestal — show that they, in particular, can provide that help Ask — ask for help The big prep question: “What do we want to learn from these guys?