Month: March 2018

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For once, I’d like to see a very wealthy person create a foundation dedicated to solving First World Problems.  Everybody is trying to feed the hungry, house the homeless, cure cancer and so on.  But first world problems get totally neglected!

People denigrate first world problems, but they are worth solving!  I mean survival and pain avoidance are great, but if we’re all just trying to help each other not get sick and die, who will push humanity forward?

Plus, solving first world problems tends to have all kinds of wider benefits over time.  While all the Good People of the world were doing things like helping poor people get better shoes so they could walk everywhere in less pain, some guy thought, “You know the real problem? Rich people need more toys. I’ll invent a horseless carriage for them to mess around with!”  That horseless carriage, a luxury for the rich, did more to help the poor when it bloomed into a world-changing automobile industry than any amount of free shoes.  Who worries about walking shoes when you can ride the bus?

Cell phone?  First world problem solver.  Most people could use payphones, or if they had a phone, couldn’t afford long-distance calls.  Somebody decided the big problem with the world was that rich people needed to get that annoying phone cord out of the way, and also put phones in cars to be able to call their limo driver after dinner so they could make a timely exit, and also be able to walk on the beach while making business deals so they could demonstrate their dominance in movies scenes from Wall Street.  The cordless, then the car phone, then mobile phone come along.  Totally ridiculous bauble for the rich.  Who needs to talk on the phone in the car?

Now cell phones are the lifeblood of people in even the poorest countries and they conduct banking and business on the cheap, plentiful devices!  Solving that first world phone cord problem did more for the poor than all the charity of the age combined!

Just one more reason our best minds should be working on solving first world problems.  There are many, many more first world problems left to be solved, and the list grows every day.  Like how to stop Starbucks employees from always putting the siphole in line with the little paper seam in the latte cup so I spill a few drops on my skinny jeans when I take a sip.  Whoever solves that deserves a Nobel Prize!  This is the kind of work that will drive humanity forward!

As I accumulate wealth, I think I’ll get working on establishing the First World Problems Foundation.  Maybe you can join me.  Together, we can remove small annoyances from the lives of the super prosperous, and thus make the world a better place.

(I thought of this as a standup comedy bit, but since I don’t do standup comedy, I decided to post it here.  Doesn’t translate into writing as well as in my imaginary standup routine.  Just picture everyone laughing as I flawlessly deliver it.)

Why the Worst Crypto Networks Will Be the Biggest

How to Get Work Done: a Primer

Five Ways to Create Value Through a Blog Post

Stop Identifying as a Student

Try to Forget You Have a Fan Base

How to Learn a Language

Make Your Own Rules

Manned flight is impossible.  Computers will never be smaller than a house.  Space flight is “Utter bilge”.  The food pyramid.

One doesn’t have to look far to find embarrassing, peer-reviewed, max-credentialed, decades-held-as-orthodoxy proclamations by the most respected experts in the world.

Every single successful business idea or invention heard orders of magnitude more, “Not interested”, “No”, “It’s doomed to fail”, or, “It’s impossible”, than “Yes”.

Usually, the greater the paper, “official” expertise, the more likely to be wrong about the future.  All that purchased prestige is backward looking.  Conferred by mostly stagnating bodies on those who’ve mastered and regurgitated the past with the most accuracy.  It’s not surprising that experts on the past, frozen in time and protective of their rear-view knowledge, would be most confidently blind to the possibilities of the future.

Does this mean expertise is a meaningless concept?

Of course not.  It’s tremendously useful.  Especially when two conditions hold:

1. It’s earned by the value of outcomes produced
2. It’s accountable to the ever changing market

The more it’s earned by politicking, rule following, Inner Ring seeking, and “paying dues”, the less trustworthy.  The less directly accountable to the right-now and shifting market – the more protected via subsidies, cult-like yes-man status, and competition killing – the less trustworthy.

Knowledge about what is and what works as demonstrated in practice is a sounder place to seek expertise than theoretical knowledge about what might or might not be possible.  I’d trust a mother of four’s expertise on the experience of childbirth more than a medical professional who’s studied birth but never been there live, let alone given birth.  Especially if that professional earned their accolades by sucking up to the stuffy status quo, protected from profit and loss signals, and automatically assumed to be right in the popular imagination.

