The first was radio and television. Humans around the world spending a significant portion of their waking hours consuming audio and video recordings of other people.
The second was the internet. Five to ten hours a day interacting, in real time, with other people, many of them strangers.
And the third is AI. We’re about to spend almost all of our time interacting with software that appears to have an understanding of us and the world around us. All the time, in real time.
Giving someone the benefit of that doubt enables us to move forward, and that requires us to realize that our doubt might be unfounded.
Systems that assume goodwill create possibility, connection and utility far easier than those that don’t. Being invited to find a place in those systems is a privilege worth earning.
In just about every group, people decide in advance how they’ll show up when it comes to learning, to winning and to responding to opportunities. They’re wearing a hat with a label, and over time, it’s not hard to recognize.
This can change based on pedagogy, social conditions and the juxtaposition of status roles, but it’s really quite sticky.
A few people are not simply autodidacts, they’re actually motivated by the journey itself. They show up early, do the training, focus on prep and learn what they can, merely because they can. This is the person who trains for a marathon and then runs one, without waiting for an organized race to happen.
The second group gets a lot of attention. They are fierce competitors–not only against their personal best, but in regards to the rest of the pack. If others in their investment bank work 10 hours a day, they’ll work 10 and a half–but when they move to a new firm, the first thing they’ll figure out is what others do.
The ‘almost win’ group are very much like the winner group, except they almost always come in third or fourth. Resistance is real, and while competition motivates them, fear or other internal limits holds them back. Some people in this group manage to whine and blame the refs or self sabotage… the external symptoms may change, but the outcomes remain.
The next group doesn’t want to be left behind. They’re willing and able to expend effort, but not too much. If they’re in a fast group, they’ll go faster, but they never see themselves as contenders.
And the last group, with no capital letters, finds satisfaction and solace in doing the least amount possible in this situation.
These hats aren’t permanent, and different people wear them in different settings. We may have been handed a hat from an early age, but ultimately, it’s a choice.
The only resilient choice, the one that leads to agency, contribution and a cycle of improvement that doesn’t depend on the outside word… is the top left quadrant. You either push yourself or wait for others to push you.
Two of the building blocks of a resilient society.
And the opposite of the lazy shortcut.
The meanings of both clauses change over time…
Play fair:
Everyone gets an opportunity to participate, from the very beginning
Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it
Take responsibility for the effects and side effects of your work
Don’t seek monopoly power
The long-term is the point
Show your work and bring transparency to the market
Don’t be a jerk
Give others the benefit of the doubt
Call your own fouls and don’t work the refs
Work hard:
Do the reading
Ask good questions
Create value
Change your mind before it’s fashionable
Engage in emotional labor and seek out uncertainty
Write the spec, don’t just follow it
Play by the rules or work to change them
Social media and politics have done a great job of celebrating people who seek selfish shortcuts, simply because it’s entertaining or easy to believe.
Few of us do the hard work of manual labor these days. Instead, we have the chance to sign up to work hard on solving useful problems in a way that’s generative and resilient.
I hope it’s pretty clear that most of us would like to work in a culture like this. But if we don’t work at it, it disappears.
PS Play Hard & Work Fair helps us see the list with even more nuance…
AI agents are going to overhaul the way we think about buying and selling.
Uber already did this in a small way. They organized the drivers, and now they organize the riders. Hailing a cab was already sort of anonymous, but with competition and structure, AI will continue to get better at finding the right passengers for the right drivers, and vice versa.
But there are far more markets where this sort of transformation hasn’t happened yet.
Real estate (both buying and renting) has been slightly changed by the internet. They’ve made markets a bit more efficient and given buyers more insight. But the choices people make are based on intuition, and data sets are incomplete and have more “I know it when I see it” than we’d expect from such a large and regular transaction.
What happens when the right person finds the right place to live, and the connections have value far beyond building awareness?
Tinder and other dating apps changed some of the inefficiencies of people connecting with one another as they pursue relationships, but it’s mostly focused on displaying many options to people on both sides of the marketplace. It’s a very large singles bar with some pre-sorting and ranking going on. Participants aren’t eager to give up their agency, and there’s not a lot of data about what happens after a match is made.
Linkedin amplified the ‘find a job’ x ‘find an employee’ dynamic, but it’s a similar approach. They don’t know who came in second at the end of a grueling job search, nor do they know a lot about which bosses make good bosses or accomplish useful hires.
These marketplaces feel so vast and so human that it’s difficult to suggest that AI is going to make much of an impact. But I’m confident that it will. There’s so much expense and wasted time and anxiety around these essential connections that some part of the market will be open to engaging… and success will lead to more success.
We have a lot of fake agency, where we think we’re making a choice in hiring or connecting with others, but that choice is influenced by structures and dynamics that aren’t actually related to what we want. If it’s sunny on the day of the open house, more people make an offer…
We’re using false proxies and amplifying negative cultural tropes to shortcut our selection processes, and it harms everyone involved.
We don’t need a better digital resume, or a way to get the word out. We need to get much smarter about what we want, why we want it and what’s likely to work.
Creating connections between and among buyers and sellers in dramatically more productive ways is (possibly) around the corner.
“Just a little more,” might be a useful way to self motivate, until it isn’t.
N + 1 pushes us to win every race, every argument, every bank balance competition. Sometimes this is simply a self challenge, not designed to hurt others, but the problem with never being satisfied is that the loser is also going to be you.
Arguments about taste are more common than ever before. The long tail makes it easy to find what you like, and to talk about what you don’t. There’s no accounting for taste, and that’s a good thing.
Because taste is useful.
Flopping the toilet paper under or over the roll, Beatles vs. Stones, Chevy vs. Ford… the interactions and tribal identity that result from these discussions satisfies our need to be seen, to have agency and to be part of something.
Sports fans don’t change the outcome of the game, but they have fun arguing about it.
If you want to listen to Jamaican polka music, please do. You can even make up new words or ignore the Oxford comma. If it helps, that’s okay.
We’ve built trillion-dollar media empires around this simple desire. Dividing and connecting and redividing over taste, preferences and niches.
But that habit can easily cross a line. It turns out that birds are real, that the Earth isn’t flat and that 2 + 2, in all common parlance, does equal 4. To argue about these things isn’t useful.
Quantum mechanics doesn’t care if Albert Einstein believes in it or not. It’s still the best explanation available for what happens when things are very small.
Public health, math, engineering and the science that underlies them isn’t based on taste or the need we have to be in groups. Show your work, make a prediction, assert something falsifiable and then give others a chance to respond. If you can make helpful predictions and create interventions that produce value, your work is useful. Otherwise, it’s simply noise.
Every day, we’re celebrating a splintering of taste, but it’s worth pausing before we embrace the idea that there are no facts. That’s not useful.
If you’re sitting on the dock, watching the swim class without getting wet, it’s more accurate to say, “I’m just watching.”
There are plenty of theories on how different people learn.
Online, we’re in the middle of the biggest learning experiment in history, with countless videos, podcasts and interactive courses teaching just about anything.
In my experience, there are two uncomfortable pedagogical methods that lead to better learning outcomes:
Doing it poorly on the way to doing it better
Engaging with others in mutual support and exploration
It’s certainly possible that you’re the rare learner who actually absorbs new ideas and techniques simply by reading a summary.
If it’s important, though, I hope you’ll try the two most effective methods instead.
May 22, 2024
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