Choosing a partner for starting a business can sometimes be stressful. It is important to find someone whom you have trust, good communication, shared mindsets, aligned visions and similar worldviews. Previously we spoke about the pros and cons of founding a startup with your best friend, and now we are going to explore the pros and cons of founding a startup with your family.

On a side note, my co-founder is my father and I have experienced the feeling of this is the worst decision Ive ever made and the feeling of this is the best decision Ive ever made. What has helped us move forward is to define and frequently review the roles, responsibilities, and who takes the final decisions on certain domains. Another tip I could share from my experience is that you must identify and address the emotional tensions before moving forward with conversations and decisions, to avoid personal conflict.

So lets see what are the pros of starting up with family:

1.- Common Core Values

Having strong core values becomes a competitive advantage for your business because core values support the vision, shape the culture and define the essence of the companys identity. Most likely youll share strong core values with your family and when you start a business together, the values become stronger giving you an extra edge towards shaping the identity of the company allowing it to run smoothly.

2.- Communication

Communication is key to every good relationship and this is also true for business relationships. Many family members have found a way to communicate effectively, in exactly the way that a businesses could benefit from. However, this is a tricky one because when conversations go the wrong way everything can go to bad places, breaking up relationships and businesses. One of the most important things when founding a business with family, is to address emotional and personal feelings soon to avoid friction and future problems.

3.- Loyalty and Strong Commitment

Building a business requires a lot of commitment in hard times and good times. A great perk of starting a business with your family is that youre more likely to invest extra hours and effort needed to reach your goals. Also the key people are more prone to make sacrifices for the success of the company, which also relates to strong loyalty between the founders, who are more likely to stick together in harsh situations and show the determination to accomplish the shared goals.

4.- Lower Cost Staff

The salaries and wages for staff can be take a big chunk from the companys budget, but luckily for family businesses, the staff is more willing to make financial sacrifices for the sake of the business. It is more likely for family members to accept lower pay than they would get elsewhere, to help the business in the long term or during a cash flow crisis. This can be beneficial for the early stages of a business or even when things are not going as expected.

5.- Appealing for Customers

Customers relationships with businesses are based on trust, and for many customers the fact that the business is family owned is appealing. They understand that strong core values are shared, loyalty and strong commitment drive the decisions, and this translates into building trust for them. Family businesses are more likely to satisfy and understand their customers needs and happy customers drive the business towards success.

6.- Leaving Legacy

Many founders think about the possibility of creating long lasting legacies through the companies we build and when partnering with our family, it becomes a bigger incentive to put our names into that legacy. We create the possibility of making a family legacy that will last for future generations.

Now lets evaluate the other side of the coin and explore the cons of starting up with family:

1.- Conflicts

Businesses can generate situations where conflict arises and when your partners are your family, disputes can mix personal and emotional situations. This creates a lot of friction for the business, slowing down progress and requiring the involved parties to engage in difficult conversations which can last for weeks depending on the situation. It is extremely important to resolve conflicts as soon as possible to avoid future unresolved issues and reduce friction that slows the progress.

2.- Favouritism

Businesses require making decisions with objectiveness and family members can easily forget about this when working together. For example, who gets hired for a role or gets promoted, should be a decision based onwho is more fit to develop the role and take the responsibilities. However, making this decision when family is involved can sometimes be difficult. as favouritism might arise. Another example is when outside employees feel the favouritism and take sides, avoiding offering feedback in fear family members might get offended. A great tool that helps to reduce favouritism, is to use numbers and indicators for making decisions and making sure every employee feels equally comfortable with sharing their thoughts.

3.- Emotional Labour

One of the greatest challenges we face as Founders is the emotional labour we must endure when starting and running a company, dealing with our fears, anxieties, sadness, and stress, which can easily get in our way to reach our goals. When working with family things get a bit more difficult, because there is an additional layer to the emotional labour from the relationship between family members. Achieving peace with this situation requires a lot of effort and patience, but when the work is done results are worth the effort.

4.- Life events

Even though life events occur sometimes without any previous warning, it is important to think about death, divorce and incapacitation, which are situations that could potentially destroy your businesses. Family members and also co-founders often face the risks of enduring those life events. This is why it is important to take some time to discuss the possibilities and define a plan of action for those types of situations.

5.- Generation gaps

In my personal experience this has been one of the hardest things to manage while working with my father. There is a generation gap which sometimes makes our worldviews too different. When starting a business with family, take into consideration that different generations with different experiences choose to take risks and analyze decisions in different ways, which most of the time can raise opposed perspectives and possibly conflicts between family members. A great strategy that has helped us manage the situation is to agree on the methods of evaluating risks and decisions, which should aim to remove any emotional and personal influences.

6.- Power Struggles

It is difficult to separate life and work when someone from your family is your business partner, sometimes family roles can mix with the business roles, leading to a pre-established chain of command which if changed or challenged might raise power struggles. Weve managed those situations by separating and clearly establishing the family relationship with the business relationship. This has not been easy but it pays off in the long run.

If you missed our article onthe pros and cons of founding a startup with your best friend, check it out as well for some more perspective.

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The pros and cons of starting up with family - EU-Startups

On June 17, WashingtonExec will be virtually celebrating the most impactful and innovative C-suite executives in government and industry. These chief officers work in technology, security, data, operations, finance, business and more, excelling on both sides of the government contracting sector. Our team of judges have chosen the finalists for the inaugural Chief Officer Awards, so before we announce the winners during the event, we wanted to get to know the finalists a bit better. This Q&A series highlights their careers, successes, proud professional moments and notable risks.

Lindsay Weissbratten, Siemens Government Technologies

Lindsay Weissbratten is chief human resource officer atSiemens Government Technologies and a finalist in the Public CompanyCHRO Award Category.

What key achievements did you have in 2019?

I joined in August 2019 and have been leading an expansion and enhancement of critical human resources functions for the company through a Focus on You initiative, where we are systematically developing human capital solutions and programming to better serve our workforce based on their feedback through surveys and multiple engagement forums with our CEO. Programming has included items such as revamping onboarding processes and improving new hire orientation, to recognition forums, mentoring, employee development and much more.

Our efforts all tie back to the simple but powerful premise that an employees connection to our company begins on their very first day of work and is continuously reaffirmed through opportunities to grow, learn and be recognized for their contributions to the success of the business.

What has made you successful in your current role?

While hard work and continuous learning have supported my professional growth and development, there is one informal mentor that I can point to throughout my career that has been pivotal in providing me with guidance. As one of my former managers, she was also an individual who led by example. I remain in touch with her today and know she is always in my corner.

In addition to her, my parents have always believed in me. Their confidence in me translated later in life to confidence I grew within myself to achieve goals I set out for.

What was a turning point or inflection point in your career?

From a personal perspective, roughly four years ago, we almost lost our youngest child due to a life-threatening food allergy. Twice in one week. It was the kind of experience that shakes you to your core and leaves you numb.

When I have been faced with hardship, I try to pause and find the positive in it. While this was a personal experience, having witnessed the fragility of life has impacted me professionally as a leader. In todays world, the demands are never ending. They will always be there and it is important to work to your fullest potential.

However, part of working to your fullest potential is ensuring that life does not pass you by without your participation. One of my more senior employees reached out to me in a prior role and explained how important it is to the future generation to see strong leaders value family and do their best to balance success.

I try to remind myself of the importance of leading by example and how I can help my staff and others be the best they can be professionally and personally through my own actions.

What are you most proud of having been a part of in your current organization?

This spring, our team has been involved in helping the Army retrofit locations into hospitals to serve communities in need due to the coronavirus pandemic. I am proud to be a part of Siemens and the amazing things the company is doing at one of the most unique times in history. From health care infrastructure, to the development of antibody testing, we are truly making a difference when it matters the most.

One of our key strategic goals at SGT is ensuring we have a dedicated focus on being a good neighbor in the communities where our employees work and live and encourage them to leverage our Volunteer Time Off Program.

This spring, being a good neighbor took on a whole new meaning. Our employees have been giving back to their communities through activities such as making masks, printing face shields on 3D printers, donating plasma, caring for the elderly to volunteering at food banks.

Whatareyour primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?

When I think about serving an organization as an HR leader, Im reminded about our unique ability to navigate the business perspective and the priorities and challenges of an organization while also having the ability to influence the future of the company through successful talent management programming.

With successful human capital leadership, HR has the ability to impact the daily lives of the workforce, enhance job satisfaction and propel the organizations productivity and success. It is a wonderful thing to know that our employees make our nation stronger, more effective and more efficient. From an HR perspective, helping to recruit top talent and ensure we maintain healthy turnover is critical to our success in serving government customers.

Whats the biggest professional risk youve ever taken?

After more than a decade with a well-known government contracting firm in the area, I decided to take a leap of faith and exit the organization as part of a spinoff. I went from an HR staff of one in 17 days to a team of 20, led the rebuilding and design of all of our policies, procedures, systems and programming while doubling our headcount internationally in the first four months.

In addition, on our very first day as a standalone organization, we acquired another company that I was charged with helping to fold in. I remember telling my team this will be the experience of a lifetime and like no other job theyve ever had.

This was a time when I left the comfort and low-risk environment I had been a part of for over a decade for what many saw was a huge risk. There were so many unknowns and uncertainty. I have zero regrets and have grown so much since then as an individual, as a leader and as a HR professional.

The new experiences Ive gained have changed me as a person and as a leader and helped broaden my potential impact for the organizations I have worked for since then.

Looking back at your career, what are you most proud of?

During one of my positions at General Dynamics, I was charged with leading employee engagement and development. My team and I launched a resource for our employees called Dynamic Development. It was an amazing resource ahead of its time and best practices that provided employees with a holistic view of their development from traditional job changes to on the job development to emotional intelligence development.

