KNOWING NORTH

February 29th, 2020

A good explorer can go pretty far by just knowing which way is north.  The quintessential navigational tool, the humble compass, points out north for us, something that a great explorer can figure out by just looking at the sky.

The lingo of navigation forms a metaphor that we use everywhere.  In what direction should I take my career?  How should we steer this company?

For each of these we might ask what the metaphorical true north is?  What’s the one most important marker to help us understand which way we are going?

At first it might seem as though each domain in life might have it’s own true north.  Business would maybe be profits, friends and dating might be love, something like that.  But all of these can converge on a single house of light.

There is one star that we can use to guide them all.

Nearly everything that we do in life aside from solitude for it’s own sake is undertaken in order to elicit a response from other people.  We show up to a job and do what we’re told because the response a week later is a paycheck.

There is one response central to nearly every interaction that we can strive for, one that permeates all domains and optimizes the direction that is most likely to lead to success.

The only question that you need to think about in order to guide your instincts is:

How do you get someone to genuinely say ‘thank you’?

If a product is truly great and one that people are thankful to have, they will gladly pay.

If a friend is grateful for your presence in their life, you will be loved.

But for so many things we look at it backwards, looking for what the payment will be before we provide our service or effort. 

Better to forget about it

and

Just give all you can to the world. 

What does it really matter if you get something in return?  Why care?  Thinking about the potential reward is like doing the dishes before you’ve even eaten.  That sort of thinking is backwards.

Just do and give what you can.

We are an animal that thrives on reciprocity. And great work, or amazing gifts that we might release upon the world?  These don’t go unrewarded.  Sure someone might try to snatch the credit, but if you can do it once, you can do it again, and again and again.

Squabbling over some little bit of coin isn’t just petty, it takes up time and energy that could be better  spent generating more generosity.

DISHONEST COMPUTER

February 28th, 2020

Honesty is the master variable in life.  It’s the reason why we have money: it allows us to trust strangers to a hitherto unheard of degree.  Because we need to interact with so many strangers, we don’t have time nor the memory capacity to vet them all, so money truncates this process.  Like anything, it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

If everyone maintained the ability to be 100% honest, there would actually be less of a need for money.  Most people can see this for themselves in personal relations.  We generally don’t charge friends and family or at least we don’t charge them as much if say it’s business related, and we certainly don’t nickel and dime them because the degree of trust is much higher with those people than say compared with a random stranger. 

Dishonesty is the most efficient disease for rotting close relationships.  To highlight this in another way, consider this question:  would you buy a computer that lies about the information it has stored?  Say you are tracking your finances on a spreadsheet, but every time you bring it up, the numbers are different.

Such a computer is only good as a practical joke, and it’s certainly not something anyone would buy for the same reasons we actually do buy and use computers.

And yet, many of us, often by our own complicity keep company that is quite like this dishonest computer.  The ambient dishonesty is perhaps fairly low, and perhaps that’s ok, but more likely, the harmless white lie keeps the slope to more serious deceptions slippery. 

The strange thing is that most white lies are seen as a form of convenience, even though it requires additional memory in the long term.  In the short term it might result in less effort and seem efficient, but in the long term this can be wildly inaccurate.  The pun is, of course, intended.

Best to maintain the lowest tolerance possible, from one’s self and others.

After all, there’s certainly the possibility that our computer forgets something we need, that it crashes, or a bug disrupts it’s usual processes.

Not even a computer is perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth striving for.

FARMING LUCK

February 27th, 2020

If you need to make an important free throw, it’s much more likely to go well if you can make an enormous number of practice shots.  Each practice shot presumably raises the probability that the important free throw that counts will actually go in the hoop.

Compare that to a situation where you are allowed to prepare for the free throw in any other way imaginable except practice shots.  How would you prepare for the one single shot?  All the calculus in world isn’t going to help, even if you can learn all of the technical details of the arc that will put a ball into a hoop.

The difference between the two and the lack of wisdom in the latter are obvious.  And yet this comparison forms a pretty good analogy for the way we think about opportunities and carry out plans.  For example starting a business carries with it the cultural expectation of having a thorough business plan – a structure that is supposed to map perfectly the arc from initial investment up to early adopters, then first customers and all the way to profitability. How does this example map on to the previous discussion of free throws? 

