I’d hoped to do a more qualitative analysis, but since January is almost over, here is a quick look at the numbers, mostly without comment.
Travel
Miles flown: 74,052
Hotel nights: 51
I was on the road more this year than I have been in a while, mostly to SF and LA. 90% work related, with the major exception of a trip to Europe with Mom.
Ubers taken: 445
This is, frankly, shocking. More than one Uber per day??
Art/Media
Andrewdornon.com posts written: 14
Words written: 14,294
Would like both of the above to be higher, but I also published about the same volume professionally, so I’m relatively happy with my writing output.
Songs listened to: 1,731
This is frankly shocking because I listen to albums and songs on repeat a lot, maybe Spotify is counting individual listens?
Books read: 76 started and about 20 finished
This is lower than I wanted. I set out to start 10 books a week. Note: the library doesn’t keep a log of checkout records for privacy reasons, so this estimate based on times I picked email receipt and overdue notices.
Alamo Drafthouse Visits: 19
Master Pancake Shows: 6
The Alamo and especially Master Pancake are some of my favorite Austin institutions, so I’m happy with this.
iPhone
Time spent on iPhone: 41 DAYS (2 hours and 45 minutes a day)
Time spent on texting: 12 DAYS
Time spent on Safari: 7.6 DAYS
Time spent on Mail: 6 DAYS
Time spent on Phone: 1.6 DAYS
I must say all of this is very worrisome/depressing, especially because I don’t have social media apps, turned off all notifications, and use Do Not Disturb and greyscale on my phone to combat overuse.
Money
Spend is as a percent of personal spend, not income.
Grocery spend: 7.9%
Amazon spend: 1.3%
Rent spend: 24.7%
Estimated Personal Restaurant and Bar spend: 13.7%
I’m estimating that half of my restaurant and bar spend is work related.
Retirement savings as percent of gross income: 22.6%
Personal spend as percent of gross income: 54.8%
I didn’t have a savings or spending goal, so I’m fairly happy that autopilot did this well.
If you’d like to do similar analysis, I just pulled together data from Gmail, Mint, Personal Capital, the Screentime app, airlines/hotels and Spotify.
Ask anyone you know how they’ve been, and some very high percentage will say busy. There’s no doubt that some people are busy, but for the rest, which is the majority, they feel busier than they are. If you look at time use studies, average working adults today have more leisure time than ever before AND better and cheaper leisure activities (how much more than $10.99 would you be willing to pay for Netflix per month?). On top of this, we have the lowest labor force participation rate in the modern era for all sorts of reasons, but surely non-caregiving people not in the labor force aren’t busy. Those who are raising children are raising fewer, and recently the US fell behind the replacement rate of child births, so there are fewer parents than ever. Why do people who objectively have more leisure and subjectively more pleasant living and working conditions feel so rushed?
“The rate of change is faster than ever before.” This is the beginning line of countless quick hit business articles touting AI as revolutionary to all enterprises or longform think pieces about how society is being constantly transformed and how this has led X group to rebel/conform/you name it. But it’s completely false. Technological innovation along most measures has slowed, yet most people feel that the technology they interact with has gotten increasingly integrated into their lives. And increasingly disruptive—but not in the sexy sense that wunderkinds and VCs use the term.
Taken together, people feel like they have less time to get work and leisure activities done when they have more, and they think that the world is changing rapidly when it isn’t. These things are intimately connected via an idea I’m calling Technological Unevenness.
Technological Unevenness is the quality of consumer content technology to improve much faster than other technologies and decrease productivity, while creating the perception of faster large scale change.
Technological unevenness leads people to perceive the world in specific, incorrect ways. They feel at risk of being left behind, that they can’t contribute and that the world is getting worse.
None of those things is true.
People think they are busier than ever, but they aren’t.
People report being busier than ever (this is actually kind of hard data to find). But at the very least, they use the word busy or synonyms in their Christmas cards more than ever. And there are now over 30,000 books on Amazon related to the word busy. Despite the softness of this data, it certainly points to an overwhelming concern many people have. But when you ask them to break down their days minute by minute or hour by hour, they are getting less busy. The best longitudinal data is from 1965-1995 and show a big decrease in paid and unpaid labor and a corresponding increase in leisure time.
On average, Americans have 4.5 hours of leisure time per workday and 6.25 hours of free time per weekend day. And this is using some pretty specific definitions of leisure time—how much of your eating would you consider leisure time? Also notable is the low hours of work per day—4.5 hours on presumably workdays. This is a little misleading given that we have the lowest level of prime age workforce participation in modern history. So let’s take a look at time use by folks who are employed on days that they work.
