Talk with folks who train horses and they’ll tell you some interesting things about the way a horse’s brain works. First, a horse has a very short memory when it comes to connecting two events, or, rather, connecting cause and effect. Second, a horse tends to remember the way things end, but not much about the way they start.
Since I began working with horses about 15 years ago, I have tried to use these horse tendencies to my advantage. I always offer reinforcement immediately. My rule is a two-second rule. If the horse does something I want it to do, I offer positive reinforcement immediately. If it does something I don’t want it to do, I make sure that the horse knows within the count of two that the behavior is undesirable.
In training sessions, I always make sure that I end with something positive. If I am working on backing up, for example, and the horse has been refusing to do what I ask, I never, ever end the session with a refusal from the horse. I make sure that the horse gives me something. Even the smallest of steps in the right direction gives me a chance to reward the horse and end the session on a positive note. The horse is then prone to remember that training is good because it ended good, even though the majority of it was bad.
We have found that these techniques are helpful with other inhabitants of the farm as well, namely the dairy goats.
Like most livestock, goats require routine care that can be uncomfortable or even painful for them. Besides the twice-daily milking, they must occasionally receive medication and vaccines, have their hooves trimmed, or even be tattooed. We have employed a simple reward system that helps make the goats very easy to work with in all these instances. It is as follows:
When you are done you get a cookie.
I told you it was simple. Here’s how it works inside the goats brain:
Hey, that guy is coming to get me to take me into that white shed. Cool! I am going to get a cookie! I love cookies! Cookies! Cookies!
I proceed to take the goat to the shed for milking or trimming or vaccinations. It really doesn’t matter, because when I am done I give the goat a cookie. The goat returns to its pen:
I got a cooooookie? I got a cooooookie!
You get the idea.
“But wait,” you say. “I don’t train animals. I don’t even have a dog. What does this have to do with me?”
Imagine my amazement when I discovered that we, as humans, do the exact same thing as horses and goats when it comes to remembering events.
A study was performed in which volunteers were required to undergo two separate experiments in random order. In one experiment, they held their hand in a tub of water that was exactly 57° F for 60 seconds while continually recording with a dial their level of discomfort. In the other experiment, the same volunteers held their hand in the same tub of water for 90 seconds. For the first 60 seconds, the water was held at 57° F, but then secretly raised to 59° F over the last 30 seconds. In this experiment the volunteers also recorded their level of discomfort just as they had on the first.
What were the results? Well, the initial results were exactly as you would expect. In the 60 second experiment, participants recorded a level of discomfort that was moderately high. In the 90 second experiment, they recorded an almost identical level of discomfort, except it lasted for 90 seconds. So, in aggregate, the participants experienced 50% more net discomfort in the 90 second experiment than they did in the 60 second experiment.
But this is where it gets interesting.
Several weeks after the experiments were performed, the participants were told they would have to undergo one of the experiments again, but they could choose which one. When offered the choice, 69% of the participants chose to undergo the 90 second experiment. Why? They said they remembered that the longer experiment was less painful. The fact that the 90 second experiment had ended slightly less uncomfortably than the 60 second experiment made a large majority of the participants remember the entire event as less painful.
So if perception is in fact reality, we humans have brains that at least in some ways work just like our animal companions'. Kissing a booboo makes it go away, a lollipop from the doctor makes a shot hurt less, and all is well that ends well.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
You Never Know Who’s Going to Buy an RV
My friend Matt is a dude. Not the kind of dude who tucks his jeans into his boots or wears a straw hat to a horse show in the middle of February. Matt is the kind of dude you might find sitting on a Southern California beach, soaking wet and covered in sand with a surfboard at his side; or maybe in line for the chair lift at one of Utah’s great ski resorts, wearing a classic tuque with the newest flavor of snowboard strapped to his feet.
If a toy has been made that glides, rolls, skims, jumps, peddles, paddles or slides, Matt has owned at least two.
And Matt is generous. In the almost two decades we have known each other, I have been dragged behind his boat, ridden his motorcycles, and borrowed his snow shoes a dozen times or more. For several years, Matt even kept a beautiful wooden canoe and two paddles not so subtly hidden in the main stairwell at his office so that anyone who wanted to could enjoy a paddle around the small decorative pond just outside the cafeteria.
In short, Matt is one fun guy to hang out with.
But don’t think Matt is the classic slacker. He isn’t. He is a well-educated, highly-skilled engineer and businessman who has made a fine living in the software industry. This is where the RV comes in.
In 1997, Matt and I were both working for a small software company when it was purchased by a much larger company headquartered in Japan. As part of the acquisition, the executives at our company arranged for a certain amount of money from the purchase to be set aside for the employees. Each employee got a certain amount of this “start happy” money based on tenure, position and current salary. Because Matt had been at the company for several years and was an integral member of the management team, he started quite a bit happier than most of us. With his windfall cash, Matt decided to top off his toy collection with a piece of equipment he had wanted for some time: a motor home.