Wherever possible, look for outcomes over opinions, and market accountability over stagnant status.

Recommended reading:

The Fatal Conceit (book)
The Pretense of Knowledge (speech)
Competition as a Discovery Procedure (paper)

A friend mounted a defense of the concept of ‘wage slavery’ and asked what I thought.

I had several problems with his arguments directly, but I had a hard time getting really passionate about whether or not someone can be called a wage slave, and if so, what to do about it.  I tend to think it’s an incoherent concept from the outset, and whether it is or isn’t, completely free and open markets are the solution.

But what interested me more is a more subtle thing lurking in the discussion.  The use of words themselves impacts the outcomes desired.

Using the phrase “wage slavery” may make escaping it harder.

Metaphors and language matter. If you see yourself as a slave, your imagination shrinks, and your sense of what’s possible declines. Verbiage associated with victimhood, etc. have a powerful self-enforcing tendency.

This doesn’t mean you can happy-thoughts your way into a better life, but framing matters.

I think of all the people I’ve known over the years. The ones who see their work in terms of wage slavery never have 1/10 the opportunity or progress as those around them who do not. They don’t see it, or it never comes because they’re so damn down-trodden and negative.

Even the extreme case portrayed in the movie Shawshank redemption, where Andy Dufresne was a literal prisoner, and Brooks Hatlen was not, the latter felt so trapped he killed himself (because he defined himself as a prisoner and couldn’t see beyond it even when he wasn’t) and the other escaped – mentally and physically.

It’s also noteworthy that many of those we wealthier people see as wage slaves do not see themselves as such.

So it may be the case that, whether or not you can get away with defining something as wage slavery, you are more likely to overcome it (from the perspective within, or a third party) if you refuse to see it that way and instead define it as a shifting set of desires and choices about how to achieve them, no matter how few or unpleasant they may be.

The reverse effect is also possible.  If you define your situation as “the unpleasant result of limited options” you may in some cases be less likely to seek an extreme or risky exit necessary to move past it.  Starkly defining it as “slavery” may provide the raw framing needed to motivate escape.

My takeaway is that we are playing a series of games with language and metaphor (calling it a game does not mean it’s trivial!).  The games that best help us move closer to who we want to become are the best games.  So if playing the game “I’m a wage slave”, or, “Those people are wage slaves” makes you less likely and able to become a superior version of yourself, stop playing it.  If it helps, play it.  (But don’t expect or force others to play the games that work for you).

I’m giving a talk to a packed lecture hall.  It’s about personal growth, career progress, how to build your future, start a company or something along those lines.

I open by asking the audience a question,

“How many of you have more than two or three unread emails sitting in your inbox?”

The vast majority of hands go up, smiling and curious about what’s coming.

I say, “OK, everyone with your hand up, leave.  Go home.  Don’t come to a talk like this until your inbox is at zero.  Thanks.”

That’s what I imagined this morning while laying in bed half awake.  It was a great daydream. (Except for the travel involved in giving a talk. Ugh).

And it’s right.

Creativity “hacks”, time optimization, or ideas on how to change your life, an industry, or the world are more than useless if you don’t have dominion over the things in your nearest sphere of influence, like your inbox.

In fact, until you achieve and maintain inbox zero and a 24 hour response time to important communication (which is not that hard if you have a few ounces of discipline and persistence), the other tips and ideas will be a distraction more than an aid.  You don’t need to know about advanced tips for working with teams if you don’t even know how to work with your own tasks and communications.

I’ve met people who do a lot of stuff and have badly mismanaged inboxes.  I’ve also seen tall houses built on shoddy foundations.  It can be done, but every new addition or improvement is a bad idea, because it only adds to the value that will be lost due to inevitable foundation problems.

Inbox zero is an especially important task for those who are looking for that next big thing to make professional progress.  They don’t have any concrete jobs or paths.  They’re attending conferences and workshops to find far-flung ideas and inspiration to cobble together some amazing, creative project.  They’re always searching for that elusive ten-step plan that will get them results.  Yet the easy, obvious thing they have complete control over is running roughshod over them.  Their inbox haunts them and begs to be slapped back into shape, but they ignore it, chasing shiny objects over the horizon instead.

