How to Win Friends and Influence People

By JoshPetersel in Josh and the Arts 0 Comment

I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or a grasshopper in front of the fish and said: “Wouldn’t you like to have that?”

How to Win Friends and Influence People is the product of one of my favorite college classes, Introduction to Physics 118. A favorite because I did little more than sit in the back of the lecture and read books. Ninety minutes, twice a week, in the midst of an impossibly busy academic and personal schedule, with nothing to do but read? What an escape!

Sure, title of Dale Carnegie’s book is a bit unnerving. It sounds like a book for insecure antisocialites or perverse masterminds. Though I don’t see why either group wouldn’t appreciate the book, anyway.

I profoundly enjoy the book for its simple yet brilliant insight, captured best, I think, by the quote above. Talk to people, in terms they understand, about their interests. Get what you want. No duh?

Consequently, I highly recommend the book. Seems to taper off and start repeating itself a little towards the end, but overall, it’s easy to read and you’ll feel like a smarter, better person when you’re done.  I’ve got a copy full of highlights of my favorite passages that sits by my bed in New York.  I’ve considered compiling all of highlights into a blog post, but I’d hate to dissuade you from picking up and reading a copy yourself.

Eating the Dinosaur

By JoshPetersel in Josh and the Arts, Josh plays Sports 0 Comment

Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur has taught me some interesting things about football.

On Texas Tech coach Mike Leach:

The Red Raiders play football the way eleven-year-old boys play Xbox: They throw on almost every down, they only punt when the situation is desparate, and they’ll call the same play over and over and over again.

…What’s the secret to his brilliance? [According to Leach,] “There’s two ways to make it more complex for the defense…One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that’s no good because the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays run out of lots of different formations. That way, you don’t have to teach a guy a new thing to do.  You just have to teach him a new place to stand.”

On coach Bill Walsh:

Bill Walsh, the architect of the San Francisco 49ers dynasty…built the West Coast offense on an interesting combination of mathematics and psychology: He realized that any time a team rushed for four yards on the ground, the play was viewed as a success. However, any time a team completed a pass that gained four yards, the defense assumed they had made a successful stop. Walsh understood that the two situations were identical. By viewing the passing game as a variant of the running game, he changed everything about how football is played.

I really enjoyed reading about the evolution of football both as a game and as an organization. I love how individual games can be overwhelmingly affected—if not controlled—by a visionary coach (in baseball, seems as though the most any manager is responsible for is calling for steals and sacrifice bunts). I love that the meta game follows its visionaries and evolves over time, resulting in a game today that utilizes the read option (wildcat!) on offense and zone blitz on defense from a game that originally didn’t even have a forward pass. I loved learning that the West Coast offense has a sound psychological foundation (my old take on it: “That’s stupid. How can that work?4 yard passes aren’t effective.”) And I look forward to the day when the NFL adopts the strategy of largely abandoning the punt.

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Most of the rest of the book is decidedly not about sports (topics range from laughing Germans to Garth Brooks). It’s weird, and random, and I’m not totally sure any of it is connected or even makes sense.  I’d recommend borrowing it from the library. Or reading the football chapter while sitting in the lobby of a Barnes & Noble.

CollegeHumor

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business, Josh surfs the Internet 1 Comment

An interesting case study (could you call it that?) on how a brand and product ages with the passage of time: www.collegehumor.com . Feels like I’ve been a fan for a thousand years—I think my first memory of the site was this video.  Though it’s ironic, and a sign of both my and the site’s age, that I can’t manage to find the on-site version.

CollegeHumor has evolved with time into a much different monster today than it was back then. And with good reason. Streaming video wasn’t really universal—or even all that realistic—back when the website launched in 1999. You couldn’t create content that parodied Facebook before Facebook existed. But that’s not the interesting stuff.

What’s interesting to me is that CollegeHumor is very slowly and sneakily becoming less and less of a college-based humor website. For now, much of the content still applies to collegiates.  But if you look closely, you’d notice that much of site’s original content—video series such as “Hardly Working,” “Full Benefits,” “Phantom of the Office,” and even their (arguably) most popular series, “Jake and Amir”—are all office-based comedies.

CollegeHumor is (or at least, soon will be) faced with a difficult dilemma: the staff is getting old; as good as they’ve been at putting it off, Father Time always manages to make his rounds. Already, you don’t really see the once readily-available vulgar language, drug abuse, or nudity on the site anymore—and it’d be impossible to argue that these aren’t significant facets of collegiate life. In fact, according to their Media Kit, you’re not even allowed to advertise on any pages that feature content of that nature.

What could you do? As CollegeHumor, you couldn’t create classroom-based sketch comedies with a staff that’s probably largely 5+ years removed from being in college, or else you’d fast run into an authenticity problem. You couldn’t cycle your personnel as they age,  or else you’re faced with a staffing nightmare—and plus, you lose out on all the branding and loyalty developed by your current team. Very risky.