It tied our recruitment, compensation ladder system and learning programs together in one place with exercises and resources embedded throughout that were tailored and customized specifically for our workforce. I worked closely with a vendor who helped us embed a behavioral competency tool within our intranet and later modeled our work creation into future offerings for their customers, even a decade-plus later.

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Chief Officer Awards Finalist Lindsay Weissbratten: 'Faced with Hardship, I Try to Pause and Find the Positive' - WashingtonExec

Harbor High holds drive-through graduation for its alternative school students on June 3, 2020 at its White Lake campus Wochit

High school diplomas were collected by 101 unconventional graduates and one proud, grieving mother on Wednesday night in the Huron Valley School district.

Everything about the 2020 Harbor High School and adult education commencement was unusual in this year of coronavirus.

In a drive-through ceremony, students popped out of their vehicles to pick up their diplomas from a table and stepped on to an outdoor stage while only the family they could fit in the car clapped and cheered.

Also applauding were school faculty spaced six feet apart and who mourned the hugs they couldnt give to their students whose paths to graduation were the most noteworthy of all, overcoming obstacles that even a pandemic could not overshadow.

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Every single one of the kids in the alternative high school and adult ed are overcoming something difficult, usually loss or adversity in their personal life that is really hard for them, Ben Dowker, director of the alternative high school and adult education for Huron Valley, said. They didnt think they were going to make it (to graduation).

One of the graduates honored Wednesday didnt make it to the stage, but his mother did in an exceptionally emotional moment.

Joe Wagner, 18, completed the necessary coursework for his diploma from Harbor High School last September. One day later, he was crossing Highland Road in White Lake when he was struck by a vehicle and died.

Christy Wagnerclutched her sons diploma as well as the Courage Award which staff bestowed upon Joe when she stepped on to the commencement stage.

Christy Wagner of Milford accepted her son Joe Wagner's diploma during Harbor High's commencement on June 3, 2020. Joe Wagner was killed in an accident last September, a day after he completed his coursework.(Photo: Courtesy of Huron Valley Schools)

It was bittersweet, the Milford mom said. Of course I felt sad that he wasnt here to accept all this, but me and my husband are honored to accept it for him. We promised we would always celebrate him like he is here.

Joe, who worked full-time for a construction firm and had overcome many personal struggles to achieve his diploma, was all about family, Christy said.He was also survived by his father, Larry, and his younger brother, Connor.

The motto that it takes a village to raise a child rings true to Christy, who said Joes village included Dowker and Karen Gerard, Harbor High teacher and adult ed student advisor, who she said feels like family to her.

Christysaid she plans to take her sons graduation cap to Dowker and Gerard to sign. At the graduation, she released a balloon signed by the family.

Larry and Christy Wagner hold a picture of their late son, Joe and his high school diploma on June 3, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy of the Wagner family)

Joe, who loved to be the center of attention, would have loved the fanfare.

I left there feeling like he accomplished something and we helped him accomplish it, she said. Joe had no shame in his game, he would have hammed it up and let them know he was there, and his personality would have come out for sure.

Jessica Worden, 35, finally crossed the finish line at the Huron Valley adult ed commencement, surmounting obstacles that make the pandemic seem like hardly a blip on her lifes radar.

The Waterford resident dropped out of school when she was 17 to raise her sisters baby in order to keep him from going into foster care. She had custody of her nephew for the next decade.

In 2016, Jessica and her mother, Jena Marek, enrolled in the Huron Valley adult ed program to finish their high school education together, but Jessica was foiled by a dog bite, which was a blessing in disguise.

The bite sustained from her Great Dane when she got between it and another dog resulted in 28 stitches and damaged nerves. While she was being treated at the hospital with her husband Tyg by her side, he suffered cardiac arrest, leading to the discovery of a heart condition for which he is now treated.

In the fall of 2017she enrolled to try again.But two months laterwas called upon to help her brother-in-law, a widower with two young sons, one of whom was discovered to have a brain tumor. Surgery was successful, but tragedy lay ahead.

In May 2018, another nephew was murdered in Pontiac, leading her to spend a great deal of time in court for the trial and leaving her feeling defeated about life and her education.

And then I just gave up for a little bit, because I had already tried three times to go, and my Mom was like, You have to give it one more try, Worden recalled. I felt it wasnt meant for me to go to school anymore. Every time I start, something horrific in my life happens. What more can I take that is going to happen?

Last fall, she dug in again, and then coronavirus arrived in March threatening yet another derailment of her dream.

Jessica Worden celebrates her high school graduation during a commencement ceremony held by Huron Valley Schools on June 3, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy of Huron Valley Schools)

Worden, who is a home healthcare worker and raising nephew Dayvin, could only look in stunned disbelief at the email that said school was closed.

I thought, Oh my God. Seriously? Here we go, its really not meant for me to finish school, she recalled.

But a worldwide pandemic was the one enemy she would finally defeat, and even though the graduation ceremony was way out of the ordinary, she said she wouldnt change it.

With everything I have been through, it was everything and more than I could have asked for, she said. Because I didnt go through school the traditional way, why have a traditional ceremony?

True to form in a life that hasnt been easy, her car was in the shop and she and husband Tyg pulled up to the drive-thru ceremony in a rented 2020 GMC Terrain, with nephew Dayvin, as well as two nieces.

She got out of the car, wearing her cap and tassel adorned with a passage from Proverbs, She is clothed in strength and dignity and she laughs without fear of the future.

Tyg Worden holds wife Jessica Worden, who displays the top of her graduation cap on June 3, 2020.(Photo: Courtesy of Jessica Worden)

In her excitement to get to the stage as Gerard announced her as the adult ed valedictorian, nearly forgot to grab her diploma and carnation from the table until reminded by Dowker.

She recalls proudly the clapping and cheering she received from the staff, the people who had pushed for her, and believed in her even when she didnt believe in herself.

I felt like a star, they absolutely made me feel like a starI felt amazing, she said. I felt like a 30-year goal was accomplished, I felt wonderful. It almost made me feel like everything I had to endure and go through was worth every bit of it.

She reflectedback on 2016, when she had first stepped into the Huron Valley adult ed building in White Lake and told her mother and Gerard that she didnt belong there, that she was too old.

Gerard responded with words that have stayed with her.

She said, Youre never too old, its never too late to go back and finish something, Worden recalled.

Those words, along with gestures like the staff sending her flowers following her husbands heart troubles, when she was again out of school and at the lowest point of her life, or just lending an ear when she needed it, are not forgotten and never will be.

Worden, who recently accepted a job at Fords Livionia transmission plant and plans to attend college to become a social worker, cant wait to return to see the Harbor High staff when it is safe and hug those who helped her succeed.

Gerard looks forward to that day.

I know that good things are in store for them in the future, she said. They showed determination and courage to even walk through the doors of this building to complete their education and by willing to adapt to the current situation, they showed the inner strength they had and I know they will have success in their future because of their ability to do that.

Contact reporter Susan Bromley at sbromley@hometownlife.com or 517-281-2412. Follow her on Twitter @SusanBromley10.

Read or Share this story: https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/milford/2020/06/05/huron-valley-alternative-and-adult-ed-graduates-granted-2020-diplomas/3137246001/

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Abstract

Human technology is characterized by cumulative cultural knowledge gain, yet researchers have limited knowledge of the mix of copying and innovation that maximizes progress. Here, we analyze a unique large-scale dataset originating from collaborative online programming competitions to investigate, in a setting of real-world complexity, how individual differences in innovation, social-information use, and performance generate technological progress. We find that cumulative knowledge gain is primarily driven by pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks flexibly, rather than by pure innovators or habitual copiers. Our study also reveals a key role for prestige in information transfer.

Culture is responsible for the behavioral diversity that has led to our species remarkable adaptability and ecological success (1, 2). At the heart of culture lies social learninglearning influenced by contact with other individuals (3)which is used by an extensive variety of species. Only in humans, however, do we see compelling evidence for the buildup of socially transmitted information over multiple rounds of innovation and social learning, often into complex multicomponent functional solutions, leading to tools, products, and knowledge that no one individual could have invented alone (2, 4, 5).

Strong evidence suggests that individuals should use social learning selectively according to strategies that guide how, what, and under what circumstances they copy others, and when they rely on their own experience (611). Recent studies show that humans exhibit consistent individual differences in the rates of using either social or asocial information in decision-making (1216), with these preferences consistent across time and contexts (13), and linked to personality traits in both adults (17) and children (18). Such individual differences in social-information use have profound implications for the way researchers conceptualize and model social learning. In particular, there has been little research thus far on how variation in learning strategies between and within individuals could affect the processes underlying cumulative cultural evolution.

Here, we analyze a unique large-scale dataset to investigate, in a cumulative cultural evolution setting, whether and how individual differences in learning generate collective progress. The dataset arises from a series of collaborative online programming competitions organized by the MathWorks software company over the course of 14 years (19). Each contest involved participants attempting to craft and improve solutions to a set of NP-complete computer coding challenges (20). Such challenges do not have an exact solution, which allows open-ended improvement, as typically characteristic of cumulative cultural evolution. This exclusive dataset provides a rare opportunity to isolate the causes of technological progress in a setting that approaches real-world complexity.

Complex cultural systems, often characterized by opaque links between cultural traits and payoffs, require individuals to use effective heuristics to guide their learning. One cue thought to be particularly important in human societies is prestige, defined as high status or influence typically related to higher competence in valued domains of activity (21). In complex contexts when direct observation of payoffs is difficult, watching how much other individuals defer to, attend to, or copy a model can provide an efficient proxy for that models information quality (22, 23). Prestige can extend across domains, for example, being perceived as a successful yam grower might still increase the probability that an individuals fishing techniques would be copied (4).

