The Cheat Code

by Brian Wong

  If I spent all day trying to excel at design, I’d be wasting my brainpower. It makes a million times more sense for me to focus on channeling my superpower toward getting potential clients, partners, and investors excited about our business.

  Do what you’re best at. It’s what you love. And better yet, it creates what people call a virtuous cycle. Love it more, do it more—get even better!

  You’ll free up more time to be a better human being. You’ll have more fun. You’ll create excellence. Superpowers are what set the superheroes apart from everyone else. What’s yours?

  In both business and in life, you usually have to be a follower before you can become a leader.

  I learned this when I was young, skipping grades and hanging out with my older brother and his friends. Given that I was generally several years younger than the kids I hung around with, guess who was not always the top dog?

  It wasn’t always easy for me to stay confident in those situations, but it was so much fun hanging with kids who could do things I couldn’t that I lost interest in trying to be the leader of the pack. I accepted myself for the follower I was, and let myself get comfortable with the role I was in.

  When you are comfortable with your place in the food chain, people tend to like you. It’s hard not to like people who like themselves (in a non-smug way). It’s hard not to like people who aren’t trying to prove anything or one-up anybody; it’s easy to be around them. Don’t you often like to be around younger, less accomplished people even more than you do some of your peers, because you don’t see them as competition? They appear more benign and less threatening. And because they don’t take themselves too seriously, they can be so much cooler and relaxed than a lot of people.

  That never changes, no matter what level you rise to. Even so, there’s always at least a little fear factor in being the underdog. People with power and status can intimidate you.

  I learned, though, that even if people are at a lofty level, they are still just people, like you and me.

  When I started Kiip, I had to pitch lots of big honchos at big brands, and it’s hard to walk into those meetings without a few butterflies in your stomach, especially if you’re barely older than some of their kids. Back then, our start-up—like every start-up in the beginning—wasn’t much of anything, and that made me the (very young) CEO of Not Much of Anything, Inc. It turned out that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Sure, some established companies had a big head start on us, and they were always going to be bigger and more experienced. So we said, “Okay, that’s cool—we’ll be David and they can be Goliath.” And we all know how that story ends.

  Because here’s the thing: Since we were smaller, Kiip could be nimble and quick, and do things bigger players in the ad space couldn’t, like building things that didn’t look like the typical ad. Or using entirely different metrics. Or flying in the face of conventional advertising thinking. We could also make our clients feel like they were almost a part of our team—that the level of service we could give them could make us almost an extension of them. We could also show that being early customers of ours was an advantage and a strength for them, because it proved to the world how innovative they were. On the timeline, we were followers, but when it came to innovation, we became leaders.

  The power of being a follower also works in the personal realm. I don’t have to try to walk into a meeting on the eightieth floor of a Manhattan megalith and pretend to be equal to the CEOs twice my age. Instead I’ve learned how to make my youth work for me, as I’ll talk more about in Cheat 20. I realized that being young is great if you look at the positives instead of the negatives. It gives me a fresh perspective that older execs value. They expect me to be innovative and to think outside of the box. Youth is especially valuable in advertising, where practically every brand is obsessed with reaching millennials. Their take was, who better to learn from than a millennial himself?

  Sure, some big-time business titans like to intimidate people, and they’re good at it. But most of them don’t even try. They don’t have to. The majority that I’ve met are the coolest people ever, and you immediately feel comfortable around them. That down-to-earth personality is a big part of why they’re there. It’s a mark of a great leader.

  So when I go into a meeting with any person of power now, I go in with the perspective that I’m just meeting with a normal person, like somebody I’d meet on the subway, and I try to have a normal conversation with him or her. I don’t set myself up for failure by being afraid.

  After all, all the most powerful leaders out there started out as followers—and look where they are now.

  Not that there is such a thing as a humility contest—by definition, humble people wouldn’t enter, would they?

  When somebody once asked Warren Buffett to give a speech on humility—since he’s the de facto winner of the humility contest among billionaires—he said, “Isn’t giving a speech about humility an oxymoron?”

  Too many people work too hard at being humble, and it shows. They’re so demonstrably self-effacing and flattering of others that it just doesn’t ring true. Call it the vanity of humility, the ultimate oxymoron. You know the type I’m talking about here. There’s just something off about them.

  Warren Buffett recently offered a good definition of humility at an event devoted to advice for CEOs under age thirty. He said humility is “knowing the edges of your own competency,” and added that he’d rather be somebody with an IQ of 130 who thinks it’s 125 than somebody with an IQ of 180 who thinks it’s 200.

  My goal in this area is simply to be the kind of person that people like to hang out with. Humility isn’t something you can engineer; it’s just a matter of being true to who you are as you grow. That’s why introspection is so key. You need to keep asking yourself: “Who am I really? Why am I doing the things I do? What makes me feel comfortable in my own skin?”