Sure, some day when you get 1,000 non-spam emails a day because you’ve created such a dent in the world you can approach your inbox differently.  Until then, pointing out that high-demand people don’t always respond to emails so you shouldn’t either is a cop-out.

Get your shit together.  Start with your inbox.  Until you have that mastered, and you use it like a pro, none of the other stuff will be good for you anyway.

By the way, this is no new insight of mine.  My daydream was probably prompted not just by age-old wisdom, but the ever-present discussions these days about Jordan Peterson’s phrase, “Make your bed”, which I was discussing with colleagues yesterday.  He’s right.

 

Last night was poker night, which is always great fun.

I tend to be pretty bombastic and blab and trash talk the whole night, and at one point I said something to the effect of, “We have a lot more guys here tonight than usual, so I’m gonna have to adjust my strategy and play more aggressively.”

One of my friends laughed and said I had it literally backwards.

My odds of having the best hand are worse with more players, so I should be more cautious with the same hand.

I half-heartedly tried to work through it and see if I could make sense of my instinct for aggressiveness, but it was in the middle of poker night, so I didn’t pursue it much and instead focused on my beer.

It kept bugging me this morning.  Why do I always feel I need to bet on weaker hands to have a chance at winning when there are more players, vs being able to wait for better hands before betting in a smaller game?

Take a 4 person vs. 8 person game.

Clearly, the odds that my hand will be good relative to the ranking of all possible poker hands is the same in each scenario.  I get two cards out of 52 regardless.

And in the larger game, it’s also the case that the odds that my hand is better than all the other players hands are lower, since there are more players I have to beat.  Having a hand better than 3 other people is more likely than a hand better than 7 other people.

So this would imply that I should be willing to bet on weaker hands in the 4 person game than I would in the 8 person game, since I likely need a stronger hand to win the latter.

That all makes sense, but it kept bothering me that, in my experience, I always feel that to survive or win in a larger game I have to be more aggressive, not the other way round.

I think I figured out why.

In a 4 person game, there is less likely to be a raise or a bet in general than in an 8 person game.  It’s not uncommon for everyone to “check” in a 4 person game, which means I can be a little more patient and choosy about which hands to bet on, since I’m not forced into a bet or fold choice as often.

In an 8 person game, the odds that every person around the table checks are much lower, as someone is likely to either have a good hand, or have a more aggressive personality.  This means that in order to survive and win and not just bleed blinds all night, I am pushed into bet/no bet situations more frequently, and I realize that I’m going to have to start betting a bit more aggressively than I would in a game with fewer raises.

Yes, when I do bet, my odds of winning are lower (only assuming that several other players stayed in, which is often not the case.  Typically even in an 8 person game, I’m betting only against 1 or 2 others who didn’t fold), but my odds of winning by never betting are zero, and with more bets in general, I have to bet a little more than I would in a 4 person game.

Of course, none of this factors in non-mathematical elements like the emotion of the event and how it changes with different personalities, more people leading to more distracting side conversations, people getting more impatient and making crazy bets because they want to win or lose so they can go home, etc. etc.  Maybe those factors alter the way I feel about larger vs. smaller games and it’s not so much about the math.

Or I’m just an idiot who’s gut is leading him to irrational strategies.  A definite possibility.  (Still, in the history of poker night, I’m the winningest attendee from a rotating cast (or at least tied for first), so I’ll take it.  Hi Cameron!)

You can’t handle the truth!

That famous line from A Few Good Men is memorable and offensive.  Of course I can handle the truth!  I’m a curious, rational, truth-seeking person.

Until it comes to myself.

It’s not that hard to be truth-seeking (or at least truth-open) about other people or the world around me.  I can handle difficult realities when they are out of my control.  The price tag for my car repairs, the likelihood of a catastrophic asteroid strike, and even bad news about my genetics are truths I’m braced to face.

What I don’t want to know are the things I’m doing wrong to cause my own suffering.  That’s the scary, hard truth.

Being in utter darkness about why I’m not getting what I want is more comfortable than the knowledge that it’s because of some attitude or behavior of mine that’s out of whack.  It’s easier to handle being treated badly by someone for no apparent reason than to find it it’s because I’m an unpleasant conversationalist.