For now, the characters, sketches, and content created are all still relatable to anyone in the pre-, current-, and post-collegiate demographics.  But how long until CollegeHumor.com becomes OfficeHumor.com—either in effect, or in execution?

I think CollegeHumor has taken the right path. Keeping old customers is far easier than capturing and nurturing new ones; that’s not rocket science. And for now, that means that the website and content have to age accordingly. I’ll be interested to see if and when the website reaches a true breaking point where it’s largely irrelevant for the current crop of collegiates.  The creation of other assets that aren’t tied to a stagnant age demographic, such as sister sites Dorkly.com, TodaysBigThing.com, and BustedTees.com, was an absolute must—and I think they’ve managed to successfully leverage the popularity of CollegeHumor into the development of the rest of the CH Media product portfolio.

Eleven may face a similar predicament in the near future / today / last year. Does the magazine grow up with its editors? Stay tuned.

Fantasy Baseball Champion

By JoshPetersel in Josh plays Sports 1 Comment

Add this one to my legacy: Fantasy Baseball Champion.

And in the event that the link breaks down, text copied below.

Fantasy Baseball Champ is crowned!

Congratulations to Josh Petersel as he is crowned the first ever Posters Series Champion for winning our In-House Fantasy Baseball Playoffs

The players Josh rode to the championship were highlighted by Nelson Cruz, Tim Lincecum, Cole Hamels, and Evan Longoria.

As champion, Josh receives

1) limo ride to and from an STL Blues game along with 4 tickets for the game.

2) trip for 2 to Vegas

3) team name engraved into the bar trophy.

Congratulations Josh and we hope to see everyone competing again next year!

I’d like to thank all my pals who gave help and advice along the way.  I’ve got a heaping bar tab waiting for you.  I want to thank my mom, my dad, my kids, God, Morgan Freeman, and Yahoo! Sports; without your undying love, support, and inspiration such a feat would not have been possible.

Acceptance speeches are silly.  Trips to Vegas, however, are serious business.

Guest Posts

By JoshPetersel in Josh on Josh 0 Comment

I’ve decided (rather arbitrarily) that the best way to to improve the quality and legitimacy of this blog / make something interesting happen / in all likelihood lampoon myself / do the coolest shit possible would be to have a few friends write up a guest post for my blog.  I’ll be sending some emails out over the next few days, but consider this post a cordial invitation for you to join in on the fun.  No real rules except that you have to be funny or a total badass.  Email me at josh@elevenmusicmag.com or leave a comment below.

Redbox

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

I read recently that Redbox is planning on introducing Video Game rentals to its kiosks.

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the Redbox business model: Rent a movie for $1/night, put kiosks  in high-traffic locations to generate impulse buys.  And in all likelihood, bank on drunken fools to lose the disc before even getting home to watch the movie and charging them like $50 a pop (but hey, we all still love you, Danny).

Why this fails: the system doesn’t scale.  Movies, purportedly, you can watch in a single night.  The barter when I pick out my Redbox movie is only for a buck.  Videogames take a long, long time to complete. (Unless we’re talking Super Mario World.  I can actually do this in under 20 minutes.) Most modern games would take weeks for anyone with school or a day job.  And then, on top of that, Redbox plans on charging $2/night.  You’ve just gone from a $1 impulse to a $25 investment.

Here’s a curious idea, though: What if, anticipating that videogames will take twice as long to return, Redbox charged half as much? $4 for a week or so of play, maybe I could stomach.  Maybe further, I’m more likely to forget about the game for an extra twenty seven days while charges continue to pile.

Steelers & Tecmo Super Bowl

By JoshPetersel in Josh plays Sports 1 Comment

 

I’m a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan. There’s a great reason why: Rod Woodson.

Once upon a time, I was little. And owned a Super Nintendo, and with that a game called Tecmo Super Bowl. Though predecessor Tecmo Bowl’s Bo Jackson gets most of the internet fame, Pittsburgh Steeler Rod Woodson possessed similar ability in the Super Nintendo counterpart. He was fast, and great at returning kickoffs. So I always played as the Steelers.  As such, when the time came around for me to start following real professional football, who was I going to root for? The Jets?

Some thoughts from my recent brush with Steeler Nation and Heinz Field.

The bad:

  • How are there modern scoreboards that aren’t equipped with an unending waterfall of statistics? At Heinz, it’s difficult to tell what down it is. Downright impossible to check on scores from around the league. Forget about listing individual stats for fantasy purposes. I shouldn’t have to check my smartphone for that junk.
  • Mom puts it eloquently, “You know what’s hard about this? They don’t have the  yellow lines on the field.” Which I thought was cute. Relatedly: I will never, ever understand the logic of the chain system referees to check for ball placement and close first downs. Aren’t first downs just arbitrarily determined by wherever the guy in back drops his length of the chain first, leaving enough room or not enough slack for the ball to reach the first down marker? Can coaches challenge this?
  • Nobody walked around selling concessions the entire game. I don’t know if this was such a bad thing—I’m not big into stadium snacks after my obligatory hotdog and diet coke before sitting down.  Just thought it was interesting.