Here we see that full time workers do work and work related activities for almost 9 hours and part time workers work for almost 6 hours. It’s important to note that work related activities include your commute and work related eating. Given that the average commute is 25.4 minutes each way, it looks like the full time worker is putting in the standard 8 hour workday. Not amazing compared to Western European standards, but historically quite low.
Looking at the average time use to include people who are not employed including parents and caregivers, they certainly are not suffering from the curse of busyness. But given that the average full and part time workers also average around 30 hours of free time per week, I think we have to drop the hypothesis that people actually are busier than ever. So what the hell is going on? People have more leisure time, but feel busier.
Consumer content technology is ruining leisure and work.
Consumer content technology here is mostly advanced communication tools normally accessed through (or sprung on you by) your smartphone—things like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, text messages and email. These tools ask you to check them every once in a while to see what others are doing and report what you are up to. A seemingly innocuous reason for being, but when everyone is checking in constantly, sharing the latest viral video and posting photos of their latest vacation, the flow information is high quantity, low quality and nonstop. But each notification, scroll through your feed or quick response generates the same dopamine hit as completing a valuable task or getting an in real life social reward. So we check each ping instantly and scroll the feed endlessly to monitor others’ actions and relative social status. Ok, but how much does this really add up to in the course of the day?
A Deloitte study of smartphone habits shows a pretty consistent trend of Americans using their phones 47 times per day. According to a meta-analysis on HackerNoon, those 47 uses add up to over 4 hours per day spent on mobile phones and looking at your phone once every 20 minutes. 4 hours? That’s awfully similar to the average American’s number of leisure hours per day. It looks as though we may be just be dividing up our leisure time into 5 minute bursts every 20 minutes. Which could be fine, except that it creates the perception of having less leisure time than we actually do. And task switching itself creates what’s called time pressure, or the feeling of being rushed. Feeling constantly rushed and like we have no leisure time would be a bad enough effect, but consumer tech is also hurting our ability to be productive at work.
It seems self-evident that constantly checking your phone at work for unrelated notifications is bad for productivity from a simple time use standpoint. Your employer doesn’t want to pay to you to share GIFs with your friends. But labor productivity doesn’t take a hit simply because employees are taking constant breaks, but also because when you switch between tasks you create “attention residue” where some percent of your brain is still focused on the initial task and this creates a drag in performance on the second task. This effect applies even for quick checks of your email or text messages. Worse, task switching frequently changes your brains’ expectation of how long it will focus on one thing, and as that expectation shortens, your ability to focus decreases as well.
You’re mentally clocking out several times an hour, feeling time pressure because of switching tasks, and having a harder time focusing when you return to work because of attention residue, this is a recipe for feeling rushed and like you can’t complete all of the things you need to accomplish. You’re probaby planning your work like you’ll focus on tasks for periods of time longer than 20 minutes and that you won’t constantly sabotage your focus by 20% with attention residue, so it’s quite likely that you can’t accomplish the things you should be able. On top of this, knowledge work is getting harder.
Why on earth did we focus on creating ever better ways of sharing memes?
The original answer is that venture capital saw the internet as a way to create winner take all markets. When I was in the startup world, the conventional wisdom was that B2B startups weren’t all that interesting because there were fewer potential customers and customer acquisition costs were much higher because you needed to hire a sales team. This general trend led to venture capital driving massive innovation in the consumer web.
I’m not sure how much of this was intentional versus luck, but based on market cap, the VCs seem to have been right.
There’s no B2B FANG equivalent.
The winners that we all know, love and interact with every 20 minutes or so, all ended up being what Ben Thompson of Stratechery calls the Aggregators.
““First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.”
“This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be aggregated at scale leaving consumers/users as a first order priority. By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle.” (Emphasis mine.)
In short, the best consumer content technologies have commoditized content producers whether news organizations or…us, and then will create ever better user experiences to drive ever more usage (and a moat against potential competitors). The fact that many firms have near monopolistic profits means they will attract the best design and development talent to further their goals and crowd out productive technology.