I’m not alone in aversion to self-knowledge.  It seems to be part of the human condition.

It’s one of the reasons employers rarely give reasons for not hiring candidates.  It’s not too hard to handle not getting a job offer without knowing why.  It affords the comfort of conjecture.  Maybe the company is just stupid.  Maybe the boss’s nephew had an inside track all along.  Those possibilities are livewithable.  I’m not going to send an angry email to the company if I don’t know why I didn’t get hired.

But if I find out I wasn’t hired because something I said offended the interviewer, they think I have weak attention to detail, and the way I handled a question about my previous work came across as cavalier, I’m going think they are wrong.  I’m gonna be mad.  Employers know that the more detailed rejection feedback they provide me, the more likely I am to send an angry response.  More information about how I can improve means more points of disagreement and more fodder for rage.

Truths I can control are also the most important.  That’s what makes them so scary.  I know they can submarine me.  And I know it doesn’t just take mental toughness and acceptance like truths out of my control.  It also takes ownership, action, and discipline.

Ouch.

But there’s hope in this too.

If I can learn to seek truths about myself with the same openness as I seek truths about the world outside myself, I will be invincible.  If I can handle what I discover and maintain self-honesty about my self-knowledge, there is nothing I can’t do.  In other words, the greatest single determinant of my quality of life is something within my control.

That’s the comforting, terrifying truth.

One of the most valuable and difficult to define attributes is judgement.

Knowing how to read and react to a situation, when to say/not say things, and other “soft”, social, and emotional intelligences.  I’m not sure if judgement can be taught to someone who lacks it.  Judgement can certainly get refined through experience, and someone who has it can gain highly specific forms based on contextual feedback.

I’ve been using the broad catch-all word “judgement” to describe this trait for a long time.  Yesterday it occurred to me that judgment manifests in two very different ways.  Or maybe it has two levels.

Level one is knowledge judgement.  People who know the appropriate action to take in a given situation.  This so rare and precious.  People who get it often come with a proposed solution that perfectly fits the situation and navigates the nuance.  They always propose the right solution or close to it, but they still propose a solution.

Level two is action judgement.  These people know what action to take and they take it without asking or getting validation from others.  They might ruffle feathers in an authoritarian structure by acting before asking, but in a more open and dynamic structure, they have far more upside than people only with level one judgement.  An early stage startup, for example, will suffer if an employee always needs to get official approval for their proposed action, vs. someone who sees the need to act first and discuss later.  Level two judgement is not just about knowing what actions to take and taking them, but knowing when acting without asking is in order and when further deliberation is warranted.

Of course, if you don’t have knowledge judgement at level one, the worst thing is to try to go level two and act without asking.  That’s the worst.  But if you are good at knowing how to read and react to a situation, the next step is knowing when to do so without double checking with someone else first.

We run an exercise in the Praxis writing module where participants write a blog post, find the total word count, then go back and edit until it has half as many words as the first time through.

I can’t really think of any exceptions to when the final, halved draft is better than the original.  I’ve done this exercise myself many times with the same results.

It reveals how hard it is to translate ideas to language efficiently.  Writing is a way of processing ideas.  I usually begin with a rough sense what I want to convey and the typing teases out the rest.  This is one of the reasons I blog every day and it’s a great way to unearth my thoughts.  But it leads to overworded communication and less than razor-sharp thinking.  It takes greater intellectual power to communicate the same idea in fewer words.

So to get tighter in thinking and communication, cut your words in half.

There’s another challenge I’ve been issuing myself and a few others recently:  Take whatever ideas and goals you have and double them.

The basic insight in both of these exercises is that our ambitions are too small and our words too big.

We waste a lot of time and talk and energy on ideas and aspirations too small to warrant it.  Why not dramatically tighten the talk and radically expand the thoughts?

Try it.

Professors and teachers: The best way to increase the quality and engagement of students is to separate your instruction from accredited institutions.

Don’t complain about low quality students; they’re not there for you and mostly don’t care about your ideas. They’re there for a piece of paper they think is a magic ticket to acceptance in the world and they suffer through your class as a cost.

