#267: Getting COVID, CNN+, Airbnb's Work From Anywhere....
Hello!
You might be wondering why there was no newsletter last week. Some of you might also wonder where the OMD’s Journal April update was on Sunday as well. Well. I had COVID.
I was incapacitated both mentally and physically over the last couple of weeks. That’s delayed the OMD Journal updates and I hope to publish the Powerlifting April update in the coming weeks. Mind you, not much powerlifting was done in the month of April.
A lot happened in April. Some, I can share with you and some I hope to share in time. What I’ll share in today’s issue is my reflection on what I learned having COVID. The health-focused learnings will be addressed in the OMD Journal report. The essay I share with you in the culture essay is closer to the tired and wheezing accounts of one man who felt the weight of years lift over a couple of weeks.
In addition to the COVID essay, I have a couple of essays in the business segment based on two particular podcast interviews. One touches on the streaming landscape and CNN+. The other is about the remote working policy adopted by Airbnb. Both touch upon the cultural implications of each organization. Each podcast episode is short so take a listen if you’re interested.
The ABC’s of the OMD learning function are below. Feel free to pick and choose the segments that interest you and I hope they make you think about something you didn’t before, raise an eyebrow, or leave you satisfied.
Art: Books, Movies, Creations
Business: Investing, Systems, Work
Culture: People, Self, Observations
Art: Books, Movies, Creations
I watched a lot. I had COVID. I didn’t do anything except consume content in this state. But I haven’t retained the cognitive ability to think through what I’ve consumed…yet.
Business: Investing, Systems, Work
Insights on CNN+’s Demise
Streaming continued to be an entertaining battlefield of capitalism with the shutdown of CNN+. Netflix played the valuable of elevating the standards of media and presented a new world of consumption. Now, we have the option for Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Prime Video and every other broadcaster at our finger tips.
While some like Quibi and CNN+ failed, it just showed how wonderful capitalistic competition is for the consumer. I truly hope the day when there is a oligopolistic relationship in the streaming wars doesn’t come.
On that note, I found this 1-hour podcast episode on TechMeme Ride Home to be informative on the state of streaming today—at least for someone who knows nothing like yours truly:
Though the episode was titled WTF Netflix because the company lost subscribers, I came away thinking ‘WTF CNN?!’ As it turned out, CNN+ was launched with full awareness that it would fail. It was the result of internal strife amongst children disguised as grown men in power suits and titles.
In what appeared to be the case of one sibling letting the other stick a fork into an outlet while fully knowing what the result would be, CNN+ was launched with the knowledge internally that it would not work. It boggled my mind that executives (so-called leaders that can’t even act as managers at the best of times) would spend both financial and human capital on a doomed venture.
There was to be no learning or glory from such stupidity. They just took years off of the entire talent base that devoted time to building a doomed venture….like spending one’s career building a sandcastle right by the water. Having spent years in consulting, I shouldn’t be surprised at the poor use of capital and human effort in large companies. But there’s a difference between mistakes from acts of ignorance versus stupidity.
I don’t know where the line lies. But the green light on CNN+ seems to err as one of stupidity. Not for trying it out but for green-lighting it knowing it would fail just to prove a point it would fail.
Airbnb’s Push to Standardize Remote Working
Airbnb made headlines with a push toward its remote ‘work from anywhere’ policy. Here’s the podcast episode I listened to get up to speed on it.
What caught my eye was how Airbnb was embracing this policy when travel was opening back up. To put it simply, they are embracing it when it actually matters for the employees.
Embracing remote work during the thick of the pandemic was easy for most companies. It was easy in that many were forced into it, even if they didn’t want to trust their employees. Most companies took the path of fitting in and begrudgingly accepted remote and said all kinds of PR to make themselves look like they gave a damn. As COVID restrictions started easing, many companies reversed their position and started calling employees back.
I’m not saying remote is the only way for a company to operate. That’s not what Airbnb is advocating for either. Instead, their policy is to give control to the employee and let them be the adults they were hired to be.
For most employees, the prospect of being remote during the pandemic was one of safety. But for those who had been working remote in forward-thinking companies pre-pandemic, working remotely was a way to embrace living.