The complex interactions characterizing cumulative cultural evolution provide an ideal context for such prestige bias to emerge. Repeated interactions between individuals in a challenging environment characterized by hard problems allow individuals to create reputations that are used to guide the copying of beneficial traits. In the aforementioned programming contests, once an individual submitted a valid entry, it became public, making its code accessible to other participants, along with its score and the authors chosen username. Over time, some individuals took part in more than one contest, which allowed the potential to build reputation and influence across contests.

Here, we show that the successful individuals that drive cumulative improvements in the programming contests are neither habitual innovators nor inveterate copiers, but rather mixed-strategy pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks flexibly. We further demonstrate that superior performance in contests allows players to generate reputations that are used by other players as a cue to guide social learning above and beyond the effect of payoff bias, both within and across contests.

We analyzed data from 19 online programming competitions organized by MathWorks from 1998 until 2012 (19). Overall, we had data from 1964 unique participants from 19 contests, with an average of 136 participants per contest, some of whom took part in more than one contest, and collectively submitted a total of 45,793 valid entries. We grouped submitted entries according to the participant that submitted them (henceforth called contestant) both within each contest and, where possible, across different contests. Each contestant was thus responsible for a collection of entries, which can be characterized in terms of activity (the total number of entries submitted to the contest), novelty (similarity to the entry with the current best scoreas there is substantial copying taking place in the contest, this similarity is an unbiased, relative measure of how much an entry is deviating from the current population consensus), and performance (whether the entry became, on submission, a leader in its contest, i.e., whether it achieved the best score at the time of its submission). Each individual contestant could thus be characterized by a number of entries, a distribution of leader similarities, and a distribution of performance measures for every entry they had submitted. To begin with, for simplicity, we analyzed each contest as independent and assumed that all contestants were distinct (i.e., contestants were not linked across contests; see below for an analysis considering the same individuals participating in multiple contests). This means that each contestant had an associated activity, novelty, and performance measure for each contest in which they participated.

We found that individuals differed widely in their activity, use of novelty, and performance. Activity ranged from those who only submitted one entry to very active, very exploratory individuals who returned a wide range of raw scores. The number of entries per contestant was approximately exponentially distributed in all contests, with 30% of contestants submitting only 1 entry in the entire contest, 60% submitting 5 or fewer, and less than 1% submitting >50 entries (fig. S1). Of all participants to all contests, 22% submitted at least one entry that took the lead, and 14% did this more than once. The average number of entries per leading contestant was 10 times larger than the average number of entries per nonleading contestant. Activity was therefore strongly linked to performance at the individual level (fig. S2). However, the variation in activity levels among leading contestants indicates that high activity was not necessary for a participant to be able to take the lead8% of leading contestants submitted only a single entry, while 16% submitted less than five (fig. S2).

The novelty results show that this between-individual variation extends to how individuals used social learning in their solutions. Some contestants were very conservative and preferred to keep their entries safe through solely copying the current leader, while other contestants were relatively adventurous, submitting entries that varied in their novelty (Fig. 1A). However, contestants did not display a bimodal distribution in use of copying or introduction of novelty, but rather could be broadly split into three groups, albeit on a continuous distribution: (i) a surprisingly large number of contestants who only submitted entries with low similarity to the current leader, a group that we term incurable mavericks, who barely ever took the lead (Fig. 1A, left section); (ii) an intermediate group whose entries ranged from zero similarity to very close copies of the current leader, termed occasional mavericks, who were the most likely group to take the lead (Fig. 1A, middle section); and (iii) a smaller group whose entries were always very similar to the current leader, termed extreme conservatives, who, again, rarely took the lead (Fig. 1A, right section). Most leading contestants and the most active contestants lie toward the copying end of this spectrum.

Similarity to current leader (A) and score increment (B)average values with bars spanning the range of the distribution. The colored circles indicate leading contestants (i.e., contestants who submitted at least one entry that improved the overall score at the time of its submission), and the size of the circles is proportional to the total number of entries submitted by each contestant. The shaded panels in (A) indicate a visual split of participants into mavericks (left), copiers (right), and flexible users (middle) based on how they make use of social learning. The shaded panels (B) indicate a visual split between poorly performing contestants (left), contestants who are variable in performance (middle), and consistently good performers (right).

There was also considerable between-individual variation in terms of performance (Fig. 1B), with participants again split into three groups: a number of contestants who displayed very little variation in scores relative to the current leader and who often took the lead but more often than not only submitted one or two entries (Fig. 1B, right section), a group of contestants who showed variation in performance but tended to take the lead (Fig. 1B, middle section), and a final group of contestants who varied in their scores but showed poor performance on average (Fig. 1B, right section). Leading contestants use social information in a notably different manner to other contestants (Fig. 2). We split participants into leading contestants (i.e., contestants who submitted at least one leading entry that beat the current best in the contest, in at least one contest) and nonleading contestants (who never submitted any entry in any contest that beat the current best leader). To test whether the way individuals used social information affected their performance, we fitted a generalized linear mixed model with a binomial error distribution that predicted whether an individual was a leading contestant or not as a function of the mean and the range of the distribution of similarities between that individuals submissions and the current leader at the time of submission, to ask whether more or less innovation in terms of solutions was beneficial.

(A) Distributions of average leader similarities and distribution of leader similarity ranges for all nonleading and leading contestants. (B) Probability of a contestant becoming a leading contestant as a function of mean leader similarity and the range of the leader similarity distribution, as predicted by the generalized linear mixed model.

According to the generalized mixed linear model (GLMM), the probability of a contestant introducing leading entries increased with a higher mean similarity to the current leader, but was also correlated with a higher range of the distribution of similarities between each entry submitted by the author and the current leader (i.e., the variation of solutions submitted by the author; Fig. 2B and Table 1). For every one unit increase in mean similarity, the log odds of taking the lead increasd by 3.488 (i.e., the odds increased by a factor of 31). Therefore, both between-individual variation (i.e., how much copying a contestant engages in on average, as measured by the average similarity to the current leader) and within-individual variation (i.e., how variable the solutions submitted by each contestant are, as measured by the range of the distribution of similarities to the leader for each individual) are predictors of individual performance. Leading contestants, who were almost always occasional mavericks, were more similar to the current leader, on average, than nonleading contestants. However, leading contestants also showed considerable flexibility in their behavior, being substantially more variable in their use of social and asocial information than nonleading contestants. Leading contestants deviated more often from the status quo than extreme conservatives, while (unlike incurable mavericks) still sometimes working on variations of the current leading solution and scoring consistently better than nonleaders even with their nonleading entries (fig. S3). Results from the continuous version of this model confirm our findings (table S1 and fig. S4).

Results from GLMM: LeadingContestant ~ MeanScoreDifference + MeanLeaderSimilarity + RangeLeaderSimilarity + (1|Contest). Predictors are standardizedsimilarity ranges theoretically between 0 and 1 and score difference between 1 and 1.

We devised a measure, which we call influence, that captures how much of an entry a population picked up following the entrys submission. Influence is broadly calculated as a normalized version of the average similarity between an entry and subsequent entries submitted by other contestants in that contest, thus capturing how much of an entry is reflected following entries, while controlling for self-similarity (fig. S5). Leading contestants were also copied more (i.e., they had, on average, higher influence) than nonleading contestants, through both their leading and their nonleading entries (Fig. 3). Leading entries had higher influence than nonleading entries overall, but even nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants had higher influence than entries submitted by nonleading contestants (Table 2), even when we control for score difference. For instance, a nonleading entry submitted by a leading contestant had a 0.135-point increase in influence compared to a nonleading entry submitted by a nonleading contestant. If the entry was also leading, this added another 0.175-point increment. This was in addition to the increase in influence due to higher increment. Notably, leading contestants submitted entries that had a higher influence on other participants, even when those entries were not the best available to copy, and even when variation in actual score was accounted for. This demonstrates that a prestige effect was taking place in the contests, with contestants who manage to take the lead at least once forming reputations that influenced how others copied.

Entry-level influence distribution for entries submitted by nonleading contestants, nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants, and leading entries submitted by leading contestants.

Results for fixed effects from linear mixed model: Influence ~ LeaderGroup + Increment + (1|Contest/Contestant). The top row represents the baseline, entries that neither led nor were submitted by contestants who were ever leaders. The following two rows indicate additive effects relative to the baseline for nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants and leading entries submitted by leading contestants. The last row indicates the relationship between influence and performance as measured by score increment (standardized between 1 and 1).

Crucially, this effect extended across contests (fig. S6). Overall, again, leading entries had significantly higher influence than nonleading entries, and so did nonleading entries that had been submitted by a contestant who managed to take the lead in the same contest. Leading entries submitted by a contestant who was a leader in the current contest had, on average, 0.243 higher influence than nonleading entries submitted by a contestant who was never a leader, but even nonleading entries submitted by a contestant who had taken the lead in the contest had, on average, 0.217 higher influence (Table 3). More surprisingly, this prestige effect held even for entries that did not take the lead, submitted by contestants who did not become leaders in the focal contest, but had taken the lead in a different contest (Table 3), which achieved 0.120 higher influence than the baseline, nonleading entries submitted by contestants who never led. This was true while controlling for payoff bias, i.e., mean performance overallfor every unit increase in mean score increment, influence increased by 0.284 units. This shows that cross-contest individual behavior was significantly related to entry-level measures of influence, indicating that consistent individual characteristics affected how entries were copied, in line with the expectations if prestige effects were forming across contests through repeated participation.

Results for fixed effects from linear mixed model: Influence ~ LeaderGroup + Increment + (1|Contestant/Contest). The first row indicates the intercept: nonleading entries submitted by nonleading contestants who never took the lead in any other contests. The following rows indicate the additional effect corresponding to each factor level indicatedbold indicates leading (either entry, contestant, or contestant in a different contest). The last row indicates the relationship of influence with performance, measured here as score increment.

