This was written in June 2014.
I am trying to rekindle the habit of doing vomits. I did one this morning on the way to work and I figure I might as well do another while I’m on the way home.
I just downloaded the 1 Second Everyday app. I’m hoping I can stick with it. I really like the idea of having a movie you can watch of your life, a second at a time. We’ll see. (Update: Nope, didn’t really stick with it. I guess I have to sort out more fundamental things before I can pickup a habit like this. Or maybe there’s some other way to deal with it, but I can’t really be bothered to think about it right now.)
I’m tired of talking about social media and cigarettes. I feel like I’ve made my points about those things and I’m not even interested in going very much deeper into those things. Rather, I want to acknowledge them as suboptimal and focus on what is optimal instead. I know what those things are: good sleep, healthy eating, hydration, exercise, reading, writing, dates with the wife.
CHANGING READING PRIORITIES: I’m re-enamoured with the idea of reading intensively and writing book reviews. It occurs to me that I already have an outdated bookcase. I picked my books mostly when I was still unemployed, so I chose books about physics and evolution and linguistics and semiotics… things that I wanted to read back then.
It’s not like I don’t care about those things, but I have new concerns and priorities that matter more. I think it was rational to be interested in those things when I wasn’t yet a part of any sort of team or framework. It made sense to try to make sense of big, sexy ideas. They seemed interesting, challenging, exciting.
Now I have much more simple or trivial concerns, because I have a job and it makes more sense to focus on getting better at my job than it does trying to make sense of, say, the global economy. Getting better at my job opens up more immediate opportunities for me to grow and challenge myself, in ways that have a real and immediate impact on the world- even if small.
TEACH PEOPLE TO FISH: I’ve come to believe that one of the most compassionate things you can do for a person is to make them employable and to get them employed. Rather than give charity, which always feels a little awkward to me, you help people be self-sufficient and create real value/wealth in the world. I’ve gotten two of my friends internships at my company, hired another, and I helped set up another friend with a job that was pretty much made perfectly for him- he just didn’t know or realise it at the time. That feels really good, because now he has a job he likes, that he learns a lot from, and the world is richer for it. I’d like to do this at a much greater scale over time. And again that depends on me getting better and better at my own job, and any better jobs I might grow into.
Or perhaps I may one day start something of my own and create value for others directly. That’s really a damn beautiful thing, and it’s something that was never quite communicated to me in an eloquent way. David Ogilvy described it when talking about how his employees reminded him of baby birds hungrily waiting for food from the parent. In a way that is the relationship I have with my boss. He pays me, he trusts me, he coaches me. I want to one day do that for others, too. I have the opportunity to do that with my colleagues, which is an honour and a privilege. But more importantly I have to focus on doing the best possible work I can do. That is the best gift I can give to the people who have given me so much and asked so little in return.
THE VARIANCE IN QUALITY OF OPPORTUNITIES is absolutely flabbergasting. I got the slightest taste of it as a part time worker at Shangri-La hotel, as I compared it to working at fast food, or doing manual labour. In all cases you are being paid for your time, but Shangri-La pays a couple of dollars more per hour than McDonald’s- and puts you in far more complex and interesting situations. [1] Navigating these situations is a joy in itself. It challenges you. You have to pay attention, you have to think, you have to be engaged. All of these are practices that are ‘antifragile’, I think, in the sense that they force you to have to deal with messiness and complexity. It’s like strength training with weights rather than with machines.
And I’m guessing this is the case with everything. With internships, you might get a company that expects you to do the paperwork and make coffee, or you might get a company that allows you to get deeply involved in actual decisions, to face real customers and make real decisions. (We’ve been doing that with our interns and it’s worked out really well for us, and for them. The trick is to pick smart people to begin with, and challenge them healthily.)
I guess what I wanted to say with that was… if you want to do great things in your life, if you want to grow and be bigger and stuff like that, then you should seek out roles that let you face (at least some facet of) reality.
Once you go down this rabbit hole, a lot of society feels very farcical. To protect itself from itself. Most people live in a massive zoo, all of us included, and we spend our time trying to figure out how to please the zookeepers. Which leaves us very vulnerable when systems change and we suddenly need to fend for ourselves.
Notes:
[1] Paul Graham (I think?) described McDonald’s as essentially a piece of software- there are such clear, simple and distinct rules for what everything should be doing. It must be an interesting challenge to write the software if you’re at the top, it’s mind-numbingly boring to be at the bottom. After all, the software is designed to work with the most thoughtless, ignorant, uneducated, unpredictable employees in existence. This is not meant to be a dig at McDonald’s employees, bless them- it’s meant to be read as praise for the software.
It’s interesting in turn to juxtapose this thinking with Venkat Rao’s idea about civilization being the process of taking intelligence out of people’s heads and putting it into institutions. In that regard McDonald’s is more civilized than Shangri-La.