Another way to think about the dynamics of success is with farming, or even gardening.  Even when planting just a single plant, we don’t put just one seed into the soil.  We put a bunch of them, more or less depending on the species of plant and the different likelihood of sprouting that each species have.  If a plant has a lower chance of successfully sprouting than we put more seeds in, which raises the chance that we’ll get one, or a couple seedlings.

These examples, of planting many seeds and taking numerous free throws are ways of hedging bets and mitigating the chance of a downside.  But the business plan is an example of putting all your eggs in one basket, but unlike all the seeds in one planted spot, the basket can drop and the downside is that we loose everything, all our effort, energy and investment. 

Ok, but how to go about something like a business plan?

Sure, it can be very useful to sketch out an arc towards profitability, but it becomes dramatically less useful through time as the plan fails to succeed.  What’s required here is a willingness to change the plan or even abandon it all together, and treat every little step of the plan as an experiment that gathers information that once interpreted might point us in a different direction than the planned path.

The gathered information, or the feedback is the most important part.  Like with the free throws, each shot indicates how we should change.  The ball bounced off of the left side of the rim, so the next throw needs to be a little more to the right.  The ball bounced right off the backboard?  So the next shot need to be a little lighter so it will fall a little shorter.  The idea of iterating is very intuitive when it comes to the physical world like this.  Feedback is instant, and that distance between instances of feedback is key.

The faster we can iterate our action, the more often we get new information, the faster we can fine tune our direction. 

But here’s the thing, no matter how strong and finely tuned our mental model, or no matter how many free throws we take, the result of our next action will always have a degree of unpredictability.

Even Tiger Woods misses 2 foot puts every now and then.

Whether throwing a ball at a hoop or initiating the next phase of a business plan, there’s simply no way to be absolutely certain what the outcome will be.  But the more we can poke around for the right direction and the faster we can do this, the more likely we are to hit our target. 

There’s really two concepts at play here and they are both methods for cultivating, or farming luck.

In one case we have multiple irons in the fire.  Perhaps we have a couple of projects on the go in order to see if one of them might take off, just like the seeds in the ground.  Nurture them all and see if any grow.  The one that pops up first is maybe the one to nurture. 

The second is iterating a single project.  Like a bloodhound constantly sniffing around, each action we can take with the project can help us figure out which way to go if that action gains any real feedback. 

Compare this to planning and working on something in isolation for many years and then finally releasing it.  This sort of situation only creates one opportunity for feedback. 

Now how well does it seem that situation will be at cultivating and capturing luck. 

In fact, has anything really been cultivated?

Not every seed sprouts.

FRUGALITY

February 26th, 2020

A need or discussion of frugality creates an association with poverty.  Money and mindset gurus don’t talk too much about frugality because it implies a restricted state: it indicates that a person doesn’t have the ability to increase the value they create and capture.  Frugality is about resorting the way resources are used in order to keep more, and this requires some sort of limit to the resources that are coming in – quite counter to the great heights advertised by your lifestyle guru.  The lure that such money and mindset gurus use isn’t that you’ll become better off. . . and here are the strategies.  That’s not exciting.  Such gurus create attraction by claiming you will become spectacularly rich, and

then of course there will be no need for something as plebian as frugality.

Advice on this front often takes coffee or avocado toast as an example.  Stop drinking the coffe and you’ll save X amount of dollars every month, that’s Y amount of dollars every year! and just think about what you could do with that money.

That last bit, about what you can do with money, might seem like the optional addendum that’s so obvious that it doesn’t necessarily need be said, but it’s the most important part of the discussion about frugality, and not in the way one might first expect.

The question arises: what exactly ARE we doing with the money we do have?

Most expenses perpetuate due to mild addictions and simply trying to ‘fit in’.  Coffee certainly qualifies as an addiction, and maybe avocado toast fits somewhere between ‘fitting in’ and our constant ridiculous conviction that to go more than 12 hours without eating during which you’re not spending most of that time sleeping is unhealthy insanity. 

Confronting the facts of fasting, and experimenting with the practice in an informed strategic way certainly makes it look like the incredible quantity of food that we consume in the modern age is perhaps better described as an addiction as opposed to something as quaint as ‘maintaining health.’

Fasting aside, is a daily coffee and toast smeared with healthy fat really the best places to look in order to figure out where and how we spend our money or save it?

The real things to look at are the ones that seem non-negotiable.

