The Writers Coin

Ever have a tough time making a decision? Well, you’re not alone.

At one point or another, we all have tough decisions to make. Some of us struggle with potentially making the wrong decision. Some of us fear we’ll regret whatever decision we make. And still others get frozen up and never make a decision at all.

Myself? I’m the type of person that does way too much research into something and then takes all that data and applies a very unscientific method: the gut check. I figure I’ve done all the research and applied as much logic as I can, and now it’s time to just pick something based on how I “feel.”

I did this when I bought my new phone a few months ago and M and I did this when we finally bought our new place.

But there’s another way of doing it that I’ve been playing with recently, all thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker, What College Rankings Really Tell Us. Gladwell focuses most of his attention on how universities get ranked by US News & World Report and how subjective and potentially misleading these rankings are.

Especially when so many people use them as a guide to figuring out which schools are the “best.”

My Decision

It got me thinking about a decision I’m currently trying to make.

I want a new netbook and I’m trying to make up my mind on which of these three choices to settle on:

• Keep the one I have now
• Buy a Mac Air
• Buy HP’s DM1Z

I’ll spare you all the pros and cons of each of these, but suffice to say that the first choice is the cheapest (no spending), the Mac Air is the most expensive (by far), and the third one feels like a nice middle ground.

I’ve done extensive research and I know what I want to do, but I figured I would run this decision through a ranking system and see what it shows. Honestly, I was simply looking for validation for my gut decision to buy the HP DM1Z.

Here’s what my experiment with rankings told me:

I should buy the HP DM1Z.

The first thing I did was rank each one of these machines on a one to three scale on a series of seven qualities (Price, Portability, Design, Lifetime Use, Cool Factor, Power, Battery). One being the best and three being the worst. Then I aggregated all the numbers and Excel spit out what I already knew: the Mac Air and the DM1Z were the winners.

The problem was, they were in a dead tie.

Gladwell’s article has these great moments where a small tweak to the weighting of the rankings completely change the end result. I was looking for some of these unexpected results, so I started doing some weighting.

Which qualities do I think are most important? By giving price a higher value (35%) vs design (5%), I got new results:

HP’s machine leaped to the front of the pack and the Mac Air dropped. Giving price a heavier weighting did the Mac Air in, especially since I dropped the value of design, where it clearly had an edge in my rankings (it’s by far the coolest machine out there).

I decided to simplify things a little and cut down the things I ranked to four (Price, Design, Lifetime Use, and Battery) and see if that would do anything dramatic. Without weighting these, this is what I got:

Nothing new here. What if I weighted just these four qualities?

Now the Mac Air is really getting penalized for the price and it can’t make up the ground anywhere else. Why? Because I just don’t care that much about the areas where the Mac Air stands out (even though it’s way cooler than the other two). The design is impressive, for sure, but not impressive enough for me to overcome the massive price gap between the machines.

You’re talking to a guy who ate the same sandwich for years to save money.

Finally, in an effort to artificially create a “Gladwell moment,” I weighted design 50% and price 10% (the Bizarro Me) and here’s what I got:

Sorry Mac Air, the best I could do for you—even by trying to manipulate the results—was a tie.

This is an easy call.

P.S. I created a spreadsheet that I’m tweaking that I’m thinking of sharing. It allows you to type in three things you’re trying to decide on and then gives you a place to rank and weight them to tweak your results. Anyone out there interested in this or should I stop spending time on it?

Image by GDS Infographics

• Most Likely to Succeed, by Malcolm Gladwell: I first heard about this article on The Simple Dollar, but I wanted to wait until my issue of the magazine showed up in the mail (I guess I’m not ready for a Kindle just yet…). Anyway, this is an engrossing look at education and its “quarterback problem.” Why does this appeal to me? I’m intrigued in how one teacher can be considered “better” than another and because I’m obsessed with the backup-quarterback position in the NFL. That jump from college football to the NFL is one that I love reading about. So if you’re a teacher or you love football (or if you’re both like me), this one is right up your alley. This is really really good stuff.
• How Are Retirees Losing 50% of Their Portfolio? Check this one out over at GenXFinance. I was also wondering this very same question because I’ve heard a lot of people talking about it. If you’re near retirement, why would you have so much of your portfolio in stocks? Because the person handling your money told you to? Or because you wanted to ride the bullish wave we’ve been on since 2002? Either way, it’s a good topic to ponder a little…or a lot, depending on how old you are.

I know I blab a lot about The New Yorker, if it’s worth the cost, and if the fiction is any good. Anyway, I just finished reading Waiting by Amos Oz, and again I have something to say.

First of all, my mom really loves Oz, and she’s recommended I read him a few times, so when I noticed a story of his was featured, I was interested. Then the story started. It’s about this guy who can’t find his wife, basically. The whole story is of him walking around town trying to figure out where she’s at, and the whole time you get this eery feeling that maybe something happened to her.

Do you find out at the end what happened to the wife? Nope. It’s a little frustrating, but it goes right back to my usual complaint about the fiction in the magazine: is it any good? Was I entertained?