After a few weeks of investigation and research, Matt and his wife got up on a beautiful Saturday morning and drove to the RV dealership just a few miles up the interstate from where they lived, fully intending to buy a motor home; a very nice motor home; a very expensive motor home; with cash.
They were in every way a salesman’s dream that day, with one exception: they didn’t look the part.
I can picture what they must have looked like that morning. Matt was probably wearing leather sandals and some faded khaki cargo shorts, topped off with a souvenir t-shirt from a recent mountain bike rally, road race, or one of the local micro-breweries; his not long but longish dark, wavy hair and scruffy beard making him look even younger than he was. His wife certainly matched him in attire as they both walked onto the RV dealership lot with a certain casual, “just looking around” demeanor.
For two hours they walked in and out of RVs, trying to decide exactly which one they liked best, while one of the salesmen occasionally trotted by and asked “How ya doin’?” or “Ya doin’ alright?” Not once did the salesman ask them what they were looking for or if he might be of assistance. Not once did he acknowledge that they just might be two people who would, in fact, buy an RV. He was too busy with customers who, by his assessment, were more likely to be buying. In fact, in the two hours they were at the dealership, no one even bothered to introduce themselves or ask them their names.
So Matt and his wife did exactly what most of us at some point in our lives have wished we had done, but didn’t. They got in their car, drove 30 miles to the next nearest RV dealership and bought their new motor home. When he got home that evening, Matt called the inattentive salesman from the first dealership and told him exactly what he had done and why he did it.
As someone who makes a living as a salesperson, I can tell you that the salesman who got that call was sick for days thinking about what he missed through his poor judgment and inattention.
Since the day he recounted it to me, I have turned Matt’s experience into a life motto. In both my professional and personal life. I try to carefully examine the manner in which I judge people based on their outward appearance or demeanor.
Have I missed making a new friend because someone didn’t fit into my rigid definition of friend?
Have I mistreated a stranger because they were too different from me?
Have I lost a business opportunity by assuming that the person on the other end of an email or phone call just wasn’t the kind of customer I was looking for?
When I catch myself making these kinds of decisions, I stop and remember my friend Matt at the RV dealership on that bright Saturday morning . . .
. . . and I remind myself that you just never know who’s going to buy an RV.
If a toy has been made that glides, rolls, skims, jumps, peddles, paddles or slides, Matt has owned at least two.
And Matt is generous. In the almost two decades we have known each other, I have been dragged behind his boat, ridden his motorcycles, and borrowed his snow shoes a dozen times or more. For several years, Matt even kept a beautiful wooden canoe and two paddles not so subtly hidden in the main stairwell at his office so that anyone who wanted to could enjoy a paddle around the small decorative pond just outside the cafeteria.
In short, Matt is one fun guy to hang out with.
But don’t think Matt is the classic slacker. He isn’t. He is a well-educated, highly-skilled engineer and businessman who has made a fine living in the software industry. This is where the RV comes in.
In 1997, Matt and I were both working for a small software company when it was purchased by a much larger company headquartered in Japan. As part of the acquisition, the executives at our company arranged for a certain amount of money from the purchase to be set aside for the employees. Each employee got a certain amount of this “start happy” money based on tenure, position and current salary. Because Matt had been at the company for several years and was an integral member of the management team, he started quite a bit happier than most of us. With his windfall cash, Matt decided to top off his toy collection with a piece of equipment he had wanted for some time: a motor home.
After a few weeks of investigation and research, Matt and his wife got up on a beautiful Saturday morning and drove to the RV dealership just a few miles up the interstate from where they lived, fully intending to buy a motor home; a very nice motor home; a very expensive motor home; with cash.
They were in every way a salesman’s dream that day, with one exception: they didn’t look the part.
I can picture what they must have looked like that morning. Matt was probably wearing leather sandals and some faded khaki cargo shorts, topped off with a souvenir t-shirt from a recent mountain bike rally, road race, or one of the local micro-breweries; his not long but longish dark, wavy hair and scruffy beard making him look even younger than he was. His wife certainly matched him in attire as they both walked onto the RV dealership lot with a certain casual, “just looking around” demeanor.
For two hours they walked in and out of RVs, trying to decide exactly which one they liked best, while one of the salesmen occasionally trotted by and asked “How ya doin’?” or “Ya doin’ alright?” Not once did the salesman ask them what they were looking for or if he might be of assistance. Not once did he acknowledge that they just might be two people who would, in fact, buy an RV. He was too busy with customers who, by his assessment, were more likely to be buying. In fact, in the two hours they were at the dealership, no one even bothered to introduce themselves or ask them their names.
So Matt and his wife did exactly what most of us at some point in our lives have wished we had done, but didn’t. They got in their car, drove 30 miles to the next nearest RV dealership and bought their new motor home. When he got home that evening, Matt called the inattentive salesman from the first dealership and told him exactly what he had done and why he did it.
As someone who makes a living as a salesperson, I can tell you that the salesman who got that call was sick for days thinking about what he missed through his poor judgment and inattention.