The good:

  • Downtown Pittsburgh is crazy on gameday.  Everyone—EVERYONE—is wearing a Steelers jersey. I’m told this phenomenon actually typically starts on Fridays, even though games are on Sunday. Are the Steelers more popular than The Beatles?
  • Good-er: Maybe 95% of the Pittsburghians fans wear a black (home) jersey.  Even the Steelers’ 3rd Jersey is black & gold in color.  Everyone wears black and gold.  The result is overwhelming—for opposing teams, and for any poor fans who aren’t part of the tribe yet. It’s as if you’ve got to buy a jersey as a prerequisite for buying a ticket.  On the other hand, the Mets seem to have twelve different jersey colors—I’ve at least seen orange, bright blue, black, grey, white, and pinstripe—and I feel like the Islanders come out with another set of jerseys every second year.  As a result, I’m just as comfortable showing up to an Islanders game wearing only an Isles hat to show team pride.  But I wouldn’t dare come within ten miles of Heinz Field without my Steeler threads.
  • The Steelers managed to go an entire game without some stupid giveaway, freebie, anything.  No bouncy girls frolicking around.  No Pepsi Party Patrol shooting t-shirts into the stands with a laser-guided cannon or a tommy gun.  No Play-MatchGame-and-Win-a-$20-HomeDepot-Giftcard TV timeout games. No kiss cam. Just football.  And when we needed a distraction during halftime, Pop Warner football.  The message: If football isn’t enough to keep you entertained during a football game, go home.  I was proud.

Ultimatley, what I’d do if I owned a sports team:

  1. Own a color (scheme).  You’re not caught dead in downtown Pittsburgh without wearing black & gold. Or anywhere around Indiana University without wearing crimson on gameday. Different variations are okay, but they can’t throw off the whole theme. Everyone wearing black and gold was a part of Steeler Nation—something greater than a stadium crowd on Sunday.
  2. For that matter, avoid orange.  The Islanders, Mets, Knicks, Bengals, Browns, Broncos, Bears, Orioles, Tigers, Bobcats, Oilers. The San Francisco Giants, and maybe the Philadelphia Flyers, are the only decent clubs of the bunch. I’d rather try my luck with picking up a color all to myself.  You can spot Yankees Blue, Packers Green, or Vikings Purple from a mile away.
  3. Embrace the Fantasy Sports generation.  Give the fan every stat, all the time.  Give him no reason to check my phone for updates after an incomplete pass. Could you somehow reward him for drafting players on the local club? Hell, let him do his draft at the stadium! (Related: <a title=”The Post in Maplewood, St. Louis does all of this.  They kill it.)

I can’t wait to go back.

Airports

By JoshPetersel in Josh for Business 0 Comment

I travel a lot. Most recently, a weekend trip to Las Vegas to reconvene with the college guys. It was a three-day, two-night trip, but I didn’t have any luggage big enough to carry a suit yet small enough to fit carry-on.

I really don’t like being stuck and waiting around. (In fact, I’m sure my penchant for line cutting is fairly well documented.) Sometimes, it’s unavoidable. Good luck sorting through the trainwreck disaster they call airport security (we couldn’t call it a “planewreck disaster,” could we, TSA?). And the last ten minutes of sitting in the plane while it’s taxiing are totally unbearable.

Sometimes, maybe, the wait can be camouflaged.

I’m consistently delighted whenever I arrive at baggage claim and my bags are already there, ready for me to go. This happens…never. Maybe “consistently” was the wrong word. I doubt very much that we can make the baggage people work faster. It’s a bottleneck, much like forcing every passenger to remove their shoes, belts, and laptops.

Here’s an idea, perhaps: Why not design your airport so that it takes 15 minutes longer for me to walk to the baggage claim area?

  1. Walking, moving, progressing forward is not the same (and not nearly as bad) as waiting and standing still. The lady behind the counter announces “now boarding rows 1-6,” and folks jump out of their chairs to get in the next line. Passengers from rows 7-12 even start to shuffle into jockeying position for the next call. Progress. People like that. Why? The plane’s not going to take off any sooner. Doesn’t matter. Forward motion. (An abstract example: think about any website that has a loading screen, and how pleasing it is to watch the little bar progress from 0 to 100%.)
  2. It’s going to take just as long to get out to the street from the airplane, though more time is spent walking than waiting. What are you going to do? Complain about the airport because it’s too huge? Some nerve it has! If you gripe about anything, maybe it’s about indulging in that one last doughnut.  More likely, you just move.
  3. Ta-da! There are your bags, already there for you on the carousel. You’re ready to hit the streets.  Didn’t even have to wait a minute.