Tough to say. The writing was pretty good, although it got annoying how many times they pushed the whole “he’s walking against the wind/against an invisible force.” That seemed very amateurish. But the thing about a story like this being in this magazine is it makes you think that maybe you didn’t “get it.” And maybe I didn’t, but that’s not what I want to know. I’m exploring whether or not I liked the darn thing.

My “quest” to figure out if I liked it is kind of like the story itself: no resolution, just buildup. Did anything happen to his wife? Is it something or nothing? Is the story something or is it nothing? Could be one or the other, I don’t know, but you have to give credit where credit is due: I read through the whole story, never considered shelving it, and I’m on here now devoting a good bit of time and energy talking about it. So it definitely struck a chord with me.

What if the boy that delivered the note were not Arab? What then? Would this story have the same edge? For a minute there I thought perhaps the character was dead and he was a ghost. That would’ve incensed me, by the way.

If there’s one good thing about consistently reading this mag’s fiction, it’s that I’m realizing I probably shouldn’t submit to it anymore. I don’t want my stories to cause these feelings in readers (even if I could) at this point. My goal is to entertain and maybe stimulate thought, and this story just felt like it was part of a bigger piece or something. I hate being left out like that.

I’ve had a subscription to The New Yorker for over a year now, and so far it’s been a mixed bag. For every really good article, there is typically a pretentious, boring short story mixed in and a whole lot of one-sided politics going on. The cartoons and the cover art, for the most part, are pretty entertaining.

This past week, for example, there’s a really great article on the writer Ben Fountain (the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara) and the circuitous path he took to becoming a writer (it took him a LONG time). The article discusses how some creative people (like Picasso) bloom early and things come naturally to them, while others (like Fountain and Cezanne) take a lot longer. It’s a very interesting read written by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink.

And actually, this week’s piece of fiction was pretty good, which was a nice surprise.

My current subscription doesn’t run out until April of next year (I got a sweet deal on what is typically a pretty expensive magazine), but the other day I started wondering what I would do if it ran out tomorrow.

Would I stop reading it or would I renew—and how much would I be willing to pay?

The Magazine

It’s a quality magazine, no doubt about it, but there are some things that drive me crazy:

• The Fiction is pretentious and boring: I like my short stories to sizzle. If I feel like the story is trying too hard to be smart or sound intelligent instead of simply (!) entertaining me, then I lose interest real quick. I’d say 75% of the fiction (one of the main reasons I subscribed in the first place) is like that, and it drives me crazy.
• The politics are not even handed: We’re not talking Fox News or anything—and I realize we’re getting closer and closer to the elections—but I can’t stand it when every single article bashes Republicans and praises Democrats. I never start an article off wondering where it’s going to go, it’s always the same and I don’t like that. Give me a little dissent every once in a while (intelligent, coherent dissent, not Alan Colmes-type babble).
• The Shouts & Murmurs section is a waste of space: I see what they’re trying to do here: humor that is “out there” and “different.” It doesn’t work—ever. Next week David Sedaris will give it a shot and that’s a good sign, but unless someone like him is writing it, I usually skip this section.

Other than that, I love the magazine. It gives me a collection of really interesting articles about all kinds of diverse topics that I would never read about anywhere else, and that’s really valuable to me. This week, for example, there was an article/book review about texting and what it means for the future of language. A few weeks ago there was one on the huge machines that dig tunnels into the ground. Sound boring/weird? It’s not. And the writing is top notch, which is a good thing for someone that calls himself a writer. The more high-quality stuff I read, the higher the odds are that osmosis will suck up some of that goodness and I’ll become a better writer.

I love the book reviews, movie reviews, and the financial page. And one of the best things about it is that it comes to me every week—a weekly reminder of everything that’s going on in the world that is outside my “domain.” This too is very valuable.

The Money

It’s not cheap—the fliers that come in the magazine offer subscriptions as follows:

• 1 Year (47 issues) for $47 ($1/issue)
• 2 Years (94 issues) for $77 (82 cents/issue)

My current deal was a two-year subscription for just $24, which I still have a hard time believing. It was one of those deals where I got an offer in the mail and every time I threw it in the garbage can I kept getting an even sweeter one. As a current subscriber, I can get a much better deal than this advertised one:

• 1 Year (47 issues) for $29.95 (64 cents/issue)
• 2 Years (94 issues) for $49.95 (53 cents/issue)

That’s not the deal that got me into the magazine, but it’s still pretty damn good.

Survey Says…

The politics drive me crazy, but I hope that once the elections are over that will taper down. As for the bad fiction, I think I’ll just follow Stephen King’s advice on that one. Reading bad fiction is not necessarily a bad thing because it’ll keep my own fiction from carrying those qualities that I don’t like. Fingers are crossed.

Now all I have to do is hold out for the best deal. I’ve already started getting things in the mail but I know I have until April, so hopefully they’ll come down quite a bit and we’ll both get what we want.