Category: Commentary

Politics
Climate change
Artificial intelligence
Immigration
Aggregate economic data

Notice what they have in common?

I love to work.

Like most humans, I’m driven to build stuff. Grow wealth, opportunity, freedom, and influence. I get excited by building companies, technological growth, and personal growth.

But why?

You could chalk it up to materialism and say it’s a sickness of market culture. I don’t. That’s not why I do stuff. I’m interested in living free, finding truth, and feeling peace and beauty. Those aren’t acquired by worldly success or money. But the things required to move towards them often result in worldly success and money.

To find truth, to live free and feel fully alive, I need growth. Growth happens by overcoming meaningful challenges. Meaningful challenges almost always come from the process of building stuff. Building stuff takes work. That’s why I do it and that’s why I love it.

I build stuff because it’s the path to freedom and truth.

Drawing seems to be more about suppression than invention.

I’ve always been terrible at it, but today I tried to make a realistic face drawing and it came out kinda okay. My friend told me not to draw objects, but to draw shadow starting darkest to lightest.

It was a breakthrough. For the first time, I get drawing. I understand it. It’s not about fine motor skills or amazing imagination. It’s about shutting down the left brain. It’s an exercise in smothering the object oriented completionist in me and drawing only what shades (not objects!) I actually see without trying to make them into something.

The representation emerges from the negative space. It’s a weird breakdown of the way my brain processes the world. It’s hard to suppress the connection making logic that interprets interplay of light as a world of things. It’s like shutting down intelligence and becoming nothing but a lens that doesn’t distinguish what it sees.

Still, it’s ridiculously easy compared to the mystical idea I had of drawing. I’m excited to try some more!

Competition is hard. But it’s harder to not compete.

Competitive environments and mindsets are everywhere. They’re sometimes fun and on a macro scale produce great outcomes. But on the individual level it’s not always best. There are three phases. Phase one is discovery, where competition creates too much pressure and hinders learning. After some discovery and basic mastery, the second phase thrives with competition. It demands it. Leveling up from good to great happens when you can rise to a competitive occasion. But then there’s phase three. This is the ascendant, or innovative phase. This is where better won’t cut it. This is where different is needed. Once you learn to win the game, you’ve gotta learn to create new games.

If you’re trying for phase three, competition is a dangerous distraction. Your familiarity with competitive pressure from phase two will draw you to it. Its siren song will pull your focus away from creating new games and into the reactive challenge mode of trying to win the old games.

It’s here where you’ve got to ignore everyone else. It’s here where you’ve got to get free from any external definition of success or failure. It’s here where you’ve got to conceive games where to create them is to play them and to play them is to win. These are the games that are uniquely you, and by definition, above competition.

There’s an old economist joke that Development Economists are the least developed economists.

I think people deep into personal development are sometimes the least developed persons.

What makes a deep, productive, progressing, valuable, and interesting person seems to be a person who is deeply interested in what they are doing at any time. Whether monotonous labor, a hobby, family life, books, food, fitness, or anything else. People who just find the world interesting – whether because they choose to see uninteresting stuff as interesting, or because they choose to do only stuff they find interesting – are well developed people.

People perpetually in search of ‘professional growth’, and ‘personal development’ because they think it’s good and noble tend to be more flat and boring and less developed than intellectually hedonistic interest seekers.

I find myself more boring when I start studying an area directly related to what I’m doing with the intention of leveling up because I feel I ‘should’. While building a business, the more business books I read the less I enjoy myself and the less interesting and intelligent I become as a business builder. Paradoxical but true for me. When I step back and just consume things that fascinate me, I end up having more fun being more interesting, and building a better business to boot! I see and make novel connections. I’m not just mimicking other stuff, but creating new patterns.

I am a huge fan of investing in myself and becoming a better version every day. But the way I try to do it is by irresponsibly following my interests wherever they lead rather than feeling pressure to study anything in particular or specialize in things directly applicable to what I’m doing.

Prices are information. They provide both info and incentive for individual actors to help them determine how to allocate resources. I love prices and the way they emerge.

But on a massive scale and when aggregated, they can get pretty wild. You can see anything you want in the info they convey. Especially in nascent markets.