  Ben Franklin, who polished his introspection to the degree of genius, had a simple habit for self-improvement that inadvertently helped him stay humble: He made a list at the end of the day about things he could have done better. The point of it wasn’t to become more humble, but just to do the things on the list better. That’s why it helped keep a lid on his ego. It reminded him that there are always things he could do better.

  If you can stay introspective, you naturally end up being yourself—and the real you is always very humble.

  There’s a saying, “Be yourself, because everyone else is taken,” and it’s so true. You are yourself, whether you want to be or not.

  When you are yourself, you don’t need to work on being humble, any more than Franklin did. When you achieve the greater goal of being comfortable with yourself, you won’t need to worry about trying to be humble after you achieve some great thing, like all the movie stars who win an award and say, “I’ve never felt more humble.” Humility is not something you actually want to brag about. Real humility comes while you’re still working on your achievement—it’s not an after-the-fact thing. You don’t wake up in the morning and go, “Oh, I’m going to be humble now.” Of course movie stars get humble after a while—they’re fucking rich and famous, so they can afford to be. Or at least afford to act like they are.

  So let’s end this with some Shakespeare: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

  My mom was always there for me when I was a kid, cheering me on at things like my hockey games, giving me advice, and keeping a close eye on how I was interacting with other kids, just to make sure I got started on the right path. A great parent—and a great leader too—is someone who is so in tune with how you’re developing that it’s easy for them to help you make course corrections on the fly. One of the biggest corrections she ever pointed out to me was: “You can’t outsmart everyone. If you try to, you’ll only outsmart yourself.”

  As usual, she was right. She knew I was intelligent—thanks to some good ge
nes from her and my dad, and some hard work of my own—and she realized that smart people tend to overthink things. When we do, we tell ourselves it’s a product of intellect, but it’s really a product of fear, and it’s one of the worst traits you can bring to your work.

  When you do, you usually end up thinking in circles, like the smart character Vizzini in The Princess Bride, who thinks his enemy is trying to poison him with some wine that he puts at each of their table settings. He knows a clever man wouldn’t drink the wine in front of him and would demand to switch glasses, but he also knows his enemy knows that, and so he should therefore not switch glasses. But then he thinks, “Wait, this enemy also knows that”…etc., etc. So he goes around in circles until he arrives at his brilliant conclusion, drinks his wine, and dies.

  The streets of Silicon Valley are littered with people who thought of so many contingency plans and potential scenarios that nothing got done. Part of the problem is that most smart people who are part of this industry got tossed into the mental pressure cooker of academia, where overthinking becomes an art form. But really, since when does success in academia translate into success in the real world?

  So instead of overthinking, why not try overdoing?

  I could go into a long discourse on the exact significance of that advice. But why overthink it?

  Sometimes I start speeches to audiences of very accomplished people who look like they’re older than me—which is easy, since I’m twenty-five and look even younger—with something like, “You’re probably wondering why you’re here listening to a twelve-year-old Asian kid.”

  That self-deprecating line does two things. It says (1) “You guys are cool, and sometimes I wish I was a little older, like you.” And (2) “I’m cool too, and sometimes you probably wish you were a little younger, like me.”

  But don’t worry: You don’t have to be twenty-five to use this cheat. If you know how to use your age to your advantage, there’s no bad age to be.

  That truth gets lost in the tech culture, because there’s a perceived chasm between young people, who grew up in the e-world, and older people, who didn’t.

  Of course, this isn’t just a function of our high-tech world; there’s always been a perceived gulf between old and young, and every generation comes up with a new rendition of it. In the sixties, when the boomers were the kids, it was the culture chasm between the flower children and their World War II–era parents; after that it was the gap between the aging boomers and Gen X, and today it’s the middle-aged Gen Xers versus, well, guys like me.

  John Hayes, the chief marketing officer of American Express (an investor in Kiip), is somebody who bridges the generation gap gracefully and shows other people how. When I met him I thought he was in his late forties, but I just Googled him and learned that he’s sixty, and spent the last year learning how to code for iPhone apps. He gained a lot of respect from his team for being an older guy who can code; in his case, his age works in his favor.

  He’s a guy who knows not only that old dogs can learn new tricks but also that new tricks aren’t the real key to staying current. Recently he said, “Too often we tend to think of change in a very singular mind-set: as technology. But technology is not the root cause—it’s an effect. The real driver of societal change is society itself, not your smartphone.”

  Progress, in other words, has no age—or at least not one that’s particularly relevant. So whatever part of life you’re in, there’s always a way to spin your age to your advantage.

  You learn how little age matters in a microsecond when you touch down at the airport in San Francisco, the world’s petri dish for start-ups. When I go back home to SF after a trip to the real world, still carrying the feeling of being the youngest guy on the planet, it isn’t long before I walk down the street and see somebody I know and think: “Man, here’s a kid who’s five years younger than me that just raised more money than me, and is building ideas that are probably even cooler than mine. And, damn, he’s probably getting more girls too. I’m too old for this shit!”