Since the day he recounted it to me, I have turned Matt’s experience into a life motto. In both my professional and personal life. I try to carefully examine the manner in which I judge people based on their outward appearance or demeanor.
Have I missed making a new friend because someone didn’t fit into my rigid definition of friend?
Have I mistreated a stranger because they were too different from me?
Have I lost a business opportunity by assuming that the person on the other end of an email or phone call just wasn’t the kind of customer I was looking for?
When I catch myself making these kinds of decisions, I stop and remember my friend Matt at the RV dealership on that bright Saturday morning . . .
. . . and I remind myself that you just never know who’s going to buy an RV.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
It Tastes Like Milk
A man sits down in a diner. “What's the special?” he asks the waiter.
“Tongue sandwich,” the waiter replies.
“That’s disgusting!” says the man. “I could never eat anything that came out of an animal’s mouth!”
“What’ll you have then?” asks the waiter.
The man shrugs and answers, “Just give me a couple eggs over easy.”
Like the man in the diner, all of us make judgments about the way things are that seem completely rational to us. We hold on to these ideas for long periods of our lives, believing they prevent us from making bad decisions or having uncomfortable experiences. In some cases we guard them like valuable treasures that must be protected at all cost. But very frequently, we are wrong. Our judgments are often based on something other than reality, whether upbringing, culture, fear, past experiences or some other seemingly compelling yet inaccurate standard.
So what should we do about it?
In my family, when we tell people we raise dairy goats, almost without exception they begin asking a series of questions that to them must seem completely reasonable, but to us have become an inside joke.
We grin at the first question:
“Dairy goats? What do you do with dairy goats?”
“We milk them.”
Then we have to giggle at the inevitable second question :
“What do you do with the milk?”
“We drink it.”
The third question is always the same:
“Really? What does it taste like?”
“It tastes like milk.”
But no matter how many times we go through this exercise with some newly curious visitor to the farm, we find most people cannot quite understand what we are telling them. They carry with them ideas that have lead them to form unfounded conclusions about milk. They believe milk from a goat must taste like something other than the milk they get from the store. It must be goatier or farmier or non-real-milkier than real milk. Why? I have no idea. But I can tell you that before we started raising dairy goats, we each went through this exact same process.
So, as is almost always the case, we have to sit them down, put a glass in front of them, take a bottle from the fridge, and pour them some milk - goat milk.
They raise it to their mouth then set it down without tasting it. “What does it taste like?”
“It tastes like milk!” we insist.
“OK.” They pick the glass up again and smell it. “Hmmm?”
Finally, after some persistent prodding, they causally shrug and they drink it.
“Hey!” they proclaim licking their lips, “It tastes like milk!”
In doing so they abandon the ignorance that just a few minutes ago had them convinced that milk from a goat didn’t, couldn’t and absolutely would not taste like milk.
“Tongue sandwich,” the waiter replies.
“That’s disgusting!” says the man. “I could never eat anything that came out of an animal’s mouth!”
“What’ll you have then?” asks the waiter.
The man shrugs and answers, “Just give me a couple eggs over easy.”
Like the man in the diner, all of us make judgments about the way things are that seem completely rational to us. We hold on to these ideas for long periods of our lives, believing they prevent us from making bad decisions or having uncomfortable experiences. In some cases we guard them like valuable treasures that must be protected at all cost. But very frequently, we are wrong. Our judgments are often based on something other than reality, whether upbringing, culture, fear, past experiences or some other seemingly compelling yet inaccurate standard.
So what should we do about it?
In my family, when we tell people we raise dairy goats, almost without exception they begin asking a series of questions that to them must seem completely reasonable, but to us have become an inside joke.
We grin at the first question:
“Dairy goats? What do you do with dairy goats?”
“We milk them.”
Then we have to giggle at the inevitable second question :
“What do you do with the milk?”
“We drink it.”
The third question is always the same:
“Really? What does it taste like?”
“It tastes like milk.”
But no matter how many times we go through this exercise with some newly curious visitor to the farm, we find most people cannot quite understand what we are telling them. They carry with them ideas that have lead them to form unfounded conclusions about milk. They believe milk from a goat must taste like something other than the milk they get from the store. It must be goatier or farmier or non-real-milkier than real milk. Why? I have no idea. But I can tell you that before we started raising dairy goats, we each went through this exact same process.
So, as is almost always the case, we have to sit them down, put a glass in front of them, take a bottle from the fridge, and pour them some milk - goat milk.
They raise it to their mouth then set it down without tasting it. “What does it taste like?”
“It tastes like milk!” we insist.
“OK.” They pick the glass up again and smell it. “Hmmm?”
Finally, after some persistent prodding, they causally shrug and they drink it.
“Hey!” they proclaim licking their lips, “It tastes like milk!”
In doing so they abandon the ignorance that just a few minutes ago had them convinced that milk from a goat didn’t, couldn’t and absolutely would not taste like milk.
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