The freedom to work anywhere gives the opportunity to truly visit places and people to build connections. People love talking about empathy or inclusion. But how would anyone ever truly understand those concepts without putting themselves in environments where empathy and inclusion mattered? If that white person leading HR wants to know why inclusion is important, have them live somewhere in Asia for a while and experience what it’s like to have everyone stare at her when she enters a restaurant or be refused service for not speaking the local language. Travel is one way to always put oneself in the position of a minority and that’s a wonderful thing!
Such wonderful opportunities can be unlocked for people and companies through remote working policies. It’s not just that Airbnb will have their employees ‘eat their own cooking’ but it’ll make them better humans the more they travel about and get out of their self-created bubbles.
This time, right when travel is opening back up, is when companies should be embracing remote work and making that a permanent part of their policy if they truly believe in acquiring, developing, and retaining the best talent. It’s amazing to see a 6,000 person company take such a charge.
The story of acquiring talent from anywhere is a common slogan for many remote-only companies. I don’t mean to brush it off, I agree with it 100%. If a company is truly serious about talent and prioritizing talent, then they will look past the local vicinity that surrounds their HQ.
But the really interesting thing has been Airbnb’s intention to open-sourcing one of the hurdles for keeping most companies from embracing the “work from anywhere” (i.e. treating employees like adults) policy: administrative work. The idea is that Airbnb will figure out how to handle all the burdens of payroll, tax, compliance, and legal for their 6,000+ employees and share that knowledge with everyone. There are many remote companies who’ve been operating that way for 10+ years but few (if any) have done it at the size Airbnb is planning to.
Airbnb’s push to not only open sourcing the remote protocols but to use their large position to work with countries to standardize visas for remote workers is truly admirable. This is one-way economies of scale can work to elevate society, not just to cut costs and bump up operating margins by 1%.
Airbnb is taking steps to let their employees be adults by letting them decide what works best for them. Of course, some people will abuse the system. But if the hiring is done right, then that number will be low.
The default modus operandi for people isn’t to be slackers. When truly ambitious talent is brought in, they will go about self-managing and building the systems that work best for them. Having an environment that understands this will only attract others like them. There will always be a few bad apples but a good company doesn’t manage to the lowest common denominator.
Culture: People, Self, Observations
Breathing Through COVID
For the first time in four years, I was forced to do nothing for more than a week. I couldn’t read, write, train, see friends or even go outside. I had COVID to thank for this rare opportunity to do nothing.
It’s something I never would’ve done for myself. I don’t think I ever will in the future either. It was awful not having the energy to even hang on a pull-up bar. My back ached and spasmed as I tried to muster a paragraph in my journal. Reading became impossible as I fell asleep within twenty minutes of focusing on any sort of page.
Unable to do all the things that gave me joy, I was relegated to staring at either the TV screen or the ceiling. There were spurts of time when the drugs kicked in at full-blast (a concoction of cough syrups, Tylenols, and lozenges at once) when I could muster up the energy to chat with my fellow inmate. Lucky for me, my partner got COVID from me so we were two sick peas in the sofa-pod—renamed the Blanket Fort.
It was during one of these conversations that my partner looked at me and said she was so happy to see me enjoying myself. Yes, a part of me was miserable because I wasn’t able to do any of the training, writing, and reading I so loved.
But I had come to accept there was nothing I could do. I had given in to becoming a couch potato. I was the being in the trademark “Elephant Pants”—the ones everyone gets on a trip to Southeast Asia—binging through seasons of a Michael Shur sitcom. Did you know he either wrote for and/or created The Office, Parks & Recreation, Brooklyn 99, The Good Place, and some other catchy show I can’t remember?
I hadn’t done anything “productive” in ten days. The near two-week period was the longest gap I had between writing essays, my morning journals, my powerlifting training, and novel writing.
I stopped doing anything to better myself. All except the rest my body needed to fight off the disease. As it turned out, doing nothing was what I had to do so I could go about doing all the others things I did to grow.
That was the purpose to my starchy state. I was going to vegetate and stew in my couch with such perfection and take as many naps as possible to accelerate my recovery. I was determined to not do anything so I could do everything again with gusto.