In a cumulative cultural evolution setting with real-world task complexity, we have shown that individual differences in reliance on social and asocial learning give rise to considerable variation in performance. Analysis of individual-level patterns of entry novelty did not indicate a dichotomous split between individuals who preferred copying and those who preferred innovation, but rather a continuous spectrum, in which individuals varied not only in their proclivity to copy and/or innovate but also in how much within-individual variation (i.e., exploration across entries) they displayed. Notably, the spectrum of the individual reliance on social learning had long tails formed by individuals with relatively pure always innovate and always copy approaches, who had relatively low success overall. The best-performing individuals occupied the center ground, mixing a balance of copying the leader with their own innovation and exhibiting flexibility and exploration in achieving this balance. Our results suggest that, to succeed, it is not enough to innovate alone, or solely to copy uncritically, but rather, individuals must strike a balance between the two. Successful individuals are pragmatists, willing to copy, innovate, explore, and take risks.

Previous work acknowledges and occasionally focuses on between-individual variation in social-information use (9, 15, 24), sometimes identifying factors that could explain this variation, such as confidence (9), intelligence quotient (25), or age (26). For instance, in a dataset of 60 years of opening moves in the game of Go, Beheim et al. (27) found both individual variation in social-information use (some players copy more than others), as well as cultural variation (players from certain countries copy more than others). Modeling work has shown that a mix of innovation and social learning can be beneficial, at both the population and individual level (6, 11, 28), and improvement is maximized by a careful blend of exploration and copying (29, 30). The literature less often discusses within-individual variation in social learning and how it is linked to population-level improvement. Morgan et al. (9) show that individuals flexibly adjust their reliance on social information over time, as they gain confidence in the task, and Toelch et al. (31) show that individuals change their reliance on innovation when presented with social performance cues. Such findings are indicative of growing evidence that humans implement learning strategies flexibly (32). We extend these findings to show that not only do individuals use social information flexibly but also this flexibility is adaptive in the sense of being associated with successful performance: The best-performing individuals are those that most effectively navigate the trade-off between innovation and social learning.

Within our current framework, it is not immediately obvious how this trade-off is negotiated, or even how to predict accurately how good ideas are generated. Individual preferences for copying versus exploration can be explained in terms of both perceived expected payoffs and built-in proclivities for either type of learning. The structure of the scoring system allows for better scores either through algorithmic improvement or through speeding up the code, which means that copying is a safe strategy and individuals who are not especially proficient coders will typically receive higher payoffs from copying than innovating. Nonetheless, we see evidence of poor performers who stick exclusively to innovating and refuse to copy, suggesting a personal preference, manifest independent of payoff. Given the substantial search space of existing solutions, the fact that entries tend to have high similarity to the current leader is not surprising, as copying the leader is a quick heuristic for reducing the space and focusing on proven solutions. The fact that new leaders are both similar to current leaders and more exploratory could be interpreted as leaders being good at innovating from a starting point of the current best solution, although studies show that a degree of randomness can aid exploratory search (33, 34). However, our data imply that both conservatism and exploration play a role in effective innovation. We have shown in previous work that many leading entries were very similar to the current leader, but a handful were very different, yet associated with higher improvement (19). The latter generated large innovative leaps that triggered the population to adopt this new solution, which was then optimized through small modifications. Here, we show that the individuals responsible for these crucial entries rarely worked alone and also participated in the tweaking process. Overall, leaders showed a higher level of engagement than nonleaders, perhaps symptomatic of relevant personal motivators (interest, expertise, and perseverance).

Prestige effects are expected to emerge where there is a correlation between status and performance (21). According to participant accounts, introducing an entry that takes the lead is a highly sought-after prize, which suggests that reputation is a valued commodity in these contests. Moreover, participants remember good players from previous contests and pay attention to their submissions. Our study provides clear evidence that leaders had more influence on the patterns of solutions in the population than nonleaders, even when their entries did not take the lead. This effect extended across contests such that individuals who had proved successful had influence even in contests in which they never took the lead. Modeling the influence of leaders while controlling for the individual performance of each entry allowed us to establish whether leaders had higher influence merely as a result of submitting generally better entries or whether leadership genuinely creates a reputational effect. The analysis confirms genuine prestige effects in the copying of leaders. This prestige effect held up across contests, suggesting that an individuals reputation builds in the MATLAB contest world independently of the specific challenge, perhaps serving as a heuristic used to reduce the overwhelming search space. This is in line with Henrich and Gil-Whites theory (21), suggesting that prestige can be a useful tool in the face of uncertainty, even when that uncertainty is not a result of lack of success information, but rather an excess of it. However, such effects are still reliant on general programming expertise, as opposed to, say, a gifted footballer promoting a brand of clothing, and it remains to be established how widely this cross-domain influence extends.

We have investigated how individual-level use of social information contributes to technological progress in a cumulative cultural evolution microcosm, where cultural artifacts are incrementally improved over time through modifications by multiple individuals. We studied what humans do when unguided or unprompted, confirming and extending results from theoretical models and small experiments in a large-scale realistic setting. Although there were no experimental interventions in this study, we can nonetheless draw clear inferences about the factors that shape cumulative cultural change. Our results suggest that overt attempts to maximize cumulative cultural adaptation require populations consisting of many individuals exhibiting leader qualities (i.e., exploring and flexibly switching between social and asocial information). We have also shown that prestigious individuals have a disproportionate influence on cultural transmission, a finding that implies that performance increments may be achieved through coupling prestige with superior solutions. We note, however, that prestige bias need not speed up cumulative cultural evolution, if this means that good solutions introduced by nonprestigious individuals are hindered from spreading through the population. While our study system might mimic patterns of improvement in some contemporary scenariostodays business world, for exampleit is limited in its generality. For instance, many cultural adaptation scenarios do not involve the level of competition or transparency manifest here. Further realistic studies of such phenomena are needed to establish the generality of our findings.

Consistent interindividual variation in behavior has been a focus in behavior studies for over a decade, sometimes controversially (35). Our study contributes to the growing expectation that differences between individuals, and groups, in their approach to learning will have important effects on the patterns of cultural evolution (36).

However, our findings also draw attention to within-individual flexibility in the use of social and asocial information, suggesting that not only the predilection to use social information but also the contexts in which humans copy could be learned. Here, any assumption that social learning strategies are not learned could underestimate the speed of response to environmental variation (36), as well as the patterns of change of these social learning strategies (32), and the vulnerability to the propagation of maladaptive traits (37). Our study implies that flexibility in learning is a key ingredient for successful innovation.

Last, our study provides compelling evidence for prestige bias. To date, little empirical work has focused on the importance of prestige bias [see (38) for a review of the existing literature], but the complex cumulative cultural evolution microcosm provided by our dataset provides a useful framework for studying this learning mechanism in a naturalistic setting. Why prestige effects should be so potent is unclear, but plausibly, this bias has been co-opted as part of norm psychology, a psychological suite of traits evolved to support cultural evolution (39), and is used even in the presence of more effective learning mechanisms. If the effect of prestige is manifest even in the presence of a clear cue of success, then our findings suggests that prestige could play an even more prominent role in human social learning contexts in which payoffs are opaque.

We analyzed data from 19 online programming competitions organized by MathWorks, the company that produces MATLAB, from 1998 to 2012 (19, 40). Each contest involved the organizers proposing an NP-complete problem (traveling salesmantype constraint problems; see the Supplementary Materials for an example) and participants submitting solutions to it, in the form of MATLAB code. Each entry was submitted to an online platform and evaluated automatically. Once submitted, each entry, along with its score, submitting author, and time of submission, was freely available on the website for all the other participants to access and copy. Participants could only learn their score by submitting an entry. Prizes were nominal (e.g., a MATLAB T-shirt), and participants competed mainly for reputation. Participants were incentivized with small intermediate awards like daily leader and highest improvement in a day. Both these intermediary prizes and the final winner were highly sought-after accolades. The contest attracted programmers that varied in their skill level and engagement with MATLAB, from beginners to engineers and academics who use MATLAB proficiently in their professional life.

Our dataset consisted of 1964 participants from 19 contests, with an average of 136 participants per contest, some of whom took part in more than one contest, and collectively submitted a total of 45, 793 valid entries. Participants submitted an average of 21 entries each, but with very large variation between participants, ranging between 1 and 1502 entries submitted. Of the total of 1964 individual participants, 83% participated in only one contest, and the average number of contests participated in was 1.34, with 2 participants competing in 14 of the 19 contests we studied.

Throughout the week of each contest, participants were allowed to submit as many solutions as they wanted through an online interface, which resulted in numerous participants submitting multiple entries. The participants were identified using an identification number that was linked to a MathWorks account that they themselves created and that was needed to submit entries to the contest. Individuals were not forbidden from creating multiple accounts if they wished to do so, but we have reason to believe, based on online communication between participants, that most did not and, because this would have required substantial effort (e.g., creating a new account, linked to a new email address), we expect that this was not a major confounding factor in this analysis.

The score of each entry was a function of its effectiveness on the task, the speed of execution, and code complexity, measured using McCabes cyclomatic complexity (41), such that improving an entry could be achieved by improving the success of the algorithm and/or the speed of execution, and/or reducing its complexity (the latter could be achieved without considerable programming proficiency). Entries were disqualified if they exceeded execution time or length limits, and the winner was the entry with the lowest score at the end of the week.