There’s another crypto bull run going on, after a long ‘crypto winter’. No one really knows why the prices are climbing, though everyone will do their best to figure it out and tell you. There’s nothing that has really changed since the last big run up and dip. In fact, the brand leader BTC has arguably gotten technologically less feasible since then. No major advancements or breakthroughs in usage, tech, or adoption. (Yes, I know, fans of each coin will list 100 things that have happened. My point is that none of these are clear and compelling to general audience sufficient to explain the price spike). The only big happening is Facebook announcing the creation of their own coin. This could either be a threat to BTC and others, or a boon. Or nothing at all. It’s hard to tell. You would expect those betting on each of these three outcomes to more or less cancel each other out, rather than the bulls to dominate the market and drive up price.

I love massive run-ups. I also love massive dips. Not so much for the financial outcome (though I hold some crypto and have benefited from low buying prices and high selling prices at times). I love them because they are entertaining and revealing. People can’t help but show their feelings in a massive bull or bear market. You learn a lot about the state of crypto fans, traders, and doubters in the big swings. Mostly what I learn is that vocal crypto fans are almost entirely fans for gambling purposes. Very few care or know about anything but price. There’s a small cluster behind each coin that cares about use cases and development, and a small spread of agnostics who are interested in the crypto market’s overall real world application. Otherwise it’s 90% speculators. Speculators are wildly entertaining and overreact to everything in every direction. They make sports fans seem sane by comparison.

So what do the recent price spikes mean? Beats me, but I’ll have my popcorn and Twitter feed ready.

If you want to be free you have to change.

When you get into a particular groove, eventually it gets into you. It can begin to hem you in. It may be a pleasant chamber, but you lose a little freedom every day. To stay free, you have to cut loose old ties, leave behind previous eras, and grow. It’s bittersweet. Goodbyes are a necessary part of being free.

If everything was fully optimized so there was no paying for unused capacity, things would be ridiculously expensive.

Take employees. To really optimize for efficient resource use, you’d negotiate pay with them by the hour every hour. Or by the outcome every outcome. This would ensure each unit of labor was allocated with maximum efficiency.

The problem is it’s too expensive to do this. Not because you’d end up paying more for labor. You’d almost assuredly end up paying less. But because each renegotiation takes time to prepare for and conduct. The price shopping and info gathering to test the market, the back and forth. All the resources used to optimally allocate resources mean you aren’t using that time for something else that could be more lucrative. Adding 10 hours a week of employee negotiations removes 10 hours a week of fundraising or selling or product development.

So people buy in chunks to reduce the transaction costs. This is why you see people hired and fired in lumpy ways. An under-performer almost never gets a pay cut. They get fired. Because you’ve got to get your employee negotiations down to a reasonable transaction cost. Constant renegotiation is costly.

This applies everywhere. Especially in a world of limitless apps, life-hacks, and software tools. There are now SaaS products just to help you measure your use of other SaaS products, and others to compare the SaaS measurement products.

Can be great, but just remember that information and optimization aren’t free.

Plans for success are

Biased by confirmation

Plan for fun instead

In the early days of my company Praxis, I said yes a lot.

Interns, contractors, and employees had ideas. I said go ahead and try them. Why not? It was fast-paced, wild, experimental. I love saying yes to people acting on their ideas.

I’ve found myself in phases where I can’t say yes as freely, and I have to be involved in a lot more back and forth before action is taken. I hate it. Recently, I’m back in a place where it’s easy to say yes.

I started thinking about the factors that enable saying yes. It requires a clear vision. If the vision is muddy or badly articulated, every idea will just sort of miss the mark enough to warrant discussion. The mark hasn’t been made clear enough to allow various paths to it to be freely tried.

It also requires excellent teammates. To let someone free to chase down their ideas requires people who tend to have ideas worth chasing and tend to be able to execute on them. At times when hiring outpaces acculturating, you get phases where you can’t green light as much.

It requires a sense of urgency and pace where growth is prized over stability. If you’re protecting what you have, you’ll say no a lot. If you’re boldly moving into the unknown anyway, what the heck, let’s try some stuff! This mindset must be maintained even if you have stuff to lose. Growth should be prized more than loss is feared if you want to be able to say yes often.

