2021 Curated Short Form Round-up 2
A selection of my LinkedIn posts from the year
1. Talking about failures
We should talk more about our failures. Why? Because the collective flourishes when the individual perishes.
The Titanic in sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic made engineers dig deep into how the next generation of ocean liners could be built safer. The blackbox from every airplane crash prevents future mishaps. Imagine if these failures were kept a secret. Imagine the future cost to humanity.
Several years ago, I quit my job to write a book. I kept at it for two years until I had a manuscript to show. Then I did the runaround of literary agents and book houses to discover that I was passionate about writing, not so much about networking or building a brand. Not to suggest either of those pursuits were lesser. The fact was that I had severely underestimated their importance in taking me to my goal of writing for a living.
If I had just one thing to say to a decade-younger version of me, it would unequivocally be: The advice to follow your passion is hogwash. It is movie makers and advertisers romanticizing a hard truth for you: There’s nothing you’re born to do beyond reasonable doubt. Understand first what you’re getting into. Build up a specific skillset. Until then, keep your options open and keep running experiments.
My failure may not save lives like the Titanic, ironically, did. Yet, if I could stop even one person from jumping headlong off the ‘follow-your-passion’ cliff, I would be happy. Or if someone having chuckled over the story of my failure wrote back to me with ‘This is what you did wrong and this is what you should do the next time round to avoid the same fate’ then too I would’ve succeeded.
Either way, it is only talking about our failures that can get us to this point. The system gains at the individual’s expense. There’s no point fighting this truth just because you’re the individual paying the price. Better to accept it and push the world forward.
2. Today’s ethical = Tomorrow’s technical
Every generation’s ethical problem is the next generation’s technical challenge.
In school, my incentive to learn capped at doing well in tests. The learning process was: understand the material in the textbook, answer questions on it, and score well. I don’t remember being curious beyond that.
Like me, my generation has been trained to grasp the textbook well, to be a good worker so to speak. Some have learned well enough to write the textbook. These are the managers. They oversee the workers. It’s a further few who have questioned the lesson itself and come up with new rules. These are the innovators.
Picture this classification of those who understand the textbook (workers), write the textbook (managers), and rewrite the textbook (innovators) in an inverse pyramid (credit: Balaji Srinivasan), with a 90:9:1 split among workers-managers-innovators from top to bottom and a vast 99% resting on the intellectual output of a tiny 1%.
How does this split matter? Each time an innovator thinks of a new way of doing things, she has to pull 99X workers and managers along (the equivalent of changing textbooks). She will face misaligned worker incentives (principal-agent problem), changing worker behavior (from union strikes to The Great Resignation), worker shortage, and so on.
Being a rule breaker, she will look outside the box. She will go with technology. Robots and machines: all instructions coded, all incentives aligned. Suddenly, being a good worker will not matter as much. Without workers, managers won’t be needed. Those who’ve spent a lifetime being the best worker will rail at the wrongness of it all. Maybe even go on strikes, ask for reparation.
Watching the complaining parents, the kids will be amused. They won’t see themselves as either worker or innovator. Technology will allow them to be both, or more. Brought up on YouTube and online communities and Web3 and peer-to-peer and brain-machine interfaces, they will see technology as an ally instead of as a scourge. These textbooks, if we can call them so, will have taught them to build with technology instead of resisting it.
Our generation’s big ethical problems will only be technical challenges for our kids.
3. Fosbury Flop
What's your Fosbury Flop?
For high jumpers how high they could jump was for long a function of how stably they could land after. Sand pits carried a risk of injury for heavy landings. For years, jumpers used what was called the straddling technique where they faced down as they went over the bar so as to land on their feet in the pit.
Advent of deep foam matting changed that. By helping cushion landings, it kickstarted a wave of innovation in professional high-jumping. Dick Fosbury was the first to switch to a style where the jumper leapt backward over the bar, face up. His technique came to be known as the Fosbury Flop. It led him to an Olympic gold in 1968 and revolutionized high jumping forever.
Until Fosbury’s innovation, no one had said you couldn’t sprint, arch, and leap backward over the bar. But it was not institutional permission that held athletes back. The simple provision of better material for landing freed jumpers to think differently.
The switch to Fosbury Flop as the predominant jumping style wasn’t the main change in the sport. The true revolution was in lowering the barrier to admission. Straddling needed athletes to have superior take-off strength. The flop allowed slighter framed athletes to participate. Dick Fosbury was one such beneficiary.
