A Learning a Day

The Colorado river has been at work eroding rock at the rate of the thickness of one sheet of paper every year.

For hundreds of millions of years.

The result is the incredible Grand Canyon.

You and I will not have anywhere close to a hundred million years to make a positive difference on the planet or to build something as spectacular.

But perhaps we could take inspiration from the Colorado river and keep consistently plugging away – one day at a time.

Small actions performed consistently over long periods of time can produce spectacular outcomes.

There’s a great Yellowstone story about the return of the gray wolves. As a result of rampant hunting, wolves disappeared from Yellowstone in the early 1900s. After decades of study, scientists began to understand the role wolves played in the ecosystem as the top predator and realized their absence might be affecting the entire ecosystem.

So, the scientists and park officials decided to experiment reversing this human-driven change. In 1995, they released 31 gray wolves from Alaska into Yellowstone. What followed was pretty extraordinary.

(The text in the picture is small – so, you’ll need to click on it and zoom in)

Prior to the re-introduction the of wolves, the elk population exploded because coyotes were now the top carnivores in the ecosystem and weren’t capable of killing grown elk. The elk were eating the Aspen and all available green vegetation. Without the support of riverside plants, river banks got eroded and led to shallower and wider rivers.

Once the wolves returned, raptors from far away returned to Yellowstone to feed on wolf kills. The northern herd elk population was cut by 75% – enabling Aspen to grow again. There are more antelope again as the wolves don’t hunt antelope. Within days of reintroduction of wolves, grizzly bears were observed stealing wolf-killed elk and bison. And since there are more willow growing near the banks, insects and birds are able to survive. The woody vegetation also helped grow the beaver population ten-fold.

It is an amazing story (here’s a 5 minute video too).

There are so many lessons from the story. The one that stands out to me is the power of interactions within complex ecosystems. First order effects are just appetizers in complex ecosystems. We only truly understand an ecosystem when we are able to visualize the second, third, fourth, and fifth order effects.

This makes the communication of our impact on an ecosystem incredibly challenging. Our default behavior is to look past any immediate effects. Ergo the frustration of every climate scientist attempting to explain the impact of our actions on future climate. Their audience looks up to the skies, points to a minimal change in the weather, and shrugs. This is especially the case when the path to reducing damage is arduous.

But this isn’t just about the world’s climate – complex systems exist all around us. We need to look no further than the economy for a great example of one very few people understand.

More on that later in the week.

“This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the “ability” to dread pain and to fear the unknown.

Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present.

In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable” | Alan Watts

This resonated.

There’s a simple case for consistently prioritizing good quality sleep. When we’re sleep deprived and tired, we make mistakes.

In the best case, we spend a bunch of time attempting to fix those mistakes. In the worst case, our attempts to fix those mistakes result in more mistakes.

Worse still, tiredness makes us feel pessimistic. So, we feel less capable of fixing the very mistakes we made.

The return on investment in prioritizing sleep is significantly higher than it appears on first glance. It is a great example of a high leverage habit as one good choice enables a cascade of better choices.

And, in the long term, it may just be the highest leverage choice of them all.

A simple way to understand how a person perceives their position in the social hierarchy is to see (a) how they treat you when you make a mistake or (b) observe how they behave when they make a mistake.

There’s a caste system / hierarchy / pecking order at work in every part of the world. Some of these are local and some more global. But it always exists – pecking orders (both perceived and real) are a part of how we organize ourselves. And they reveal themselves when mistakes are made in public.

These hierarchies don’t just show up when a waiter makes a mistake in a restaurant, they are present in our lives too. In the past 12 years, I’ve had the fortune of driving in many places around the world. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes – especially so in new places as we figured out the rules of the road (some unsaid) and directions.

But, in all these years, there’s an unfortunate pattern. Whenever I have a bad experience – defined by someone shouting something unpleasant or honking longer than necessary – I know that I’ll look up and likely find an old male of the dominant caste in that specific place.

Understanding this dynamic is helpful for two reasons.

First, it helps put unpleasant experiences into context. There’s no point letting some random stranger spoil our mood.

Second, it helps us better understand our default reactions. We are likely to find ourselves feeling a lot more apologetic in contexts where we perceive ourselves to be lower on the social hierarchy. And vice versa.

Best to be aware of how we show up.

A simple guideline for when we ask for something that matters to us – the first no isn’t a no.

No just happens to be the default response. It almost doesn’t matter what we’re asking for – a change in compensation, an upgrade of some kind, or for someone’s time. No is the answer we’ll get 80% of the time.

And, in nearly every case, it pays to ask again.

If we’re able to better modify our ask to something that we think they might be more amenable to, that improves our chances some more.