The result was laughing at TV shows. It was filled with days cracking jokes with my inmate and genuinely enjoying spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. There were small moments of fright when the reality of not having “done” anything came crashing in. But it wasn’t like the other times.
If I wasn’t incapacitated because of COVID, I would’ve panicked at the fact I lost an hour watching a movie. My bouts with anxiety were so common that my partner started thanking me when I would eat dinner with her. I hated that she had been conditioned to such a state. But it was a testament to how often I went through this cycle of yelling at myself for not working hard enough.
But COVID changed things. The lack of choice and the restrictive nature of the illness put me at peace. My partner and I lay nestled in our blankets, propped up on cushions, and consumed content without any purpose. It was surreal. I didn’t have a care in the world.
What helped to accept the necessity for rest, this period of doing absolutely nothing, was what happened prior to getting COVID. I don’t know where I got COVID from. But it was around the time I returned from a trip abroad. The primary purpose of the trip was a job interview.
It was for a company that I had been speaking with since early March. We had started working together on a part-time basis and the trip to meet the team turned from a co-working situation to a 20-hour marathon of interviews. At the end of it all, we decided to work together and I saw four years of struggling to build a career investing in human capital manifest into a dream opportunity in two intense months.
I had started a premium newsletter after three years of projects because nothing had worked. I threw everything I had against the wall from 400+ job applications for dozens of interviews, 300+ newsletters, 150 podcast episodes, half a dozen consulting gigs that didn't pay much, partnerships that never became anything, and a slew of promises that made me think I had found my break.
The only reason the journey took four years was that for the first three years, I took everything by three-month increments and the big project or opportunity at the time didn’t pan out. I just picked myself back up after each heartbreak and put all my eggs into one basket every single time—I would’ve had more baskets if I had clones.
The last year, 2021, was when I decided I was going to go all-in on writing. It was when I decided I was tired of asking a bunch of VCs, entrepreneurs, or HR people for permission to do the work I thought was essential and I was best qualified for. It was clear to me that none of the people I spoke to “got it.” So, I decided to just write about what I believed was important.
But I had been writing nonstop for three years prior and the adage of “make it and they will come” hadn’t proved true for this period. I was living off of $500 a month, couldn’t apply for credit cards because I had close to no income and the only reason I hadn’t gone to the dentist in three years was because that was going to be a month’s worth of food.
Still, I didn’t believe in paid marketing. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. I continued to email individuals personally, trying to share my work. Most times, I’m talking 95% of the time emailing to people I already knew personally, it didn’t amount to anything. But all it took was one email.
It was one email to someone who I had admired from afar. I sent the person some of the essays I had written in my OMD Journal newsletter after building it for nine months. This individual sent it to the CEO of the company in question and that started the fateful meeting.
When I started OMD Journal, I worked from the moment I woke up to the moment I slept. I used to work 120 hours a week getting paid barely above minimum wage as an accountant. That was easier than the four years I spent getting paid nothing trying to build my dream career.
I wrote seven days a week hoping to one day get to a point where I could earn $15k a year from my newsletter just so I could continue doing the work I thought would help humanity. Now, I have an opportunity where I could earn that in a month and be set up to succeed in the work of human performance. No amount of words will be able to describe to you the vindication and salvation I wish to convey. But when it all came to a close, I didn’t jeer.
I actually thought I would cry. But that didn’t happen. All I felt was calm. I hadn’t been able to take a long breath over these four years. For the first time, I felt a tension lift from my shoulders, my posture broke and I could just sit and breathe. It was a whole new experience I only became aware of because of the sheer amount of tension I had held onto over the years. A kind of tension I didn’t know I even had.
Getting COVID helped me feel all that relaxation. I felt my body smush down into Jello and I let gravity do its thing to pull me into the couch and let myself curl up in relaxation.
It wasn’t that I was done. I was only about to begin. It was merely the end of the beginning. But it was an end I had only dreamed of and strived for with nothing but hope. It was a thin lifeline and I had half the mind in my head that it was do or die. I had burned all ships and there was going to be no point of return.
Thanks to contracting COVID, I finally stopped to take a breath. Ironic isn’t it?