We characterized individual variation through three principal metrics that we term activity, novelty, and performance. The analysis included only valid entries, which followed the contest guidelines and received a score (if an entry contained a bug that stopped execution, it was not valid and did not receive a score). Some of the contests included a period of darkness in the first 2 days, in which contestants only had access to their own entries, in an attempt to encourage individual exploration. To compare accurately across contests, in our analysis, we included only data from the third day onward for all contests.

Activity was measured as the total number of entries submitted in a contest. At the individual level, activity is an indirect measure of motivationwe expected that more motivated, more interested players would submit more entries throughout the contest.

Novelty is inversely related to social learning, and hence, this measure allowed us to quantify and investigate individual differences in both reliance on social learning and innovation, as well as link these factors to performance and thereby establish their adaptive value. To measure novelty, we first used similarity to the current leader as an index of copying. We have shown elsewhere (19) that solutions quickly become very complex, which incentivizes participants to copy the current leader (i.e., the entry with the best score at a set time) substantially and tweak that leading solution instead of submitting completely original entries. As a result, populations converged on similar solutions over each contest. Entries are much more similar to the current leader than to any other entries, and although this similarity might not indicate direct copying but rather could be mediated through third entries that copied the current leader, it is nonetheless a robust measure of how much an individual is deviating from the population consensus and, reciprocally, a measure of how much novelty they are introducing. Although we could have used raw proportion of new lines introduced into the contest as a straightforward measure of novelty, this would be a biased measurethere is much more scope for novelty at the beginning of the contest, while novelty naturally decreases over time as possible space of solutions is explored and exhausted. Therefore, we settled on similarity to the current leader as a relative measure that is conditional on the current level of novelty entertained by the best entries. Code similarity was measured using the Czekanowski similarity, designed as a statistic for comparing two ecological samples in terms of proportion of overlapping species, given byCZik=2j=1Smin(xij,xkj)j=1S(xij+xkj)(1)where CZik is the similarity between samples i and k, xij is the number of instances of species j in sample i, and xkj is the number of instances of species j in sample k. For our analysis, each sample corresponds to an entry, and each species is a line of code. Every entry is a set of lines of code, so the similarity between two entries is a function of the total number of lines they have in common, including reoccurring lines, relative to the sum of their lengths. Each individual contestant could thus be characterized by a distribution of leader similaritiesthe novelty introduced by an individual is therefore given by the distribution of dissimilarities (i.e., 1 CZik for each entry).

Performance of an entry was simply characterized as whether that entry became, on submission, the leader in its contest (i.e., achieved the best score at the time of its submission and thus improved the overall score). Extending this to the contestant level allowed us to quantify how many of each contestants entries improved upon the current leader. To test the link between social-information use at the individual level and contestant performance, we fitted a model that predicts whether a contestant ever became a leader or not (within a contest) as a function of that contestants social-information use. We used both the mean and the range of the distribution of similarities between a contestants entries and the current leader as measures of copying and exploration around the population consensus. Thus, we fitted a generalized linear mixed model with a binomial error distribution. The predicted outcome of the model was whether an individual was a leading contestant, and the dependent variables were the mean and range of the distribution of similarities between that individuals submissions and the current leader at the time of submission.

An additional independent variable accounts for the fact that some contestants were better players overall. Thus, the model also included an average performance measure for each contestant as a fixed effect. We used the difference in score between the current leading entry and each specific entry as a continuous, relative measure of performance at the entry level, which takes into account the steady improvement in score. This score difference is positive for entries that improved the overall score, and negative for most entriesa large negative difference indicating a particularly unsuccessful entry. We rescaled this increment within each contest so it fell between 1 and 1 according to Eq. 2I=sign(I)IIminImaxImin(2)where I is the original increment value, Imin and Imax are the minimum and maximum values taken by all increments, and I is the rescaled increment. We included the mean score increment for each contestant as a fixed effect in the model. The model also includes contest as a random effect to account for inherent differences in performance and similarity introduced by different tasks in different contests. Therefore, the model specification wasLeaderijBinomial(1,pij)logit(pij)=+1MeanIncrementij+2MeanSimilarityij+3RangeSimilarityij+aiaiN(0,a2)where leaderij is the probability of contestant j in contest i to become a leader, and ai estimates the random effect corresponding to contest i. All models were implemented in R, using the lme4 package (42).

In the context of the MATLAB contests, being a leader was a highly prized achievement and a principal motivator for contestants. Here, leading entries and leaders have the broader significance of improving the overall score at the population level. As a result of the considerable copying taking place, most entries scored just below the current leader, making those entries that did surpass the leader even more salient. This pattern extended to the contestant level: Most contestants, including leaders, had a mean increment value just below zero. Leaders whose mean increment value exceeded zero generally submitted a small number of entries (one or two), while many leaders had a negative increment value because they submitted both leading and nonleading entries. For these reasons, whether a contestant was a leader or not is a more meaningful measure of performance than mean increment (or other continuous measures of performance), although we also fitted an additional linear model similar to the above, in which we use mean increment as the outcome variableMeanIncrementij=+1MeanSimilarityij+2>RangeSimilarityij+aiaiN(0,a2)

To investigate whether individuals formed reputations that affected how they were copied, we needed to establish the extent to which an individual was copied throughout the contest. While we used similarity as a proxy for copying, this does not exclude the possibility that the two entries are related through copying via a third entry they both copied. As quantifying indirect copying is impossible in this context, we devised a measure that we call influence that attempts to capture how much of an entry a population picked up following the entrys submission.

Influence was calculated as the average similarity between an entry and subsequent entries in that contest. To control for the situation in which a contestant is working on a solution and submits a series of very similar solutions to each other, we only took into account subsequent entries submitted by other contestants. This excludes self-similarity as an explanation for high influence. The influence of the entries submitted at the beginning of the contest will naturally be lower than the influence of the entries submitted toward the end, purely because the number of subsequent entries is higher for the entries submitted at the beginning of the contest, which translates into a higher number of entries that could potentially be dissimilar to these initial entries. Therefore, we divided this average similarity by a number indicating the order of the entry into the competition, ranging from 1 for the first entry to the total number of entries in the contest for the last. We used the order of submission rather than the raw time point of submission to control for variation in the rate of submission across the duration of the competition (although the results hold when using raw time point as a normalizing factor). As mentioned above, in this analysis, we only included data starting with day 3, when participants had full access to everybody elses entries; therefore, this timestamp never actually took the value 0. To correct for the skew introduced by the difference in magnitude between similarity and this measure of time, we used a log transformation of the influence measurethis skew correction was used for both measures of time, raw time point, and entry order. Thus, influence was given byInfluence=log(mean similarityentry order+105)(3)

Last, this influence measure was rescaled between 0 and 1 using the same form as Eq. 2 to make comparison across contests possible. Influence is therefore a continuous measure of subsequent-entry similarity for each entry that indicates how much a given solution, once introduced, is used by others in the population. This measure does distinguish between the initial innovator and the following copiers purely because innovators have precedency and therefore a higher number of entries that can potentially copy them, but it does not completely discount copiers as completely lacking influence on the population outcomescopiers deserve credit, too, for recognizing a successful solution and popularizing it, thus influencing the population repertoire.

To test whether leading contestants had a higher influence than nonleading contestants in either or both their leading and nonleading entries, we fitted a linear mixed model with the influence of each entry as the dependent variable. The influence was predicted as a function of a factor with three levels that specified whether (i) the entry took the lead and was submitted by a leading contestant, (ii) the entry did not take the lead but was submitted by a leading contestant, and (iii) the entry did not take the lead and was submitted by a nonleading contestant. The intercept baseline was set to group 3, the entries that did not take the lead and were submitted by nonleading contestants. The model also included the entrys score increment as a fixed effect, because better-performing entries can be expected to have higher influence irrespective of the contestant who submitted them. This allows us to compare between prestige-bias, here measured as how much more influence entries submitted by leading contestants have, and payoff-bias, measured by the score increment of the entry. The contestant and the contest were included as random effects, with contestant nested within contest, to account for the fact that each contest might be characterized by a different average level of copying and that within each contest some contestants might have generally higher influence independent of their leader status. Therefore, the model specification wasijk=+i+ij+1Incrementk+2ContestantFactorkiN(0,12);ijN(0,22)InfluenceijkN(ijk,32)for each entry k submitted by contestant j in contest i, where i indicates the random effect corresponding to contest i, and ij captures random effects corresponding to contestant j in contest i.

The predictor of interest here was the contestant factor. We expected leading entries submitted by leading contestants to have a significantly higher influence than entries submitted by nonleading contestants. However, if prestige bias was operating, we also expected greater influence of nonleading entries submitted by leading contestants compared to entries submitted by nonleading contestants.

Some individuals participated in multiple contests, which gave us the opportunity to investigate whether individuals performed consistently across different problems or whether the variation between contest problems somehow breaks down these individual characteristics. This was tested using a similar mixed linear model as for within-contest influence. In this context, however, the predictor of interest was a factor that specified whether the entry took the lead, whether the contestant submitting the entry was ever a leader in the same contest, or whether the contestant was ever a leader in a different contest. This factor had six levels: (i) nonleading entry submitted by a nonleading contestant who was never a leading contestant in any other contest, (ii) nonleading entry submitted by a nonleading contestant who was a leading contestant in a different contest, (iii) nonleading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was not a leading contestant in a separate contest, (iv) nonleading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was also a leader in a different contest, (v) leading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was not a leader in a different contest, and (vi) leading entry submitted by a leading contestant who was also a leading contestant in a different contest. As before, we included score increment as a fixed factor, and contest and contestant identity as random factorsin this case, the model included a random effect for contest nested inside the random effect for contestant, as contestant identity explained more variation than contest identity. To capture within-participant variation adequately and to ensure methodological validity, we chose to examine individuals who participated in at least three contests, giving a sample size of 96 repeat contestants, of the total of 1416 unique contestants overall.

