Author: alearningaday

Seth shared a post yesterday that struck a chord. Sharing in full.

In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it.

This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, because it’s just going to become a new standard. It doesn’t pay for a credit card company to invest in customer service, the thinking goes, because that won’t pay for itself, it’ll just raise costs for the leader and for all of its competitors. That’s how the race to the bottom begins.

Perhaps it pays to simply focus on being better at making a profit, or being better at getting new customers, or being better at making the stock price go up. These proxies push short-term thinking and aren’t resilient.

What truly changes the game is when an organization decides to commit to being better at being better.

That’s hard to do and difficult to compete against.

Thanks Seth.

There’s a lovely passage from Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen in Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks.” He is describing the Helsinki bus station to students of photography.

“There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.

Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours.

Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station.

But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own.

What’s the solution?

“It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”

A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.”

“Stay on the fucking bus” indeed.

H/T: Sasha’s blog for reminding me about this story

Someone I know has a simple operating principle – if an asynchronous conversation exceeds 5 back and forth exchanges, pick up the phone or meet in person.

It is a useful rule of thumb.

No amount of hype, internal slide decks, dialed in execution, influencer marketing, or even rockstar talent can save a product that isn’t solving an acute and valuable problem.

Matt Ridley’s in his book “How Innovation works” makes the case that growth doesn’t ever have to stop. Once we figure out how to produce more, we learn how to produce more with less. Until our efficiencies far outweigh our appetite.

Light is a great example. Once the cost of light goes down, more people leave their lights on. However, the efficiency of LEDs mean we’re more efficient than ever before.

This chart (source) is a great example. As a share of wallet, the US has gotten incredibly efficient at feeding its citizens. Over time, all the economies in the right will keep doing more with less.

Then the challenge will be to reduce the share of consumer expenditures on quality food. And so on.

More. Then more with less.

Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.”

​Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Indeed

YouGov shared a fascinating chart from a poll asking Americans to estimate the size of groups. 3 things became evident.

First, Americans vastly overestimated the size of minority groups. Check out the difference in estimates of those who have >$500,000, are transgender, are muslim/native american/jewish, and so on.

Second, they underestimated the size of majority groups. More people are Christian, fully vaccinated against COVID-19, have flown on a plane, and have graduated high school than others thought.

Third, it demonstrated just how bad we are, on average, on estimations. Biases rule.

“We live on 1/4 of what we eat, our physician, the other 3/4” —Egyptian proverb

Rick responded to one of my many recent posts on diet with his inspiring journey transforming his diet and his health. As part of that, he shared this quote and the idea that health is not defined as “not getting sick,” but “the ability to fight.”

It all resonated. Thanks Rick!

“It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?” | Christoper Gardiner, The Pursuit of Happyness

It isn’t just the pursuit of happiness. I think happiness lies in the pursuit.

I am clearly stuck on reflecting about stars and the night sky. Here’s a nice summary about today’s sky from Perplexity that never ceases to amaze me –

The night sky we observe today is a glimpse into the past, as the light from celestial objects takes time to reach us. For example, the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is about 4.37 light-years away, meaning we see it as it was over four years ago. The stars and galaxies visible tonight are at varying distances, with some light taking millions or even billions of years to reach Earth. Thus, the night sky is a tapestry of different ages, reflecting the vast distances and timescales of the universe.

The idea that we’re looking up at a sky from 4 years ago is both mind blowing and almost hard to comprehend.

A simple look up at the night sky unveils so many layers of wonder.