When we hear someone was involved in something with a bad outcome, our default question tends to be – “What did he do?”
Our default assumption is that what someone did caused the bad outcome.
But, more often than not, it is how we do things, not what we do, that causes issues. Bad performance is more often a result of questionable attitude than questionable skill.
When in doubt, look at the “how.”
Just as you are getting out of bed, consider spending an extra 2 minutes doing the following –
Most folks love the extra couple of minutes in bed (thank you, snooze button). Hopefully, this adds value to those extra minutes.
We are the questions we ask. And, a quick 2 minute exercise to ask these questions, or others that you find energizing, can go a long way in getting the day started right.
Yuval Harari’s Sapiens is a fascinating book. I’ve been making slow progress over the past 3 months as there is so much to absorb.
One of the more fascinating pieces (in my opinion) is his analysis on science. In Yuval’s words, “the innovation in modern science was to admit ignorance.” It is a simple and, yet, profound idea and speaks to continuous tension between religions and scientific inquiry.
Here’s an interesting excerpt about how the act of admitting ignorance shaped the world we know –
The crucial turning point came in 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed westward from Spain, seeking a new route to East Asia. Columbus still believed in the old ‘complete’ world maps (see below). Using them, Columbus calculated that Japan should have been located about 7,000 kilometres west of Spain. In fact, more than 20,000 kilometres and an entire unknown continent separate East Asia from Spain. On 12 October 1492, at about 2:00 a.m., Columbus’ expedition collided with the unknown continent. Juan Rodriguez Bermejo, watching from the mast of the ship Pinta, spotted an island in what we now call the Bahamas, and shouted ‘Land! Land!’
Columbus believed he had reached a small island off the East Asian coast. He called the people he found there ‘Indians’ because he thought he had landed in the Indies – what we now call the East Indies or the Indonesian archipelago. Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation. For thousands of years, not only the greatest thinkers and scholars but also the infallible Scriptures had known only Europe, Africa and Asia. Could they all have been wrong? Could the Bible have missed half the world? It would be as if in 1969, on its way to the moon, Apollo 11 had crashed into a hitherto unknown moon circling the earth, which all previous observations had somehow failed to spot. In his refusal to admit ignorance, Columbus was still a medieval man. He was convinced he knew the whole world, and even his momentous discovery failed to convince him otherwise.
(A European world map from 1459 (Europe is in the top left corner). The map is filled with details, even when depicting areas that were completely unfamiliar to Europeans, such as southern Africa – thanks Erenow.com)
The first modern man was Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian sailor who took part in several expeditions to America in the years 1499–1504. Between 1502 and 1504, two texts describing these expeditions were published in Europe. They were attributed to Vespucci. These texts argued that the new lands discovered by Columbus were not islands off the East Asian coast, but rather an entire continent unknown to the Scriptures, classical geographers and contemporary Europeans. In 1507, convinced by these arguments, a respected mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller published an updated world map, the first to show the place where Europe’s westward-sailing fleets had landed as a separate continent. Having drawn it, Waldseemüller had to give it a name. Erroneously believing that Amerigo Vespucci had been the person who discovered it, Waldseemüller named the continent in his honour – America. The Waldseemüller map became very popular and was copied by many other cartographers, spreading the name he had given the new land.
There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.’
A fascinating story. How often do we admit ignorance?
Here are a few things you can easily compare:
Here are a few things you can’t easily compare:
We are wired to compare and compete. We compare and compete because we tell ourselves the story that winning in these things matter.
But, they don’t. The trophies we collect from these are fake and the joy they bring disappears in a few hours – like leprechaun gold.
In the long run, it is the things that we can’t easily compare that bring us meaning and happiness.
When in doubt, index on what you can’t easily compare.
There’s a few simple principles I’ve come to appreciate when it comes to spending money. The latest edition to that list is the idea of Dollar per use.
Here’s what my list roughly looks like –
I’ve pushed frugality too far in the past and skimped on everyday items. But, no more. The dollar per use idea will hopefully set that right.
In the 1950s, Biologist Joseph Connell ventured from California to Australia to understand what causes the biodiversity in coral reefs and rainforests. In particular, he wanted to understand why some landscapes exhibited vast biodiversity, with hundreds of species living side by side, while other landscapes only a few miles away exhibited homogeneity, with a few species dominating.
It seemed as if nature’s creative capacities depended on some kind of periodic disturbance – like a tree fall or an occasional storm – that temporarily upset the natural environment. But, the disturbance couldn’t be too small or too big. It had to be just the right size. ‘Intermediate disturbances are critical,’ said Connell to Charles Duhigg when he interviewed him for his book “Smarter, Faster, Better.”
Within biology, this has become known as the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, which holds that ‘local species diversity is maximized when ecological disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent.’”
This has lots of interesting parallels. For example, during the ideation process at Disney/Pixar, they make sure they create small disturbances within the team (e.g. changing the team leader) when there’s a feeling that everyone is stuck. Similarly, brainstorming sessions work well when you change things up a bit – move to a different location, use a different format, etc.
There’s a wonderful life lesson in here as well – a little bit of disruption every once a while keeps us fresh and creative. So, if you’re not looking forward to an upcoming disruption of your usual weekly or weekend routine, just remember that it is likely better in the long run.
If you live in a room full of unhealthy food and five large televisions, it is only a matter of time before you begin consuming both.
In a battle between your willpower and the environment, the environment always wins in the long run.
