Month: October 2024

“It is often easier to fight for our principles than it is to live by them.”

Words are wind.

I had the opportunity to observe a friend deal with some potentially sticky social situations recently. There were two fascinating things about their responses –

(1) When the responses weren’t what they wanted to hear, they just moved onto trying something else. No drama.

(2) When I asked this friend if they felt hurt or annoyed by the unpleasantness, they shrugged. The secret to their temperament was not taking it personally. They just focused on what they wanted out of the situation and ignored everything else.

There’s a simple idea I shared recently from Mark Manson’s book that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently – We all walk around giving too many f*cks. We let far too many things bother us – none of this is going to matter when we look back years from now. Leading a good life is about learning to give a f*ck about the few things that matter.

This friend’s temperament and behavior was a great illustration of this idea.

I found it inspiring.

It isn’t a question of whether we’ll take our blessings for granted.

We will.

It is just a question of whether we’ve gotten enough reminders built into our daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly routines to take stock of all that we take for granted… and recommit to making them count.

London began fining high-emitting vehicles roaming their city streets in April 2019 to reduce pollution.

A study looking at experimental data of the kinds of transport kids took to school showed a fascinating side-effect – kids in ULE (ultra low emission) zones were twice as likely to walk to school instead of getting dropped off.

And as you can imagine, there’s a whole host of health benefits from children walking to school.

Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the behavior.

There have been a collection of headlines about nuclear energy powered data centers of late – involving major technology companies (Google, Oracle, Microsoft). On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense – a nuclear plant provides a steady flow of energy and datacenters need a constant supply of power.

Nuclear energy has a tendency to inspire extreme reactions. However, given its obvious promise/potential, the lack of forward momentum on nuclear has always intrigued me.

Until I came upon a simple and logical explanation involving learning curves.

All new technology that is deployed en-masse gets the benefits of learning curves. As we deploy it, its costs get cheaper. And, as it becomes more abundant, we also learn how to use it better – increasing its benefits.

Today’s Artificial Intelligence/AI wave is a great example. It is expensive to deploy large language models right now. However, the cost of doing so has come down over ten-fold in the past two years. This will continue happening over the coming years – thanks to learning curves.

However, as Matt Ridley explains in “How Innovation Works”, nuclear energy hasn’t had the benefit of learning curves because of the cost of experimentation.

The cost of error in any nuclear reactor is high. As a result, nuclear is highly regulated. This results in a “waterfall” model of deployment vs. a more learning-filled agile model. For example, this means that teams on the ground are prevented from making any changes from the original spec that was approved by regulators – even if it makes little sense to continue as per plan. The costs of such rigidity add up quickly.

One area of experimentation with nuclear energy of late has been to go “modular.” This means smaller nuclear reactors that can be deployed in various places. This modularity might succeed in reducing the cost of error. That, in turn, might enable nuclear energy production to finally experience learning curves that other energy sources have benefited from.

Either way, the cost of not learning will continue to inhibit the growth of nuclear energy – at a time when solar and wind continue to grow exponentially driven by falling costs from their own learning curves.

This offers an important life lesson too. Learning compounds. While we often focus on the upside, the cost of not learning has a compounding negative effect that can have a debilitating effect over time.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

This is especially true under stress – in sports, at work, and in our life.

Observation: The quality of our workout today is directly proportional to the quality of our sleep last night.

Making peace with what is gives us a higher chance of shaping what could be.

I sometimes joke that one way to look good as a product manager in any tough conversation – with cross-functional partners and/or other teams – is to say – “let’s take a step back and align on the problem statement.”

It is a joke because you definitely don’t want to overuse it.

But it is amazing how often the act of aligning on the problem untangles the messiest of knots.

I’ve been making slow progress through Poor Charlie’s Almanack – a compilation of Charlie Munger’s wisdom.

I was struck by a few of the notes in a page today with some Q&A.

“What should a young person look for in a career?”

“I have three basic rules. Meeting all three is nearly impossible, but you should try anyway:

• Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself
• Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire.
• Work only with people you enjoy.”

“What overall life advice do you have for young people?”

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step-by-step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day-by-day, and at the end of the day – if you live long enough – like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.

Life and its various passages can be hard, brutally hard. The three things I have found helpful in coping with its challenges are:

• Have low expectations.
• Have a sense of humor.
• Surround yourself with the love of friend and family.

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I love the simple three-point answers to both questions. They’re pithy, thoughtful, and pack a punch.

That ability to keep it simple while being insightful is a mark of wisdom.