There’s a difference between ‘rich’ and ‘richer’. And ‘fit’ and ‘fitter’.
The problem with a pre-amp that goes all the way to 11 isn’t that it’s louder. The problem is that very soon, the person who bought one of these will want one that goes to 12.
Living in the liminal space is unstable.
When we get hooked on what we get next instead of focusing on what actually matters in the now, we sign up for a crash.
In a huge bag of chips, each individual chip isn’t worth as much as if there’s only a few.
On a long vacation, each day might feel less precious than on a short one.
This is an invented construct. Our perception and embrace of time and the available alternatives is up to us. If it’s helpful for you to imagine that you’re dealing with scarcity, you’ll be able to find scarcity. This one, right here, right now, is the only one just like it.
And if abundance and alternatives give us more joy, we can live with that story as well.
Don’t hoard, don’t rush. Find your pace.
The site gives movies two scores on a scale from 1 to 100: One is from critics, and the other is from typical viewers who are taking the time to chime in.
Many movies have virtually the same score in each category. But some films have a 40 or 50 point gap. How could the critics be so wrong? A 38% rating from the critics turns into something over 90% from the viewers…
The gap is easy to understand if we think about the smallest viable audience. The viewers who give a documentary, a foreign film or a fan flick a very high score do so because they got exactly what they were promised. They’re not skeptics, waiting to be surprised or impressed. They’re fans, and the movie did exactly what it said it would do.
Every once in a while, a movie gets a very high critical score and a lousy response from viewers… that’s because the marketers of the film (who might not have even bothered to watch it) hyped it as one thing and delivered something less.
Word of mouth and tribal connection never happens from a critical view or a blurb. It happens because the thing you made is worth talking about. That’s a choice, a challenge we can approach with intent.
We expend effort.
We create value.
It’s easy to get confused about which one we’re going to ultimately be compensated for.
Wild animals forage. They spend calories and take risks to acquire food. If the required work and risk expended are more than the food they acquire, they go extinct. The goal is to get as many calories as possible for as little effort as possible. If there’s a surplus, their instinct is to have kids until there isn’t a surplus.
It’s a search for calories.
Cavemen were in a similar situation. Invest effort and get calories in return.
Organization and culture amplify the opportunities and create complex systems, all in search of energy. A few hunters working together could catch a different sort of animal. A system of cooperation creates a commons for sheep to graze, and private property creates an incentive to invest in farming.
Investment in search of a return in energy. Sometimes we call that ‘profit’.
Calories turn into energy, but more directly, there’s the energy of electricity or heat, which we can then use to plow or cook or fertilize, creating energy in a form we can consume. Researchers talk about this entire category as ‘energy’ but tend to focus on things like oil–but the thinking applies just as well to spinach and to customers.
You don’t need much organization to collect sticks for a fire, but once the sticks are gone, the next highest yield on effort requires focus, patience and coordination. If the culture has momentum, it continues to move through the energy gradient, investing more to get more.
Marketing is the same way. When there are lots of customers and little in the way of competition, the return on marketing is very high. As sales get harder, we build systems and promotions and scaffolding to reach people who need a different story. And when the structure is too complex and the customers we acquire don’t pay for themselves, the organization fades away.
The metaphor is everywhere we look.
Most of the people who work at Yale don’t teach classes, and airlines have a very small percentage of pilots among their staff. We create organizations to deliver value, and we add complexity to coordinate and amplify the skilled work that people trade time or money for.
The bursar or the custodian might not be teaching a class, but their work increases the return the organization receives, and so the complexity they bring to the system is worth it.
A bicycle is the most efficient way for a person to get around, but in order to get that return on effort, we also need to coordinate and invest in a system of mining, manufacturing and road building. Everyone who is part of the project increases society’s cost, but the benefits of mobility, at scale, make it worth it.
Society (a small company, a country, anything in between) can be seen as layers of complexity, created to maximize our return on energy investment. We spend more to get more, and the shape of that curve determines how or if we’ll grow and thrive.
If we look at food, the efficiency of beans is about 5 to 1. For every calorie we invest to harvest beans, we generate 5 calories of benefit. For beef, it’s less than 1 to 30–in the wrong direction. Every 30+ calories we invest get us 1 calorie in return. Beef isn’t an efficient form of energy investment–we can build systems to make it more efficient, but we’re always going to be behind.
When an organization gets too complex, it becomes unwieldy and inefficient at its job. Most people are supporting and maintaining the system, coordinating with each other, not doing the work. As time goes on, stasis and the status quo grind progress to a halt. Complex systems get less efficient and harder to coordinate. Big science, big medicine, big government–sooner or later, the leverage stops paying off.
There are some interesting problems, and also some brand new shifts that will change the energy yield curves.
Consider a car in 1950. It was a complex (and complicated) set of pulleys, wires, cables and steel. It’s unlikely we could have made cars more efficient or safer than we did then–until the computer chip arrived. Its ability to allow us to efficiently increase complexity gave us an entirely new generation of transportation.