So, if you are trying to change behavior, you are always better off altering the environment over testing your willpower. If you are trying to stop playing games on your phone, delete the gaming apps. If you are trying to eat healthy, surround yourself with healthy food. If you are trying to read more, make sure you have books easily accessible.
Don’t waste your willpower on battles with the environment. Use your limited willpower to create better environments and better habits instead.
I am not a big fan of the news as it nearly always leaves me feeling worse at the end of engaging with it. Avoiding the news isn’t the solution, however. So, my approach has been to rely on newsletters.
I love newsletters. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone as I send a daily newsletter (this blog) and a bi-weekly newsletter (The Notes by Ada Project) myself. I wouldn’t do it to others if I didn’t love it myself. :)
So, here are a few of the newsletters I make sure I read. Some of these are about the news. But, mostly, they’re just great pieces of content.
Every morning
1. The Quartz Daily Brief: Love the news and the collection of interesting content from the internet that they share between Monday-Saturday.
2. The Economist Espresso: More news focused. High quality. Delivered Monday-Saturday. Thanks Federico (a reader who since begins most emails introducing himself as the guy who suggested The Economist Espresso :-)), for recommending this. [Update as of 2019: I’ve stopped reading this and have opted for simplicity with Quartz.]
3. Stratechery by Ben Thompson: Excellent tech newsletter. I pay for the subscription and receive 4 articles per week. It is well worth it.
4. Seth Godin’s blog: The best blog there is. Delivers every day.
Weekend reads
1. Benedict Evans’ Newsletter: A few links that summarize interesting/big movements in tech from the week.
2. The Exponential View by Azeem Azhar: A collection of interesting links on a varied set of topics. I’ve just begun subscribing to this over the past month and have found the collection fascinating.
There are many other blogs I read of course (I’ll share the list another time) but these are my essentials. I feel the day/week is incomplete if I haven’t read these.
I hope you find the list useful.
For centuries, we rewarded prowess of the human physique. Our notion of “work” involved hard physical labor. Then, we began rewarding the sort of intelligence that we came to represent as “IQ.” This was left brained and logical and focused on memory and processing power. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve begun rewarding the right brain — creativity is seen as a powerful asset in today’s information based economy.
What happens in a world where artificial intelligence takes over our most valuable jobs? Aeon has an interesting essay on how the future could reward emotional jobs that are currently grossly underpaid — think teachers and geriatric care workers. It is a compelling read and here are the last three paragraphs —
“There’s an enormous opportunity before us, as robots and algorithms push humans out of cognitive work. As a society, we could choose to put more resources into providing better staffing, higher pay and more time off for care workers who perform the most emotionally demanding work for the smallest wages. At the same time, we could transform other parts of the economy, helping police officers, post-office workers and the rest of us learn to really engage with the people in front of us.
This isn’t something our economic system, which judges the quality of jobs by their contribution to GDP, is set up to do. In fact, some economists worry that we haven’t done enough to improve the ‘productivity’ of service jobs such as caring for the elderly the way that we have in sectors such as car manufacturing. Emotional work will probably never be a good way to make money more efficiently. The real question is whether our society is willing to direct more resources toward it regardless.
Technology-driven efficiency has achieved wonderful things. It has brought people in developed countries an astonishingly rich standard of living, and freed most of us from the work of growing the food we eat or making the products we use. But applying the metric of efficiency to the expanding field of emotional labour misses a key promise offered by technological progress — that, with routine physical and cognitive work out of the way, the jobs of the future could be opportunities for people to genuinely care for each other.”
Being humane is defined as having or showing compassion or benevolence. Previous technology waves have never managed to align wealth and success with being humane. In fact, you could argue that being humane actually worked against you — as a warrior, a property owner, a businessman in the nineteenth and the twentieth century, or a stock market investor.
By having machines do the many things we considered uniquely human, it is possible that the AI wave will force us to reward being “humane.”
It is an outcome I’m rooting for.
(This is an excerpt from a longer post on artificial intelligence on the Notes by Ada project. I’m going to switching the cadence of the Notes by Ada posts from weekly to bi-weekly. More on that later.)
When speaking about their ongoing fight with cancer, a friend said this to me the other day – “We all are afflicted by a terminal disease. We just don’t know the end date.”
I’ve been pondering that comment and the big accompanying question – “how will I measure my life when that happens?”
“Working hard at life” is the response that inevitably comes back to me. I love going to bed knowing I’ve done my best in every aspect of life that I deem important.
There’s a lot of talk about working smart and how some people manage to do it all with minimal effort. I’ve just never seen any evidence of that in my life.
Everything worth having has taken effort. Everything worth having has also involved trade offs. Sure, I’ve gotten better at doing some of these things, making some of these decisions and weighing the trade offs. In some cases, I do work a lot smarter than I used to. But, even that came after putting in the hard work first, reflecting on the process and intentionally getting better. And, all of this while having access to unique privilege – being born out of poverty – and being blessed with adequate mental capacity.
Maybe there are a select few who can manage to work smart and do it all. But, for the rest of us, we have a limited amount of time and a reservoir of energy (that can, thankfully, be replenished with activity, food and rest) to work hard on whatever we choose to work hard at.
We have an opportunity to recognize that we have the power to choose, to choose and to work hard at whatever we choose. This opportunity is a privilege. It is on us to choose. And, in time, learn to choose well.
I choose to work hard at life.
I hope you choose what matters to you too.
Together, I hope we make this privilege count.