You’re too good to deal with students like that who don’t value your work!

Step out from behind the subsidized, cartelized, credentialized system and offer your instruction to excited customers in the market!

Ask Thaddeus Russell how much better Renegade U customers are than students in college courses for credit. Ask Austin Batchelor how amazing his tens of thousands of aspiring artist pupils on Udemy are. Ask anyone who’s talked at a conference or seminar that didn’t offer credit but was filled with people who actually wanted to hear your ideas!

Don’t be afraid. There is a massive market for knowledge and good instruction.

If you’re good, you’re likely to make more money, because you’ll reap directly what customers value and won’t be subsidizing low quality colleagues or administrators. The upside is limitless.

Of course if you’re not good at conveying ideas, you’d better get good or you won’t make as much. This is a healthy discipline!

And no, you won’t lose “academic freedom”, you’ll have more.

The world is so full of opportunity for hard-working intellectuals to make more money, interact with far better minds, and have more fun if they can muster the imagination and courage to stop chaining their work to the musty halls of accredited paper mills.

The revolution is well underway.

Whenever I talk with a free-market professor about the silliness of subsidized, cartelized, bureaucratized academia and how it devalues and stifles their work, it reminds me of the (apocryphal?) statement made by F.A. Hayek near the end of his life.

Supposedly, he said, “I might be an anarchist if I were a younger man.”

He was too old, too tired, and had already fought hard enough for his ideas and didn’t feel up to the challenge of taking them to their logical conclusion.

C’mon profs.  Don’t undersell yourselves and settle for a drip of government cheese and classrooms full of unwilling customers.  I believe in your ability to crush it in the open market; maybe you should too!

After all, being an intellectual outside of academia has never been easier.

 

Continuing on yesterday’s theme.

The entire education apparatus, from kindergarten through college, teaches skills relevant to how to succeed in academia, and nothing relevant to how to succeed in the free-market.

Take writing as one example.

In school, you write to criteria determined by others on topics of interest to them then submit it to a single “expert” to review it in secret and tell you if they think it’s worthy. Just like the academic peer review and publication process. But nothing like any kind of valuable writing in the real world, where you get no assignments, you are exposed to the full market, you need to motivate relevant action among your target audience regardless of “expert” opinion, and you have real profit/loss at stake.

Imagine a world in which all kids were sent to auto mechanic school for the first few decades of life.

Some percentage of them, those destined for a future with cars and mechanical problems, would love it.  It’d be a great fit for them.  They’d spend their time focused on the skills they enjoy and that will bring them value in their careers as mechanics.

For most, it would be wasteful and annoying.  They’d spend years and years being prodded into memorizing and repeating facts and tasks that they don’t care much for and that bear no resemblance to what they’ll do for a career.

Of course, those who grow up to be mechanics would think the whole system is great.  They’d be genuinely baffled by people who dislike it or think it should be skipped or scrapped.  They’d go on about how valuable all of the skills and habits gained in the system are for life.

You don’t have to imagine an educational system like that, because we already have it.

Instead of mechanic school, it’s teacher school.  And college is professor school.

The entire system, top to bottom, is designed by and for by teachers.  All the things learned and methods of learning are valuable nowhere in any part of the real world except the academic professions.  The most effective learning happens just from being around things and being in an incentive structure that rewards certain behaviors.  School means you spend all your time around educators (and none of it around any other real world professions) and in an incentive system that rewards things they like.  So that’s exactly what you learn, how to live like an academic.  As I’ve described elsewhere, school is a 16 year apprenticeship for professors.

It’s no surprise then that teachers and professors are baffled by people who complain about the flourescently lit hell of classroom cramming and credential chasing.  They loved the whole experience and it taught them all the stuff they needed to succeed in their careers as academics and educators.  It’s also no surprise that it’s such an epic, colossal waste for most people who want to enter other parts of the vast market.

There’s nothing bad about auto mechanic school.  But it’s easy to spot the absurdity of forcing every person to spend 12 or 16 or 20 years in it and telling them it will be valuable no matter their interests, goals, or future career.  It’s no less absurd to do what we currently do and force everyone to go to professor school for most of their young life.