The flipside of this is that until recently VC investment in B2B technology was pretty sparse and it shows in how bad so many enterprise technologies really are. I’m intimately familiar with customer relationship management (CRMs), the systems that all business use to keep track of the process of selling to and keeping customers. All the major systems are bad. They make it harder for salespeople to sell rather than easier. This is because they were designed for enterprise leaders to be able to forecast better and own the customer relationship rather than the rep. So the process of getting information into the system is just data entry that businesses force on some of their most skilled and highly compensated employees. I struggle to believe that any improvements in forecasting outweigh the costs of the administrivia involved. This story is likely true for most enterprise software. Although I must say I talk with maybe 20 founders of sales technology companies per year, and it seems like there’s finally a shift in talent and capital away from sharing memes and toward making the modern workplace less tedious and more productive. I’m not sure how big this trend is, and if it’s too little, too late.
People think technology is moving fast, but it isn’t.
I don’t want to speculate too much about the impact of capital chasing consumer content technology monopolies, creating giant firms that hurt worker productivity and guess at how much that will hurt global growth. I think it’s material, but there’s not good evidence. My hypothesis is that will be the end result of Technological Unevenness. That consumer content technology innovation will slow down other innovation. But frankly, that discussion isn’t needed yet.
It drives me insane when people in the business world talk about “the rate of change is ever increasing” and show some meaningless graph with an exponentially upward sloping line. Anyone who has ever seen a Fortune 500 company that runs its forecasting off Excel spreadsheets should immediately balk at those statements. People misapply how dramatically their personal experience changed in the face of consumer content technology (and a majority of venture capital on earth driving it) and assume that all technologies are improving at that pace. When in fact it’s probably the opposite. Capital chasing Aggregator-esque monopolies likely slowed innovation elsewhere. Nonetheless, all of our brains having been rewired to get a technological dopamine hit every 20 minutes, we think that innovation broadly must have continued apace.
There certainly have been some exponential improvements in computing power, no one would doubt that. Cloud computing, smart phones, and a government-run GPS has allowed for some cool business model innovations. But if you zoom out from the leaders of the tech sector, you start to see a different story.
Let’s look at the pharmaceutical industry—a sector anyone not interested in dying has a huge stake in. Some analysts are worried that we’re rapidly approaching the point where returns won’t outweigh the costs of R&D at all.
We’ve scooped up all the easy gains, and now we have to pay an ever increasing army of researchers to look for hard to find innovations. Soon it won’t be worth trying to come up with new and better drugs. This doesn’t sound like the rate of change is increasing (at least in the direction we want). If there isn’t dramatic business model innovation, this is a terrifying reduction in innovation after a century of innovation that resulted in massive standard of living gains for everyone on the planet.
On the macro scale, economists look at total factor productivity growth (TFP)—“the portion of output not explained by traditionally measured inputs of labor and capital used in production”—to measure innovations, sub-divided into technological growth and efficiency improvements. So if you have 5 labor inputs and 5 capital inputs in Years 1 and 2, and the result is 10 outputs in Year 1, but 15 outputs in Year 2, then economists would assume that you innovated over time to increase output with the same inputs. TFP is important. It’s pretty much the only way that living standards go up.
So you definitely want to have high TFP growth. The Industrial Revolution and the 19th Century was no doubt a period of innovation (and social change) unlike the world had ever seen. And we continued to have high TFP growth through the post-War years until the mid-70s.
Like pharma, but on a massive scale, we’re seeing decreasing marginal returns on R&D. The exception being a lift in productivity growth in the 90s through early 2000s from the implementation of IT technology that drove some efficiency gains. What the data doesn’t paint is a picture of ever increasing change and growth driven by technological innovation. But people feel that way.
People are perceiving changes in their own lived experience and extrapolating out to the rest of the world. They’re perceiving the massive shift from pre-smartphone life when sometimes you were bored or daydreamed or talked to a stranger in line at the grocery. Now you look at a magical device that pipes in all your friends’ photos and funny comments and this is a massive shift from whatever people did waiting in a doctor’s office 20 years ago. This misperception happens because consumer content technology changes really fast, but the rest of the world is changing more slowly.
So what if we feel busy, are less productive and think the world is changing more than it is?
Let me be clear about my position: technological unevenness is a fucking plague. Chronic time pressure and task switching are ruining peoples’ brains during the leisure they don’t realize they have and at the workplace where we’ll all underperforming. This causes everyone to assume a runaway pace of life that isn’t real.