I love pitching a vision, rallying a great team around it, and then saying yes to everything they come up with. That’s when I’m in the zone. I don’t like getting into the weeds and trying to tweak people’s ideas. But I can’t just avoid it any more than I can ignore throbbing pain in my body. It’s a symptom that reveals a problem. If I’m not finding it easy to say yes, it means the vision isn’t clear enough or not communicated well enough, the team isn’t right, or the loss aversion is too strong.

Take care of those, and I get to start saying yes and watching the magic happen.

I’m starting to believe that success is all about getting the story right.

How you talk about your product to your customers, or your company to investors, or your skills to employers. These are stories. If you have them right, stuff is easy. When you don’t quite have them right (which is most of the time), stuff is hard.

What’s funny is it’s easier to get other people’s stories right than your own. I love hearing people pitch. I always get excited because I see a way in which they could tweak their story for far more impact. But they don’t see it. They are too close to it.

And I’m too close to mine. The most important story is the one you tell yourself about your own life. All the other stories flow out of that. And that’s the hardest to get right. Even when you do, you find it changes on you and you can’t just tack on a new chapter. Each change requires a reworking of the whole arc from the beginning.

When you just feel off, like you’re running into a wall over and over, it means somewhere your story went wrong. The one you tell yourself about yourself. Get that right and the rest tends to follow.

I’ve developed a new strong opinion, though very weakly held.

I hate chatbots.

Yes, I know. We use them on the Crash site. And they are effective. And some people like them. And maybe they are a good thing, and the next step in business to consumer interaction online.

But my current hatred stems from two things.

1. I don’t like them on sites I’m visiting, especially on mobile. They are a little annoying and clumsy.
2. I feel like they reveal a flaw in the product or website or both.

If a website’s job is to help a customer experience a journey from their problem to your product, a chat bot is like adding pop-ups during a movie that interrupt the dialogue and ask, “Hey there! Having trouble understanding the story arc? What’s the main benefit you want from this movie? Can I help you learn to apply this story to your own life?”

If people aren’t taking the intended action on your site, maybe your product, market, or site design are flawed. Adding a chat bot as a second layer on top feels like slapping an instruction sticker on an iPad. If it’s designed well and used by the intended user, it should explain itself.

There are several compelling counter-arguments, and my colleagues presented some good discussion on the pros and cons earlier today. As I said, this is an opinion I’m entertaining more than one I’m committed to.

But I can’t help but wonder if slapping a chat bot on a site to help customers get what they want makes it harder for companies to work through and discover how to make their product, market, or presentation tighter, more intuitive, more human at the foundation.

If I decided to really spend some time making this site something unique, here’s what I’d do.

Make the entire site a maximally searchable, sortable, tag-able library of all posts, and a build-your-own book tool.

Anyone could select whatever posts they want, put them in whatever order they want, and it would generate a table of contents and put it into digital or paperback book format. You could choose a cover design or make your own. You could add a personalized introduction, making it easy to gift to anyone.

This would mean you could own or give away a truly one of a kind book. Your curated collection of posts with your own intro, title, and cover.

Now imagine this tool available not just for this website, but everywhere. Any author who publicly blogs or otherwise gives permission could have their content added to a book that you create. As you browse the web and find articles and authors you like, you can add them to your book outline with a plugin like you add articles to read later apps. You could create books around themes of your choice, arrange them into unique collections to make print or eBooks.

Remember mixtapes? Or Spotify playlists? It’s that, but for written content. I have several friends who would be amazing at putting together the perfect collection of works by a certain author or on certain topics that I would read over any publisher chosen book.

With a tool like this, imagine the secondary markets. You’d have authors (with a big increase in possibility of ‘one hit wonders’ and long-tail rare finds), but you’d also have a new form of literary expertise in curators. “Oh, that guy always puts out awesome collections!” The market for cover designers, formatting templates, and custom intros, bibliographies, titles, and appendixes would also emerge.

People do this now with email lists, but imagine upping the game a bit and being able to buy a beautifully bound book collection?

There are stupid copyright implications of course, but you could begin with just bloggers who openly allow such content sharing as long as it’s attributed. You could potentially have some form of royalty payment system if it got big enough.

The main thing is a simple drag and drop tool for turning articles into chapters of a book.