These become more obvious if we make some radical comparisons.  First we might ponder: harking back to the time just before the United States was founded, when Europeans were invading North America, how much money did it take for someone to survive?  At first thoughts of inflation and conversion might come to mind, but generally, the answer should be obvious: Not much at all.  People built their own houses, they knew something about farming and how to raise livestock, they knew how to preserve food.

But let’s make an even more radical comparison.  Those early settlers were equipped with a farming mindset, they were trying to make agriculture work.  So let’s go back even farther to a time before agriculture, and ask:

How much money would you need to be a hunter gatherer?

The answer here doesn’t just highlight in extreme the previous answer, it takes it to it’s limit.  It wouldn’t cost anything to be a hunter gatherer.  In comparison to modern times, the idea of money was nearly non existent. 

The difference is, of course, knowledge.  Practically no one in the modern age has the knowledge required to be an effective hunter gatherer.

But the point of going down this rabbit hole of comparing human subsistence living is to point out one fact: 

With the right knowledge and application, living is free.

Nothing could sound more painfully untrue for anyone taking part in the modern world.  Living expenses for a huge majority are at their limit, and many live on a razors edge of balancing money that feels like desperation.  Even those who have more than enough to subsist are not without financial stress.

All of this is to highlight the unquestioned areas of expense.  Sure it feels unquestionably necessary to pay rent because of course, you need a place to live.  But is this true?  Or is it more a product of what everyone else is doing?  Just imagine for a moment if you didn’t have to pay rent.  How incredible would that be?

When asking such unusual questions that are veering away from the norm, we suddenly require a different framework for answering.  Instead of looking at what everyone else is doing, we have to think about what is actually physically possible.  Allred Alfred who founded the wildly successful distributed coding school called Lambda School lived in a car while he was looking for a way to start the school.  Countless others have found similar solutions.

This aspect of rent and living expenses is likely to play a huge role in the coming decades as work becomes more distributed through an internet connectivity that gains global coverage.  Soon it will be possible to live in the middle of nowhere and get paid.

The frugal individual looks for a way to make this happen now in some way. 

But hidden beneath this discussion of money resides the real target of frugality.

Real frugality doesn’t result in pinched pennies.

Frugality is about rearranging resources and action in order to maximize the one resource that we cannot make more of, namely: time.

True frugality creates free time.

TASK ENORMITY

February 25th, 2020

Those big dreams.  Those crowing achievements we fantasize about.  Those enormous goals that spring up in our mind with too much ease.

The idea of these things being complete.  Being a source of satisfaction for having done.  They can be a great source for moving forward.

But when we finally sit down to take on the task, we are all too likely to feel powerless, even just flustered at the size of the task, the complexity of it.

Where to even start?

The short prescription here is to just start anywhere, with anything.  Just chip off a small piece and get things going.  Once you’re busy figuring out a few details, you’re zoomed in and you’re no longer paying any mind to the elephant you’re trying to eat.

The more thoughtful prescription seeks to have a little more discrimination.

Going at that elephant time and again, and dreading it every time, we can begin to wonder about making the process more efficient.

It’s familiar enough: working up the courage by procrastinating with another snack, another YouTube video, another Wikipedia rabbit hole spawning countless tabs.  It doesn’t take too much of this to wonder how it can be circumvented.

Besides, it’s always so satisfying to finish a long stint of progress on a project.  The day feels won, and anything that comes after feels well deserved.

As opposed to tackling any small facet to chip away at, it’s best to categorize a few possible starting points.  Would any be more satisfying to see finished?  Are others just invisible grunt work, necessary but nothing anyone will ever see?  Which one is most likely to get us to ease into the work and just get started?

As an example, for many coding projects, there is a lot of invisible grunt work done behind the scenes to make something work.  But then there’s also some fun stuff, generally the user interface, which can be more exciting to work on because the results of the work materialize as you build them.  You quite literally get to see how it’s going and for those who enjoy this, it can be the thin edge of the wedge for getting started on a big project.  Tackling some invisible grunt work after finishing off another chunk is a lot easier:  that sense of fun is now replaced by the satisfaction of achievement, and that emotion can be used to tackle the less exciting things. 

Usually we’re prescribed to do things the other way around.  Do the hard unsexy thing first and then do the fun thing.  This makes a lot of sense when it comes to work and play, but when the two things in comparison are both work, the fun piece can be used as a springboard to gather enough emotional inertia to plow into the less sexy grunt work. 

The enormity of a task can only be dealt with by picking the smallest viable details to work on.  And what we choose to work on first often determines how quickly we do get to work.