This allowed us to establish whether entries had more influence when submitted by a leading contestant, independent of how well they scored. Crucially, this analysis also allowed us to establish if entries had more influence when submitted by a contestant that was a leader in a different contest (i.e., if reputations carry across contests, as predicted if prestige bias is important). If entries that do not take the lead, submitted by contestants who do not become leaders in the same contest, but who had been leading contestants in a different contest still have higher influence than entries submitted by nonleading contestants both within and across contests, it would mean that the leadership reputation at the individual level was maintained across contests, evidence of prestige bias.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

J. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton Univ. Press, 2016).

R. Boyd, P. J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1985).

M. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).

R. M. Karp, Reducibility among combinatorial problems, in 50 Years of Integer Programming 19582008: From the Early Years to the State-of-the-Art (Springer-Verlag, 2010), pp. 219241.

E. Miu, Understanding human culture: Theoretical and experimental studies of cumulative culture, thesis, University of St Andrews (2017).

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Flexible learning, rather than inveterate innovation or copying, drives cumulative knowledge gain - Science Advances

Learn to say no, and put time on your calendar to think.

June 2, 2020 5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

As a business leader, is your management style dependent on thesituation? Or do you instinctively adapt your style to suit specific conditions?

I interviewed Serguei Beloussov, CEO of global tech and cyber security firm Acronis, at their Global Cyber Summit in Miami, FL.When asked about his personal leadership style, Beloussov shared a story about a hockey game he attended in Finland. One of the teams was more skilled,but the other team was playing faster. While the faster team made more mistakes, their speed made itimpossible for the skillful team to keep up, and the faster team won, explained Beloussov.One thing about leadership style is that I try to operate in a situation where there is a lot of change, and in those situations, you always operate faster than its possible to organize." He went on to say thatsituations like this force you to do things that may look impossible first, andthat styles of leadership always change to meet the demands of the situation. The main thing is that you have to be detail-oriented and you have to be hands-on, and you have to be ready to adjust your style.

In todays business and economic climate its never been more critical to have the capacity to adapt. Beloussovs advice inspired me to critically think about daily habits, the ones that successful business leaders engage in every day. Here are eight habits that most business leaders tend to agree on.

Maybe its that overwhelmed feeling thats been slowing you down. The cool kids in the business world have figured out that busy-ness shouldnt be worn as a badge of honor. Warren Buffett spends a lot of time thinking, and he says its a key to his success. Take time to think. Its one of the modern luxuries of the 21st century.

Related:25 BestHabitsto Have in Life

We hear the sports analogies all the time, but they apply well to this business principle. When youre trying to assemble a winning team, your people are your players. Instead of a top-down approach to team leadership, coach-leaders activate their teams to win championships while helping players take ownership of their roles.

Too many demands on your time, especially meetings, can drain creativity and zap energy, leaving you little time to accomplish anything in a day. Its okay to say no to meetings if you dont expect to add much to the conversation. Say no more often, and youll be surprised how it impacts your productivity.

This will be a challenge at first, especially when most of us check email on our phones several times per hour. But you dont have to completely ignore your inbox throughout the day; just flag emails that may demand same-day attention, and then go back and answer them when the time is right. You will become a lot more focused if you force yourself to hold back on emailing outside of the scheduled time.

At no time has planning been more attractive than now, when so many business leaders wish they could go back six months and plan for this current reality. Now is a great time to dissect and understand what drives your business and decide what to do if that changes.

Related:12Daily Habitsof Exceptional Leaders

When is your brain firing on all cylinders? Some of the most effective business leaders prefer to wake up at 4 am and get to the office before anyone, and then spend the first four hours of the day in prime critical-thinking mode. Your pattern could be just the opposite. Start paying attention and youll find the schedule that works best for your brain.

Putting positive energy and commitment into your personal relationships will have an immediate positive effect on your career and how you interact with peers in the workplace. Just a small change in attitude can make all the difference, especially in our digital world. Pay attention to your communication style and remember to stay positive.

As much as possible, I try to push myself to do something new and potentially uncomfortable, every day. It could be something simple, like striking up a conversation with a stranger, or something more daring like agreeing to speak at a conference. Pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone causes growth, and it can also help you to make valuable connections.

Related:Daily HabitsThat Will Help Increase Productivity

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8 Daily Habits of Effective Business Leaders - Entrepreneur

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.-Daniel Burnham, 1891

Even for the privileged among us, who still have our jobs, arent on the front lines with the pandemic, and havent had anyone close to us felled by COVID-19, the current crisis has brought hardships big and small. Parents have confronted the daily struggle of trying to do their jobs while also home-schooling. Adult children havent been able to visit their elderly parents. Graduations, weddings, and even funerals have been put on hold or Zoomified.

Yet as difficult as it has been, there have been a few silver linings, too--especially for those of us lucky enough to not be touched directly by the crisis. One of the most valuable, Id argue, is that pressing pause on our usual routines has given many of us the opportunity to take a step back, get out of our ruts, and take stock. What do we really value? What do we really miss? What cant we wait to do when this is all over? What necessity of our past lives--whether the daily purchased latte or frequent meals in restaurants--are we finding that were quite happily doing without?

My husband and I have been having these conversations regularly on our nightly walks. (The fact that we don't have much news to report from our days spent in our respective corners of the house helps elevate the conversation!) Travel is his greatest longing, and we both miss cooking and entertaining big groups of family and friends. Talking about how the pandemic has changed our thinking on a topic, or made us want to do more of something else, helps us feel like were using the present situation productively. The current sense of isolation wont be for naught, because its shaping how we intend to use our lives in the future, when we once again have a full set of choices before us.

Id argue that its also a good time to put a fresh set of eyes on your financial plan, taking a similarly expansive view of it that you might not have been able to do when you were busy and mired in your day-to-day activities.Carl Richardspresented this general thesis when he argues that too often, financial plans (and planners) move straight to the solution phase, without stopping to ask some basic questions about what someone is trying to achieve and what their real problems are. What will constitute success for you over the next few years, not just in financial terms, but in life terms, too? Are you allocating your time and money in line with your intentions, what you find fulfilling, and what brings you joy? These questions are incredibly personal; no one else can answer them for you.

Whether youre well into retirement or early in your career, it can be easy to backburner questions like these and move straight to logistics--determining your asset allocationandminimizing taxes, for example. Those are all worthy pursuits, and Morningstar.ca is full of information to help you do those jobs well. But if you find yourself with a bit of extra timeto think a bit more broadly and introspectively about your financial plan, here are some of the key questions to ask yourself.

What expenditures bring you happiness?As most investors know, the biggest determinant of whether you achieve financial success is how much youspend versus how much you save. But as important as it is to make sure your intake exceeds your outgo, budgeting can seem like sheer drudgery. Carl Richards posited a different way to go about it. Simply begin to take note of how various discretionary expenditures make you feel. Ive started to do this (at least in a pandemic-adjusted way) since we talked, and its been incredibly illuminating.

How are you allocating your precious resources?At Morningstar, we devote a significant amount of attention to helping you make smart allocations of financial capital across opportunity sets--not just saving versus spending but also debt paydown versus investing in the market, how much to allocate to retirement versus children'seducation, and so on. Those are crucial topics worthy of significant analysis and introspection.

Ultimately, the right answers are a matter of math (expected return on investment) and personal preference. But many of us, myself included, pay much less attention to how we allocate an even more scarce resource--our time--even though that allocation will ultimately have an even greater impact on whether we feel like weve met our goals. Of course, some of our time expenditures are pre-ordained--the time we spend working or caring for children, for example. But even within those allocations, it seems worthwhile to be more mindful, to help ensure that your allocation of time in a given day, week, or year aligns with your goals and vision for that period. Technology tools can help you determine how much time you waste (er, spend) on social media and other activities that could be detracting from your productivity and happiness.

Whats your own definition of enough?Many of us are operating with an incredibly vague notion of how much we really need to save in order to achieve our financial goals and find security. And even financial planners might rely on rules of thumb when setting your retirement-savings target--for example, they might assume that youll need 80% of your working income in retirement and extrapolate the rest of your plan from there.

As humans, we often have a natural tendency to reach for more more more, regardless of whether that "more" is actually bringing more happiness and security. Trying to keep up with the people around us, in terms of possessions and outward signs of success, can get exhausting and may not get us any closer to our life's goals. That's why, in this period of limited activity, spending, and social contact, it's so worthwhile to think through your own definition of enough--both now and for the future.

What do you want your legacy to be?When taking a strictly financial- and estate-planning perspective, leaving a legacy is one of those topics that can seem overly narrow. Its about leaving assets behind for children, grandchildren, and other loved ones, as well as charity if we so choose. Its about making sure we dont burden the people we care about. Those are crucial considerations, and theyre why everyone needs an estate plan that includes wills, powers of attorney, and beneficiary designations, among other key documents.

But while youre at it, why not think big-picture about your legacy, too? What do you hope people will say about you after youre gone? What life philosophy or pieces of wisdom do you hope that your loved ones will always associate with you? If you find yourself with a bit of extra time for introspection, write down a few ideas along these lines. And no, you're not too young to start thinking about this.

You can find templates for creating a personal legacy online, but my advice is not to overthink it. Balance more serious ideas with more lighthearted ones. At my fathers funeral, my husband read several of pieces of wisdom we had all learned from my dad, ranging from mundane but joyful (never say no to ice cream and put extra olives in the martini) to more profound (embrace progress and pick the plants that havent yet bloomed because watching them bloom and grow is the best part). We all have credos that we live by; make sure your loved ones know yours.

Editor's note:Read the lateston how the coronavirus is rattling the markets and what you can do to navigate it.

