Mouthwash

/ As a San Francisco resident, in mid-July, you will be reminded that the weather in the city is great. You might also be reminded that SF is actually not that populated of a city! Summer is up and about.

/ Thinking about what traits are most conducive to success when doing something new:

Creativity – able to step outside norms; dream something new

Comfort with risk/novelty – what is new is unknown; the inputs, process, and outputs are unknown; one need be comfortable with walking on unpaved roads

Resilience – new often brings more difficulty so being able to deal with that

Resourcefulness – new requires figuring stuff out vs. consulting manuals

Having vision – this is similar to creativity, but imagining 10 futures and having belief that new things can work and grow

Being committed – if you don’t commit to it who will

/ Thinking out loud about monopolies (when a single company/entity controls an entire product/service, with no competition, and they can set prices however they want)

• I think of monopolies more from the perspective that there is competition in a category…where there is known to be the best product with the majority of the market share, and that product remains superior.

• My life is much easier when there is clearly the best product in a category, where the best is rated on objective measures, and I don’t need to spend any more time than finding that and committing to it for a long time, at least until something changes. I call this idea “Best Practices”.

• Let’s talk through an example, say for mouthwash. You want to find the “Best Practice” mouthwash.

• Of the 100s of things to prioritize in life, say you established that oral health is important to your current and future self on a go-forward basis indefinitely, that oral health is important, and mouthwash is key to that regimen.

• Goal: I would like to find the best mouthwash, prioritizing the effectiveness of the mouthwash, and it will be a product I will take an inelastic pricing view towards (in other words, if I need to stretch my budget to buy a better quality mouthwash, I will). Whatever the price is, if it is the best, that is worth it. The same argument may apply to other items commonly referred to as worth paying for, like a mattress or pair of shoes.

• Then, some research led me here.

• I try my best not to get influenced by a) marketing (doesn’t lead me to the best product inherently), b) other’s opinions (data set is too small in a world of the internet era), c) whatever I find on the store (selection bias).

• I do weigh, to some degree, the collective opinion of dentists and people in dental school because while they may have different beliefs and education, they like teeth and oral health enough to spend a lot of their time studying it, so I can safely believe they, on average, PROBABLY know more than me or the average person about oral health and what is probably best.

• In any event, this product is popularly rated highly, not cheap, and appears by description to achieve my goals.

• Now, we’re in the “try” phase. Purchase, try for a week/month, and evaluate. Subjectively, do I feel it provides value? If yes, I can move on. If I feel something changes or I start collecting data points that something has changed and is no longer the best, you go through the loop again.

• For reference, the regimen includes electric toothbrush (i.e., Sonicare or Oral-B), toothpaste (Pronamel +/- Sensodyne), floss (floss picks > string floss due to convenience even if minor sacrifice on effectiveness), and mouthwash.

• Taking a step back, this is perhaps my reasoning process for selecting the best product in a category. You collect multiple data points from individuals generally inclined to have better nuance/insight/more valuable information than average and then use your judgement to decide what is best, whether that decision is consensus or contrarian (the former being easier to come to a consensus on). I’m sort of clinical about it and try to be.

• What I’ve heard before is “It’s mouthwash, it’s not that serious”.

• My response is essentially that everything is serious; everything matters.

• People’s experiences differ due to randomness, but at least I can maximize my chance of good randomness by being intentional about itClinical about meaningless things makes it pretty easy to apply the framework to things that end up being meaningful.

Tweets / Memes

-VS

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