So, if I had the gumption, I’d try to figure it out for my own site first and let readers create books from the 1,400 odd posts here as a pilot of the democratized book curation tool.

Yoga pants are everywhere.

I sometimes wonder why they are so popular. But that’s not a very fruitful question. It’s easy to list a bunch of benefits to a product or trend as believable reasons for its popularity. All good reasons. But reasons why people like something don’t shed much light on a phenomenon. They don’t tell us why those benefits outweigh the benefits of alternative choices. And they don’t explain why, if the benefits are true, it took so long for people to realize them?

In other words, every time a big trend pops onto the scene the better question than why is why not sooner?

I did a few minutes of Googling for clues as to the timing of the yoga pant explosion. It seems possible that advances in materials played a role. Some of the blends the pants are made from are only a few decades old. It’s possible that the power of the Lululemon brand and their successful stores in fashionable cities played a role.

It’s easy for these questions to get answered in one of two ways. One camp looks for a material answer. Some new tech or shift in commodity prices that explains it all. It feels sturdy, and it enhances the belief in humans as efficient machines whose emotions and subjective preferences are just a post hoc veneer for material decisions. The other camp looks for a psychological answer. A new brand, a star in a movie, an emotional attachment to a person or event explains it all. It enhances the belief that humans are irrational beings whose baser passions are the driving force behind economic activity and resource allocation.

It’s hard to sort out real causes of trends. I don’t think the dichotomy between ‘rational, economizing man’, and, ‘irrational, passion-driven man’ is a useful one. There is a logic of human action that doesn’t require people to have perfect information and needs no standard definition of ‘good’ actions or resource use. People can become emotionally attached to a resource because of its usefulness, or they can make a resource useful because of an emotional attachment. Neither is damning or elevating evidence for the human condition.

It is true, the underlying economics have to make sense. If people decided platinum pants were the bees knees, they wouldn’t likely achieve the ubiquity of yoga pants because platinum isn’t stretchy or abundant. It’s also true that individuals with vision, passion, motivation, and commitment to drive an idea forward have to be there to create a brand, distribution, and market. Just because jorts are an objectively, materially wonderful form of summerwear doesn’t mean people won’t make fun of me for wearing them. Some committed jorts entrepreneur needs to bring the world along to the realization of jorts glory like Lululemon did for yoga pants.

I’m not fully satisfied with any easy explanations for the emergence of trends like yoga pants. And I’m not satisfied saying, ‘It’s complicated’. I guess if I could really figure it out, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. I’d be using my understanding to find and invest in the next big trend.

It breaks my heart every time I pass someone sleeping in the street. I go through a mental process, wondering what circumstances, preferences, and choices get a person to a spot where sleeping on the sidewalk is better than the next best alternative.

I do not want to deny free will. It’s possible there’s a homeless person somewhere who thinks my life is miserable and theirs is better. It seems more likely nobody really wants to sleep on the sidewalk, but somehow they get to a place where that seems better or easier than whatever would be needed to sleep indoors.

I think about my own life. There are a lot of things I experience that I don’t really want to experience, but I lack the creativity, willpower, or knowledge needed to make choices that would help me avoid those experiences. I’m always living sub-optimally in some way. It’s always a combination of circumstances and choices. I’m always choosing at least a little less than what I know would be best, and sometimes a lot.

I’ve had mostly good incentive structures around me. In part from circumstances I was born into, in part from those I’ve created. To the extent that the incentive structures are good, my behavior and outcomes are good. When those structures are neutral or bad, my choices typically follow.

I think willpower can be built over time, such that a person who’s learned to make good, tough choices gets better at it. But in the beginning, and at the individual point of choosing, I don’t think any two humans are that different. We seek our self interest as defined by our subjective preferences given our current information, resources, and understanding. Those variables of preference, information, resources, and understanding are the elements of the incentive structure.

I try to find, cultivate, and stay in good incentive structures because I know that without them, my choices are capable of leading me somewhere I don’t want to go.

So much for me. What about the people still sleeping on the street? I don’t know. That’s probably why my attention turns to my own life pretty quickly. It’s something I can work with and control at least to some extent. I don’t know what to do for them. That’s part of the heartbreak.