For my entire lifetime, the computer chip has enabled us to build increasingly complex organizations and systems that extract energy and generate value in ways that were impossible before it was invented. But the yield of any complex system peaks sooner or later.
Back to the original source–the energy we use to power all of this. When there were giant pools of oil just below the surface (oil that took millions of years to produce) we could extract energy from the ground virtually for free. A hundred years ago, we had to expend one unit of energy to get 100 out of the ground. It was easy and cheap and needed very little coordination, technology or investment.
Today, the EROI (energy return on investment) for some kinds of oil has dropped from 100 to 3. We only get 3 units of power for every one we invest to get it processed. It’s generally understood that once an energy source is less than 8 or 9 by this measure, it’s no longer economically feasible. It costs too much to get the energy.
So: If an organization gets too complex, it stops working. And if the EROI gets too low, it’s not worth moving forward. Society is at a crossroads as we are challenged by too much complexity and not enough EROI–for food, for learning, for power. (And the same is true for the customers we seek to find or the projects we seek to build.)
And, and it’s a significant ‘and’, the EROI of solar has been climbing (wind is even higher, and nuclear, by some measures, higher still, but each has their own caveats and challenges). In the charts below, up is better than down.
And the final wildcard is AI. If the computer chip created new frontiers in building complex systems, proponents of AI are saying that it opens new possibilities for coordination and control of complex systems, systems that will give us a new, more efficient way to extract the value we need.
The dance continues. Complex systems increasing yield but then fade as they get too big. Energy sources that have high yields moving relentlessly lower as the easy wins are taken. And then breakthroughs in coordination and processing that allow us to lean into the process all over again.
Avoid systems that get stuck in scale. Seek out energy gradients that work in your favor. Mostly, pay attention to the changes in each, as they never stay the same.
Little kids get confused about this… just add a few more to a very big number, and you have infinity.
Actually, infinity is a feeling and a concept built on the presumption that it can never be reached.
In a metrics-driven world, infinity is a dangerous thing to wish for, because it can never be achieved.
Exactly how many followers/sales/resources/compliments would be enough? If you’re always demanding a few more than whatever you have, you’re signing up for a journey that never ends.
If the journey itself is sustaining you, there’s nothing wrong with insisting that it go on and on. But be careful what you’re trading away, because infinity will never arrive. That’s the point.
…but it’s often overlooked.
A farmer might yearn for twice as much land. But it’s far more efficient to double the yield on the land he already has.
Marketers often hustle to get the word out. To reach more people. And yet, activating the fans you already have–the ones who trust you, who get the joke, who want to go where you’re going–is far more reliable.
If you want to win an election, don’t waste a lot of time persuading people who have chosen to oppose you and your work. Instead, simply create the conditions for those who agree with you to choose to actually show up and vote. And, along the way, to bring their friends.
This is the overlooked secret of my book streak. I write books for my readers instead of trying to find readers for my books.
Marketers face a choice every day: hustle for new people or serve the ones who care. Activation is much more productive than persuasion.
We might deserve something.
We might be entitled to it.
But expectations are a story we tell ourselves, and that story is up to us.
The simple life hack is to lower your expectations, regardless of what you’re entitled to. Create the conditions for the outcome you seek, but leave yourself room if it doesn’t arrive.
Lowering expectations is a way to ensure that tomorrow is even better than you hope it will be.
I asked my AI about some obsolete card games, and it wrote a 1,000 word essay about Lansquenet. It made up the rules, the strategies, the betting techniques, all of it.
Saying that it was raining on July 14th last year is an error. Inventing an entirely new set of rules is an hallucination.
An AI can’t lie, because it doesn’t know it’s lying. In that sense, it’s sort of pathological, careening forward without a conscience. Humans anthropomorphize things, because it makes it easier for us to process and predict. And AI is tempting us to do that more than we might with an ordinary machine.
That’s probably not the most helpful strategy, and it’s setting us up for real trouble.
AI is a tool, and judgment, for the foreseeable future, remains our job. It doesn’t matter how cool your hammer is, it’s still on you to decide which nails need hammering. And to be responsible for what happens when you use it.
Workers have rarely gotten the long end of the stick. The seduction of “do what you’re told and you’ll win valuable prizes” often doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and so it’s not surprising that many people are skeptical about delivering something extra–work is called work for a reason.
At the same time, one of the best career choices you can make is to hire a great boss. A great boss will support you as you encounter worthwhile challenges. They’ll engage you and pay you fairly. They’ll help you build a career at the same time they teach you about the work that needs to be done.
But good bosses often know that they’re good bosses, and are looking for something in the pile of resumes that fly by. (These are often things that bad bosses don’t particularly care about or even want).
It’s easy to claim these skills, but not easy to commit to being quite good at them.
Most bosses don’t deserve this level of effort. I hope you can find one that does.