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OK, People: It's Time to Think Big - Morningstar.ca

Grow Your Business, Not Your Inbox

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June 17, 2016 4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

The startup lifestyle is known to be stressful and challenging, but its also meant to be satisfying and fulfilling, with you as the entrepreneur in control of your own destiny. Unfortunately, it doesnt always work out that way, based on my many years of experience with entrepreneurs and advising startups. The business can be successful, while the entrepreneur feels like a failure.

As an example, I know one highly driven startup founder whose business is growing at a reasonable pace, but the entrepreneur regrets the toll it has extracted from his family, his health, and his ability to relax and enjoy the fruits of his labor. I know several other CEOs that were pushed out of their own successful companies by investors, leaving them feeling like failures.

The challenge is not to let success come without personal satisfaction, or at the expense of the ones you love. To do that, you need to follow a set of personal principles that drive your business principles, not the other way around. Here are some key ones that I espouse:

Your personal goals should drive your business goals, not the other way around. You will never be satisfied or happy if you are not true to your core beliefs, personal interests, and a higher purpose. Write down your goals, and then take ownership to make them happen and feel the satisfaction.

If you dont see business as one of your strengths, you likely wont be happy leading a startup. Many technologists refuse stubbornly to let anyone else take their invention from a product to a business, assuming they can easily fix their business weakness. Both they and the business end up suffering.

Dreams alone wont make you happy or successful, so start early in defining and executing against a set of milestones to celebrate progress along the way. Satisfaction is not a one-time event at the end of your career; its a series of good feelings driven by results along the way.

Related:The 3 Personal Development Goals Successful People Pursue Habitually

Many business executives can give a great talk to their team about sustaining their health and maintaining a balanced family life, but they let the business override their own needs. Similarly, dont compromise your own ethics and integrity for the sake of your business.

Related:Success vs. Happiness: Don't Be Fooled Into Thinking They're the Same

The world of entrepreneurs is ever-changing, so if you arent learning and changing, you are falling behind. In business, setbacks must be seen as normal and expected challenges, not as indications of failure. Successfully recovering from problems should be a key source of satisfaction.

Related:How Prison Became My Launching Pad for Success

Being an entrepreneur is not a one-person show, so accept that fact, and build a team that can complement you and support your weaknesses. If your business and private teams are motivated and satisfied, their happiness will radiate to you. A motivated team is a successful one.

An over-arching principle for success and satisfaction for every entrepreneur is respect for yourself, and in business respect for every customer, investor, and employee. Another generic attribute close behind in value is persistence. No amount of talent or genius can take the place of persistence. Many experts believe that one of the top reasons for startup failures, as well as personal failures, is simply giving up too early.

In fact, people giving up on unsatisfying corporate careers is one of the primary sources of entrepreneurs. Most dont realize that the same satisfaction and success principles apply in both worlds and ignoring them in both will have the same negative consequences.

Switching from either lifestyle to the other will give you a whole new set of challenges, but it wont automagically bring you happiness, satisfaction, or success. In either case, Im a believer that you make your own success. Now is the time to start.

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6 Principles for Personal and Business Success

Whether designing its landmark Campus Reimagined initiative or responding to a pandemic, Florida State University has demonstrated how using existing technology in a smarter way can lead to better outcomes.

The Tallahassee institution has long used data to inform decisions on everything from course options to library hours. In 2018, however, information management became the cornerstone of Campus Reimagineddesigned to first help students better understand their interests and goals, and then provide a personalized experience based on acquiring knowledge necessary to fulfill their personal passions.

The most recent shift in using data is toward identifying unique characteristics, goals and aspirations of students, says Associate Provost Rick Burnette. How do we use technologyspecifically datato make sure the experience is as meaningful and impactful as possible for our students?

To advance that goal, the university partnered with Microsoft to set up a data lake and manage information effectively.

The school is already using every Microsoft data visualization and management tool, says Sean Brown, chief strategy officer for Campus Reimagined. But the human factor was extremely important. We found Microsofts view of digital transformation was parallel to ours, and it had the road map for where we were headed.

Microsoft representatives provided the expertise we needed, Burnette adds. They said, Heres how to get more bang for the buck with the technologies you have. Its one thing to have a tool; its another to use it appropriately. Microsoft provided alot of focus.

Its one thing to have a tool; its another to use it appropriately.

As a result, when COVID-19 led to campus closure and wholesale remote learning for some 42,000 students, FSU was ready.

We had the technology, so people could collaborate over Teams, Brown says. We found that the things you could do six feet apart or across the quad could still be done when you were a nation apart. We were able to maintain continuity of collaboration.

That continuity was key to administrative and academic success, Burnette says, and raised an important question: How do we use technology to make sure were not just delivering the same presentation remotely, but were making it an interactive learning experience?

The schools tech partner is helping with answering that question.

Both in the Campus Reimagined partnership with Microsoft, and the broader university, it is clear that a secure digital platform with chat, video communication and document sharing is very important, Brown says. When students return to campus, well need to maintain digital collaboration and distance delivery to continue maximizing student experiences and success.

Q&A with Rob Curtin, Director of Higher Education Strategy, Americas, for the Education Industry Group at Microsoft

How has the coronavirus prompted higher ed leaders and their communities to better appreciate the importance of the campus experience? Higher ed leaders have always appreciated this, but students, faculty and staff are now feeling just how important the campus community is to their experience, and how much learning occurs in and outside the classroom. Campus leaders realize they need to foster community for distributed populations, and technology can help.

How can colleges and universities ensure remote learning remains a first-tier offering even after the COVID-19 pandemic? Colleges and universities have always focused on quality learning experiences. The pandemic showed how agile campuses can be. Their rapid transition to remote learning was impressive. Moving forward, the conversation has to focus on learning with remote inclusion as a first-tier option for any or all participantsstudents and faculty. Over the next few years, well see significant investments in learning experiences and pedagogical evolution of models designed for inclusion. Faculty and students will have options for on-campus and remote learning, and synchronous and asynchronous learning. It will be more than lecturing to muted squares over a video conferencing tool.

COVID-19 has created an urgency for project-based or active learning scenarios, continuous engagement over various modalities, and interactions that extend the classroom and give everyone a voice.

How can colleges combine first-class remote learning with crucial on-campus experiences to improve student success after the coronavirus crisis? Providing flexibility on when and how students consume information, and how they meet and interact with others is important to the entire experience. College is more than just the classroom. There are many lessons to be learned on campus: Time management, self-discipline, organization and group collaboration. Human interaction is critical. Technology should not disintermediate students and teachers. It can connect people and inform their interactions to make them more personal and effective.

How can higher ed leaders ensure that both distance and on-campus experiences promote equity and remain inclusive? Now that students have access to low-cost devices or virtual machines on the cloud, we need to ensure they have access to high-speed internet. Microsoft is working with telecoms, energy access providers and others to provide high-speed internet using TV white space. These partners are using our Airband technology to promote equity and to help close the massive digital access gap, particularly in rural and agricultural areas.

Our Immersive Reader capabilities ensure learners of all abilities can see and hear text. With rich controls for word spacing, contrast, text size and even colors, we help people overcome vision and reading challenges. Immersive Reader is also found in our Browser and Office applications, and we make it available to partners who can integrate into their interfaces and scale these inclusive experiences.

For more information, please visit aka.ms/etfhe

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FSU leverages technology to maximize student experience and response to COVID-19 | - University Business

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May 19, 2020

Kurt Golder

ALPENA Alpena Native and University of Michigan gymnastics coach Kurt Golder has earned unanimous Big Ten Coach of the Year honors.

The Big Ten Conference announced the 2020 Big Ten Mens Gymnastics individual award winners on Thursday, as voted upon by the conference coaches. Minnesotas Shane Wiskus took home Big Ten Gymnast of the Year for the third straight year, while Michigans Paul Juda was awarded Big Ten Freshman of the Year and Golder, the Wolverine head coach, claimed unanimous Big Ten Coach of the Year honors.

Golder was named the unanimous Big Ten Coach of the Year by his peers after the Wolverines finished the season 11-1-0 (3-1-0, Big Ten) to lead the conference. Golder helped five Wolverines earn CGA All-American honors. The award marks his fifth career Big Ten Coach of the Year honor (1999, 2000, 2013, 2014).

Golder enters his 24th season as the head coach for the mens gymnastics team at the University of Michigan. He is only the fourth coach in the programs 80-year history, following Wilbur West, the legendary Newt Loken and Bob Darden. A native of Alpena, Golder has led the Wolverines to high levels of success over the last five years, including back-to-back NCAA and Big Ten Championships in 2013 and 2014, as well as NCAA and Big Ten titles in 1999. In addition to his smashing success during the past three seasons, Golder has coached 105 NCAA All-Americans and 13 NCAA individual national champions, and has won four of U-Ms six national titles (1963, 70, 99, 2010, 13, 14).

In 2019, Golder led U-M back to national relevance, taking fourth-place at NCAAs and captured a share of the first-ever Big Ten Regular Season Championship. With 11 Academic All-Big Ten members, four NCAA All-Americans and an NCAA Champship from Anthony McCallum on vault and a Big Ten title from Jacob Moore on floor-exericse, the campaign was chock full of superlatives.

The 2018 season saw the addition of freshman All-American Cameron Bock, who helped guide the Wolverines to a second-place finish at Big Tens inside U-Ms Crisler Center.

In 2015, Golder brought home three NCAA All-America citations, as the Wolverines took fourth at the NCAA Championships and boasted one Big Ten Champion (Nick Hunter, parallel bars).

The previous two seasons marked the most successful years in U-M gymnastics history as they featured two NCAA and Big Ten Titles, as well as a pair of CGA National Coach of the Year honors and Big Ten Coach of the Year accolades. Over that span, he guided 20 All-America citations at the NCAA meet, earned five NCAA Individual titles, five Big Ten champions, and the Big Ten Gymnast of the Year in Sam Mikulak in 2013-14.