  Which gets me where? Nowhere. It’s all a matter of perspective, so why worry about it?

  To my investors, the least interesting thing about me is my age. The same days they talk to me, they probably talk to CEOs younger than me—who also have PhDs.

  That doesn’t stop me from spinning my age as a hook to the media, though. As I mention in Cheat 33, when the press mentions me, they usually tag my age. But there’s a pretty obvious shelf life to that hook. They generally tie it to the questionable concept that only young people can understand a young market, but so what? When I’m too old for the youth angle, I’ll start to play the experience card.

  A friend of mine who’s officially an old guy but doesn’t act like it says that he spent the first half of his career lying about how old he was and the second half lying about how young he was. That’s a cheat within a cheat: Don’t act your age. If you act stodgy when you’re old, or silly when you’re young, you’re playing into the hands of negative stereotyping, and aging yourself out of business.

  The other great thing about age is that it tends to naturally put you in different life phases, each of which has advantages. Like a lot of people in their early twenties, I don’t have a family to take care of, so I can stay out all night, grab a 6:00 a.m. flight, and come home whenever. Nobody to tuck in. No garage door left open to worry about.

  Nobody says to me, “You’re a fucking asshole for being intentionally irresponsible, and always putting yourself first.” They say, “Live it up! Enjoy that freedom while you’ve got it.” I’ll take that advice any day.

  But I’ve got buddies who are a little older, and being a dad and a husband is one of their greatest motivators—because you’ll always work a little harder for somebody you love than you will for yourself. Their families are also their emotional anchors and the people they trust most. Some of them even use their kids and nieces and nephews as their primary panel for market research. These guys don’t have to think about dating, or try to impress people, or worry about being lonely. There’s freedom in that too.

  So embrace your age, without acting out the stereotypes. You’ll only have the age you are now once, so you might as well take advantage of it.

  I was once riding a tour bus in the serene Halong Bay area, in northern Vietnam, where scattered rock monoliths rise out of the bay like granite skyscrapers, feeling the wind in my face, listening to the calls of magnificent birds—and trying to ignore the tour guide’s cell phone ringing. Again. And again.

  Finally he turned the phone off and looked at me. “I do not like it,” he sighed. “My girlfriend keeps calling, and I don’t have time to respond.”

  “Which she doesn’t like, right?”

  “Right.”

  I felt his newfound pain. Part of the new e-etiquette is that if you don’t respond to somebody—whether it’s your significant other, your business partner, or a client or customer—in a matter of hours (or minutes, or seconds), you’re blowing them off. So you’re either a slave to your devices or the bad guy. What a shitty choice.

  Like it or not, though, it’s a by-product of the information-rich world we live in today. According to Eric Schmidt, who used to be the CEO of Google, between the beginning of civilization and 2003, humankind created five exabytes, or five quintillion bytes, of information. Now we create that much every two days.

  Or put another way, in just the last two years, 90 percent of all the data that’s ever existed has been generated. More scary stats: Americans absorb twelve hours of information every day outside the office. Office workers spend 28 percent of their time answering email. People send or receive an average of thirty-five texts every day.

  This information overload is causing short-term memory loss, higher stress, and worse health, and it costs the economy a fortune. It’s become such an epidemic that we now even have clever terms for too much shit penetrating your brain—like “infobesity” or “infoxication”—but in plain English it’s c
alled a pain in the ass, and a huge handicap. And it’s not even good for productivity or for our relationships; after all, when we’re so busy responding to texts and emails, when can we find the time to be creative? It turns us into Pavlovian dogs. You know the feeling: The second an email comes in, your blood pressure rises a bit and you think, “Fuck, somebody wants something.” And that makes you both stressed out and resentful.

  So here’s a cheat worth remembering, if you still have any room in your memory: Tune out!

  Stop telling yourself that intelligence is based on knowing what’s happening at this very minute. Stop trying to be in touch with everybody all the time. Don’t feel like you’ve got to notify the world every time you have lunch. All that stuff is like a drug. But like any drug, it can be hard to go cold turkey, and realistically most of us would have a hard time maintaining both our careers and our relationships if we went totally off the grid. The key is to use the information drug only in moderation.

  I’m working on it myself. Even though I fly all the time, I don’t do any communication on flights. On my day off, I don’t take work calls. I permanently turned off email notifications on my phone. I batch my emails and address them only when I actually have the time, so I can at least set the tempo instead of being a slave to other people’s agendas.

  People don’t think about this, but every time they send you a text or email, they’re taking away your time without your permission. It’s a little like they’re barging into your office without an appointment.

  We’re obviously in a new era of mobile communication—which, ironically, is my primary area of business. But that makes me even more attuned to the fact that we need to control it before it controls us. I am in the mobile advertising field, but my mission is to offer people promotions and information about products that people want, and choose, instead of just sticking it in their face.