"Creating Passionate Users" Is
a Money Blog in Disguise

Reason #1 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- It Makes the Case for Plain Speech

There is little plain talk in the personal finance literature. Why? Because the focus of most money “experts” is convincing those listening to them that they are “experts.”

I wish people wouldn’t fall for this. The big words and complicated buzz phrases make it hard to ask questions, though, don’t they? It’s not an accident. That’s the point! They could say what needs to be said in plain speech if they wanted to. They don’t want to. Obfuscation gives them an edge. It’s about keeping you in your place. That’s my take.

Kathy Sierra has obviously experienced the same sort of thing in the programming field. She compares a Normal who observes that: “I have a bad feeling about this, but I don’t know why” to an Expert who assures us that: “The answer is obvious -- we use our existing architecture to deploy a lightweight framework with standard protocols and...” The second guy carries the day because he sounds smart. What an expert! The first guy is a Normal who doesn’t sound so smart until he has a few moments to think things through but who really is the smarter of the two.

Take courage from what Kathy Sierra is telling us. The official experts are not necessarily the true experts. We all need to learn to be less in awe of these people. They are often not what they are made out to be.

Reason #2 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- It Assures Us That We Can Learn Things That Seem Hard If We Put In a Bit of Effort.

The single biggest problem that people have getting their finances under control is that they believe that the task is beyond them. Come to believe that the task is beyond you, and you won’t try. It’s worse than that. You will not try and you will come to feel guilt and shame for not trying. Then you will avoid any mention of the subject. If it comes up in conversation, you will all but put your fingers in your ears.

How is it that most money advisors seek to persuade you to save? They point out how you messed up by not saving more when you were younger. They scare you by painting a black picture of what your old age will be like if you don’t get with it. They intimidate you by bringing out tables with lots of Big Scary Numbers on them. Hello? This is supposed to help?

People do things they want to do. If you are seeking to get people to save, it’s a good idea to make them feel good about saving. It’s not such a hot idea to make them feel bad about saving.

Humans! Why do they have to be so darn complicated?

Reason #3 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- It’s Not an Accident that the Title Includes the Word “Passion”

Why is it that aspiring early retirees are able to save amounts that cause others to marvel? It’s because aspiring early retirees are passionate about their saving goals. We care about this stuff. So we achieve our goals. The rest is details.

Kathy Sierra has a graphic entitled “How Users Feel About Your Product or Service.” It shows a continuum of user feelings extending from “Love” to “Hate.” Both of those are marked “This is good.” In the middle, there is a large range of user reactions described as the “Zone of Mediocrity.” The message attached to that one is: “Here you’re screwed.”

No one ever began saving effectively because she learned about the compounding returns phenomenon. Every effective saver became an effective saver because the idea entered her head that saving effectively could change her life in some important way.

Nothing happens until somebody cares.

Reason #4 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- Kathy Sierra Pushes the Buttons of Some Techheads

Kathy Sierra is widely loved. I learned of her blog from a New York Times article that described death threats that were posted on the internet to intimidate her into silence. The blog entry on which she discussed this contained over 900 encouraging comments from people who know her writing and who love her for putting it forward. One of the comments made frequently was to ask how it could be that writing about software coding could generate feelings of such intense hate.

I know why. Or at least I have a clue. There is a certain personality type that might be described as “The Techhead.” As a general rule (there are exceptions), people with this personality type like to believe that they are in control of things. They are intelligent and they use their intelligence to assure themselves that they are in control. This personality type dominates in the field of software writing. It also dominates in the field of personal finance.

Kathy Sierra drives some with this personality type positively bonkericious. They fundamentally can’t take her. She’s smart. She talks about feelings. People relate to what she says. People like her. She persuades. She pops the control illusion balloon that these people do not want to see popped. She doesn’t wake up in the morning seeking to pop control illusion balloons. It’s something that just sort of happens when she opens her mouth.

I’ve popped a few control illusion balloons of my own in recent years, of course. It wasn’t hard for me to gain a sense of the reason why Kathy Sienna’s writing on programming could set some people off.

We need people with the Techhead mindset in the personal finance field. We don’t need so many of them, however. We need to bring some of the other types into the field if we want to figure out what really works. The techheads understand some things well. Some of them have problems accepting that there are some important things that they do not understand well at all.

We need to get a better mix of personality types in the personal finance advice field. That would help a lot.

Reason #5 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- Kathy Sienna Talks About the Role Played by Fear and Other Icky Emotions

Ask a non-saver why she doesn’t save and she will likely give you a response that is some variation of the claim that: “I just don’t have enough money coming in right now.” She’s lying. It’s not one of the truly bad lies. It’s the sort of lie that we humans tell ourselves and others on a daily basis just to get ourselves from one end of the day to the other.

We don’t tell the truth about why we don’t save because the truth is scary. Our money decisions determine whether we achieve our Life Goals or not. It’s scary for us to recognize that we possess such power (even though it’s a good thing to possess).

A money advisor who cannot talk about fear and other icky emotions is a money advisor not able to do the job that most needs to be done.

We have built walls around money topics. We try to push them off into a corner where they are “dealt with” by people who possess a great expertise with numbers and a great ability to change the topic when those icky emotions pop up into the conservation. It sounds to me that this is a problem that comes up in the software programming trade too.

Emotions trump numbers. It’s not just me saying it anymore. Kathy Sienna is saying it too!

Reason #6 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- Soft Stuff Matters

They used to say on the Motley Fool board that I was the expert on “the soft side” of early retirement. They meant it kindly and there’s a good bit of truth in the idea. I never felt entirely comfortable with it, however. There’s a patronizing suggestion in that claim that “the hard stuff” (the numbers stuff) is the stuff that matters most and that the soft stuff is a nice add-on for those seeking extra credit.

That’s a backwards take, in my assessment. The numbers stuff really does matter. I don’t say different. And I ain’t no expert on the hard-side stuff; that much is fair to say. I think that the soft-side stuff is at least as important as the hard-side stuff, though. I’m biased. You might want to take that into consideration when assessing this claim. It really is what I believe, anyway.

Kathy Sierra has a blog entry entitled “Code Like a Girl.” It’s about whether programmers should care whether their code is “attractive” and “elegant.” It’s the soft side vs. hard side debate showing up in another context. Read her arguments and see if they persuade you of why the soft side stuff matters more than some realize in the personal finance field and in the programming field both.

Reason #7 Why Creating Passionate Users is a Money Blog in Disguise -- It Maintains that We Learn By Talking to Each Other

Community, community, community. Why is that Rob Bennett individual always going on about community?

I’ve been here since the first days. I’ve noticed that we learn the most when we are talking to each other. We don’t learn the most from reading words on a computer screen. We don’t learn the most from hearing speeches. We learn the most from talking things over. I’ve seen this proven true over and over again.

Kathy Sienna argues in favor of conversational writing. She says that that is what works when trying to explain things to humans. Code writing for humans! Whatever will they think of next?