At the 2014 NCAAs, U-M became the first program to win back-to-back national championships in 44 years. The Wolverines scored 445.050 to win the meet. The title is the fourth under Kurt Golder (1999, 2010, 2013), who is now tied with swimming coach Gus Stager for the third-most NCAA titles by a coach in school history. He trails only Matt Mann (13) and football coach Fielding Yost (six), and the back-to-back NCAA titles are the first for any U-M sport since 1969-70, as trampoline won in 1969-70, and mens swimming and diving also accomplished the feat in 1958-59. Overall, U-M earned a 27-2 overall record on the season, while.The margin of victory of 443.200-440.100 over second-place Oklahoma at NCAAs was the largest victory margin in 29 years.

At Big Tens the team won its first non-shared conference championship since 2000 with a team score of 438.900, which was over four points better than second-place finisher Penn State (434.050), and was the fourth of Coach Golders career. Mikulak, who won the all-around competition, gives U-M event winners in four of the last five years, (Thomas Kelley 2009, Chris Cameron 2010, Mikulak 2011), and became the second Wolverine to win a pair of all-around titles in his career. Additionally, U-M placed three gymnasts in the top-three in six events while winning floor (Ervin), parallel bars (Caesar) and high bar (Mikulak). The trio, along with de los Angeles, took home First Team All-Big Ten honors, while Mikulak was named Big Ten Gymnast of the Year for the second time in his career, and Kurt Golder took home his second Big Ten coach of the year honor.

The success began in the summer of 2012, as he served as the primary coach for the first American Olympian in program history in Mikulak, who took fifth in the world on vault at the 2012 Olympic Games. Golder served as the primary coach for one of the most popular athletes in London, and was honored with the title of assistant coach for Team USA as a result.

In 2012, Golder guided the Wolverines to a sixth place finish at the NCAA Championships after winning session one at the NCAA Qualifier round with a season-high score of 353.450 to advance to the Super Six. In addition, he earned his 25th NCAA champion, as Sam Mikulak won the NCAA high bar championship with a 15.45. Additionally, Golder aided in guiding Mikulak to All-America honors on parallel bars, high bar, and all-around competition, while freshman Stacey Ervin earned accolades on floor exercise (third) and vault (fourth). The Wolverines took second at the Big Ten Championships behind Illinois, marking the fourth straight season the Wolverines have collected a runner-up finish. Individually, Mikulak, the United States Senior National Team member, became the first Wolverine gymnast to win a pair of Big Ten titles (parallel bars, high bar) since Scott Vetere in 2000. Freshman Adrian de los Angeles also earned First-Team All-Big Ten accolades after placing fifth in the all-around competition.

The 2011 season saw Golder lead the Wolverines to a fifth-place finish at NCAA Championships and a runner-up finish at the Big Ten Championships. Freshman Sam Mikulak took the All-Around title at NCAAs and Big Tens and was named Big Ten Freshman and Gymnast of the Year. Additionally, senior Ian Makowske (high bar) and Syque Caesar (parallel bars) won individual event titles at Big Tens.

After taking over a team that went 0-16 and finished last at the Big Ten Championships in 1996, Golder quickly developed and recruited the Wolverines into national prominence. The goals of his program are to consistently be in contention for the Big Ten and NCAA team titles, as well as to produce U.S. National Team members and Olympians.

Golder has continued to turn out leading teams in the Big Ten conference producing five Big Ten team titles and 31 individual titles. Golder was awarded Big Ten Coach of the Year honors in 1999, 2000, 2013 and 2014, as well as being named the NCAA regional and national coach of the year in 1999, 2010, 2013 and 2014. Golder also mentored the 2000, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014 Big Ten all-around champions and Big Ten Gymnasts of the Year; Scott Vetere, Justin Laury, Thomas Kelley, Chris Cameron, and Sam Mikulak (three times) respectively.

Golder stresses the importance of community service while maintaining a high GPA to his student athletes, and the team has been recognized for such efforts. In 2010 the team had the highest team-GPA out of all mens gymnastics teams in the NCAA. In 2005-06, the squad earned the Rachael Townsend Community Service Award, and in 2007-08 and 2008-09, it received an accolade for having the highest GPA of any U-M male athletic team. Also during 2010 season, Golder produced ten student-athletes earning College Gymnastics Association academic All-America honors.

After graduating from Michigan in 1977 with his Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Education, Golder began his teaching and coaching career at Ann Arbor Huron High School where he taught and coached from 1976-79. Golder led the River Rats to claim the 1979 state championship. He returned to the Big Ten in 1979 as an assistant coach at Michigan State University, a position he held until 1984. From 1984-91, he was the boys program director and head coach of Genesee Valley Gymnastics in Flint, Mich., one of the nations most successful boys gymnastics clubs. During his duration at GVG, Golder was also a member of the Junior National coaching staff for USA Gymnastics.

In 1991, Golder joined the University of Iowa staff as an assistant coach. He was with the Hawkeye program until his appointment as the Wolverine head coach in July of 1996. International coaching appointments have taken Golder to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Israel, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Belgium, Puerto Rico, Thailand and South Korea. He served as coach for the U.S. team at the 1995 World University Games in Fukuoka, Japan; the 1997 World University Games in Sicily; the 2003 World University Games team in Daegu, South Korea; and the 2007 World University Games in Bangkok, Thailand. He also coached the 1999 Chunichi Cup team in Nagoya, Japan, and the 2001 Pan-Am Championship team in Cancun, Mexico. He served as a personal coach to former Wolverine gymnast Daniel Diaz-Luong at the 2001 World Championships in Ghent, Belgium.

Golder was a three-time letterwinner in gymnastics (1975-77) and a member of Michigans 1975 Big Ten championship team. In 2008, Golder was inducted into the Alpena High School Alumni Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Alpena Sports Hall of Fame in 2001.

Golder has a 26-year old daughter, Roberta, who is a graduate of U-M.

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Fear should never destroy our courage to stand against a government that threatens our freedom and allows tyranny to flourish. Our constitutional rights have been set aside without clear and defensible reasons for doing so by state and local governments, caused by a virus that has so far taken only 175 lives in San Diego County, just eight of whom had no underlying medical conditions.

The risk of being infected with the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, is certainly a concern, but more concerning is the overreach by Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the heavy-handed and arbitrary restrictions on businesses, public spaces and personal protections.

We have been bombarded with dizzying daily virus updates and given worst-case scenarios, then seen coverage that explained, contradicted or challenged what we were told were the most recent facts. We have been urged to shelter in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with initial projections of it killing up to 1.7 million Americans, and we did.

But even with cases remaining stable, local officials became reckless with their newly discovered power and continued to pursue even more unreasonable restrictions. In Encinitas, Mayor Catherine Blakespear defended the ticketing of sunset watchers and closing trails, parks and beaches as ways to save lives and to keep us safe, and claimed these activities are dangerous to others nearby.

The irony of it all was that residents were forced to walk or jog where no sidewalks existed, along busy roads, risking getting hit by a vehicle. At the same time, doctors and scientists told us that sunshine, exercise and fresh air were necessary to strengthen the immune system and to help fight illness.

As punitive actions grew in harshness for noncompliance, I witnessed the detrimental effects on friends and local businesses and was convinced as were many others that peaceful rallies were not only justified but necessary. Arrangements were made and what I assumed would be just a small group of frustrated residents quickly grew into a very large Freedom Rally at Swamis in Encinitas.

Read more about coronavirus restrictions and protests in San Diego County:

In return, I was treated like a criminal even though Im always law-abiding, hardworking and active in my church and have been named in a local magazine for my professional and personal success.

What I find most disturbing is the intolerance by neighbors for expressing my First Amendment rights. Across the state, we see county supervisors, health officials, mayors, city councils and members of law enforcement doing what the governor insisted, without regard for the Constitution or We the people.

I have been met with fear-based tactics, public shaming, virtue signaling and bullying by the same people who urge tolerance and treating each other with respect and dignity yet leave no voice for someone who disagrees with what is happening.

Living in a vacuum, surrounding ourselves with only people who mirror our views, and censoring those with dissenting opinions is a recipe for disaster, not to mention a gross act of cowardice. Mob rule might be a convenient way to exact justice when you find yourself on the right side of the outcome. But its a slippery slope, and our entire culture and Constitution were built as a platform to guard against the resulting collapse.

I was personally characterized as a selfish, shallow person, impatient to return to beach sunbathing, and angry about the inability to get my hair and nails done nothing could be further from the truth. Some of these virtue signalers even contacted former employers and my church fellowship in an attempt to destroy my livelihood and reputation.

Coping with coronavirus

The pandemic sweeping the globe has changed everyones lives, and we want to hear how its changed yours. If youd like to write an op-ed for us on a subject related to the virus, make it 700-750 words and send it to us with your name and a phone number so we can reach you.

My closest friends own salons and are hairdressers, estheticians and personal fitness trainers, and they have been the most severely impacted and the focus of the news today. They and many of the local business owners I have talked with are afraid to speak out for fear of similar retaliation by people attempting to destroy their livelihood or governmental regulatory agencies punishing their businesses.

These people have families and bills, and cant risk arrest. Its distressing to think some may not have a place to go back to work. This should spur every American into action. Join a rally and demand the reopening of our state.

Thankfully, my livelihood is not at risk, which is why I have the privilege to focus on restoring California to normalcy not the new normalcy, the old one the one that aligns with our constitutional freedoms.

Freedoms that many Americans died to preserve. As Thomas Jefferson said, When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.

Curtis lives in Encinitas.

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Commentary: We protested the coronavirus restrictions in Encinitas. Here's why. - The San Diego Union-Tribune