Corporates champion meritocracy in the workplace: “Only your talent determines how you shall be rewarded.” But in egging employees and teams to reach for the stars, think of how you can make hard landings safe. If you want to build an organization that innovates, think of how to provide employees with psychological safety. Mission statements are overrated. The simple action of replacing sand pits with foam mats will go a long way in signaling to employees what is important to you–their safety. And then it’ll only be a matter of time before you’ll have people from the most unexpected quarters doing their version of Fosbury Flop.
4. Thinking backward
A Chicago-based furniture company makes fully customizable sofas. The firm promises customers their own signature furniture by letting them design their own. Potential customers spend hours designing the sofas they want to own, in a manner of creating their own work of art. But this does not translate into sales. These would-be customers disappear.
The firm racks its brain: Should we lower price? Offer a better customer experience? Improve material quality?
Thankfully it doesn’t just go ahead and do any/all of these things. It investigates the mystery of the vanishing customers, only to find out that what’s stopping people is that they don’t know what to do with their existing sofas before ordering a new one.
The questions that make those customers disappear are rather mundane—do I just take out my current sofa to trash? does the city collect discarded furniture and such stuff?—and none of the solutions (price, quality, and so on) the firm has considered would solve their problem.
So the company offers to pick up old furniture upon delivery of new. Sometimes you take away to give more. Sometimes you look backward to move forward. This is the mental model of inversion.
Story Credit: The Hidden Brain (https://bit.ly/3COB9qe)
5. Problem prevention > problem solving
A child sweeps crumbs off the floor and dumps that into the trash can. The child is appreciated. The child promptly empties the can on the floor and proceeds to sweep it all off again, hoping for an encore of the praise. I caught this anecdote on an episode of Brave New World (https://bit.ly/3nSUyQH)
This is a classic problem in reinforcement learning—where you perform an action, without being told to do so, and discover what kind of reward that action leads to, and learn in the process. Brian Christian, talking about how reinforcement learning can go sideways, insightfully identifies the problem as one of rewarding agent behavior (Good job cleaning up!), not the state of the world (We like our floor clean).
This is at the heart of the puzzle in organizations that reward problem-solving: it comes at the cost of problem prevention. We think by incentivizing problem-solving there will be fewer problems, but we end up seeing more. More and more avoidable mess being made in the hope of a reward for cleaning up.
Yet, can we approach this another way? What if we were to measure ourselves by the time we spend correcting poor decisions (the equivalent of dumping the trash on the floor)? What would be our assessment?
6. What’s your lesson from 2021?
There are more books, podcasts, blogs than there are days in the year if you want to spend time with people smarter than you. These are four non-obvious insights culled from the time I spent. These ideas appear repeatedly in the writings and utterings of said smart people and I’ve tried to distil and clarify them here in my own words.
The smarter you are, the easier it is to climb the wrong career hill - Chris Dixon
“How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions?” The answer comes easy if you can imagine a 2X2 matrix with skill and passion as the axes. High skill-high passion is where we are Lionel Messis of our domain, but high skill-low passion sucks us in. We’re tempted to climb this hill. We’re good at it and the rewards are right there. Why do we end up here so often? My best answer: Because no kid (not yet) wants to become a startup founder or a marketer growing up. By the time she works out what she wants, she’s already on the wrong hill. And if she’s smart, she’s already a VP in an investment bank.
Healing causes harm - Nassim Taleb
Naive interventionism breeds fragility. Be it in medical science (overprescription/over-surgery), education (forced disciplinary teaching) or business (micromanagement), a lot of harm can come to pass with good intentions. The better recourse is to let most things be and control for only a few things (size, speed). Stressors and shocks carry information that is vital for the growth of the system. The body heals itself, the child learns by following her curiosity. Constant meddling stops this process, leading to big future shocks (black swans).
The Internet has space - Amit Varma
Of course it does. Then why are digital creators advised to write in bytes, focus on hooks, et cetera? The conventional answer is: because attention is scarce. True. Amit Varma suggests we rethink form (and rethink fandom). There are always people who want those 100 extra hours of Beatles footage instead of a trimmed docuseries. A creator only needs a thousand true fans. Find who they are for what you create. There’s room for all manner of creative output.
Work like a lion, not like a cow - Naval Ravikant
Cows graze all day. Lions don’t. They hunt, then they rest. A lot. A less striking comparison is between an athlete and a manual laborer. One trains, sprints, rests; the other works 9 to 5. As knowledge workers, we are intellectual athletes. Our output is not a linear function of our input. “What we do, how we do, who we do it with” matters more than how many hours we work. Not to say hard work is unimportant. More like smart work is better.
There’s a lot to unpack in each of these principles, and I’m still on my training wheels around them. My reason to share is to encourage you to tell me about your non-obvious lesson from the year. It could be from personal experience or gleaned from others. Hit the comments!