“I realize that x may not be possible. Any chance we could do y?” works like a charm because it shows we care enough to ask again.

At the end of a day, we have a simple choice. We can either…

…dwell on the opportunities lost and everything that could have been

or

…find the resolve to focus on what worked (there’s always more than we think!) and celebrate the many bits of luck that made the day possible.

We had the opportunity to visit Yellowstone National Park recently. The trip inspired many a lesson – I expect them to trickle in in the coming days.

My experiences aside, this fridge magnet did a wonderful job humorously distilling some powerful lessons from the park.

Be natural.

Tread lightly.

Take time to reflect.

Go with the flow.

Let off a little steam.

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It resonated.

The single best feature of the internet in my book is the ability to get advice from strangers.

A few times every week, I type a random question into the search bar. Sometimes it is a “how to do x”, sometimes it is asking for an itinerary when visiting a place, and on other occasions, it is figuring out where to eat.

I’m never disappointed.

Instead, I’m often amazed at the painstaking detail and thought put into all this guidance.

Knowledge is power. And I’m grateful to all these strangers who take the time to pass it on.

Prof Scott Galloway shared some graduation advice to new grads recently – “Be warriors, not wokesters.” Here are a couple of excerpts.

Be mentally and physically … warriors. Lift heavy weights and run long distances, in the gym and in your mind. Many tasks you’ll be asked to perform early in your career will be tedious. Don’t do what you are asked to do, but what you are capable of doing. Think of it as boot camp before being sent to battle, as there are millions of other warriors fighting to win the same regions of prosperity. Get strong, really strong. You should be able to walk into a room and believe you could overpower, outrun, or outlast every person in the room.

My first job was at Morgan Stanley. I wasn’t as well educated as the other junior analysts. (My fault: UCLA is a sink-or-swim place; I decided to do neither and smoke pot and tread water.) Anyway, at Morgan, every other week I’d go to work Tuesday morning and not leave until Wednesday night. Nobody was at home waiting for me, I had no real hobbies, and in your twenties, if you don’t tell yourself otherwise, you can work 30+ hours straight … easily.

Balance is a myth. There are only trade-offs. Having balance at my age is a function of lacking it at your age. Your call.

There is a lot of discussion re what it means to be “woke,” some of it well-founded, some of it hyperbole. Yes, be awake to the privileges and prejudices that surround you and rigorously honest about the world you’re inheriting. But the word has lost that original meaning. Beyond the media noise, an insidious pattern is emerging in academic and professional settings. The insistence on filtering everything through the lens of personal identity and experience. The prioritization of victimhood. The belief that to be offended is to be right.

Structural racism is real, and our economic system is tilted, if not rigged. The most accurate predictor of your opportunities isn’t your intelligence or work ethic but where you’re born. But playing the victim decreases your capacity to be a warrior against these injustices. Pursuing the politics of personal identity ensures you will remain an individual, alienated and alone. Warriors sacrifice for the tribe, but they recognize they are part of a tribe. Separate people from ideology, or you give up access to 50% of potential relationships and allies.

Reacting to every slight and demanding satisfaction from every insult is what the system wants you to do. Joining a Twitter mob seizing on a hapless middle manager or an out-of-touch English professor may feel like justice, but it’s just a cheap drip of dopamine lost in an ocean of social media profits.

Be a warrior. Before you resort to violence, make a thoughtful assessment. Register the intention behind people’s gestures, ideas, and words. Don’t make a caricature of people’s actions and speech so you can draw your sword and feel righteous. Be a highly skilled, devastatingly strong warrior who exerts their power by example and leaves their weapon in its sheath. Forgiveness is strength. Demonstrate it, every day. Be a warrior, not a wokester.

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There’s a lot about this that resonated with me. I’ve been an immigrant since I left home when I was 17 and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve reminded myself that I may not be smarter than the people in the room, but I sure as hell won’t be wanting for my work ethic. I expect myself to show up every day and make the trade-offs necessary to get an opportunity to do more impactful work.

I haven’t seen it done any other way. The smartest kids I knew in school were also incredibly hard working.

The part about not being a wokester resonates too. There is no doubt the world isn’t fair. I still feel like an outsider in so many rooms and places. But playing the victim isn’t the solution. It has never been and it never will be. Focus on what you control, learn to get along, then change the system for the better.

This isn’t just a recipe for work. It is a recipe for life. That work ethic works just as well as a spouse and as a parent. Both of those suffer when we’re not willing to put in the work. Everyday.

It even works on vacation for what it’s worth. Sometimes, you just have to wake up at absurd hours to experience something spectacular.

It helps to know you can always summon that inner warrior when the need arises.