It’s really bizarre that people have more leisure time today than ever before, but feel like they have none. We work at nicer jobs, eat better food and have way more enjoyable and cheaper leisure activities, but somehow feel constantly stressed out and like we don’t have enough time. Despite the average American having 30 hours of free time per week. This misperception is because we’ve decided to chop this time up into 5 minute increments every 20 minutes. Well, decided isn’t the right word. Our brains, prescient venture capitalists, Jony Ive, and the best computer programmers of our generation are working together to make sure that we stare at our phones as much as possible. And today, this is where our leisure time is spent, but it doesn’t feel like leisure. No one thinks to themselves after scrolling through their Facebook feed, “ah, that was a good algorithmically selected set of photos, status updates, and news stories” in the same way that after watching a movie or going for a walk you might reflect. Most of the time if asked people will say they had no leisure time, when in reality, they glanced at their phone for hours. We’ve also replaced previous leisure activities with something literally forgettable and cause us to feel time pressure.
And since we have to do it every 20 minutes, that means we’re spending a lot of leisure time at work. Now whether this extends our workday or shortens it is an open question. But one thing it definitely does is make us worse at work. Switching between tasks hurts your ability to do either activity and primes your brain to switch again making it difficult for you to focus on tasks that take longer than 20 minutes. This would be bad under normal circumstances. But we’re facing falling productivity growth rates as technological innovation and efficiency gains get harder and harder to create. People accomplishing hard things don’t tend to check their phone every 20 minutes.
Whether we think all jobs will be automated because some jobs in their town were outsourced (despite close to full employment) or that American values are in decline (despite the lowest teen birth rate in a half century and low crime rates), the source of modern reactionary behavior is misunderstanding how fast things are changing due to how fast consumer content technology has changed our immediate experience. Everyone is uncomfortable with tech/social change at some rate, although most people are ok with stasis. So creating the appearance of faster change will necessarily increase the number of people who are unhappy, even if the rate of innovation/growth/whatever is unchanged or slowed. It’s easy to joke about the economic anxiety of Trump voters because it’s clear in the data that racial and cultural resentment animated many. The joke is funny because when you look at Trump voters, they are above the median income and live in more rural places, with few immigrants. It’s funny because they misperceive that their world is changing. We laugh and call them racists because we think they’re lying. But what if we believe them? Has consumer content technology fed them the story that they will be replaced and given the rate of change in how addictive their smartphone is, they misperceive how fast that is happening? Obviously, this misperception isn’t the only driver of the populism. But it’s one of them.
Ok, but really, so what?
Global GDP growth is probably the most important priority if you care about getting the most people out of absolute poverty.
People who think they don’t have any free time likely won’t do incremental activities that generate more growth or donate money to effective redistribution efforts.
People who are incapable of doing their best work are hurting marginal GDP growth at their current job and likely won’t start successful firms that generate even more growth.
People who think the world is changing too fast will likely vote for things that are anti-growth.
And those three things are avoidable.
Fine, what do we do?
On a personal level, baby steps are turn off all notifications except for calls and text messages (silence big group texts). Delete social apps—look on the much less well designed browser versions on a laptop. Check email only 3 times a day at work. Practice concentrating for longer periods of time.
On a social level, don’t pull your phone out in social settings. Don’t set your phone on the table. If someone does either of those things, ask if something important has come up.
On a regulatory level, I think we’ll have to regulate consumer content technologies like we regulate tobacco and alcohol. The personal and social sides of this can moderate demand, but we’ll need to restrict supply as well.
It’s possible for you to re-perceive the pace of change accurately, feel less busy and do more focused work. It will feel strange, but it’s possible.
I was having lunch with Will Wilkinson in Iowa City, and as people who write (or in my case try) are apt to do, we complained about the difficulty and pain of writing. It made me feel better that a New York Times columnist and think tank policy director found writing as immiserating as I tend to.
Why writing is painful
Will brought up that it made a fair amount of sense for writing to be so challenging for most people. We evolved spoken language long ago, but alphabets arose only minutes ago in evolutionary time. Few are competent writers, fewer good enough to be paid for it, and almost none talented and find the process pleasant. This is the place we find ourselves when trying to write. Using a relatively new conceptual tool with a brain that isn’t set up to do it.
How to get paid to avoid writing (or something like it)
We agreed that lots of business travel is simply to avoid having to carefully think through scenarios and write clear emails. As someone who works for a consulting firm, I can attest to the truth of this. The higher you are in a Fortune 500 firm, the fewer sentences you write.
On some level, consulting firms are hired to help organizations avoid the pain of careful thought and writing and what they do is something like writing—if writing means introducing a conceptual model to a situation and explaining it. Many consulting engagements are essentially about finding the right mental model to use for a given scenario or creating one if none exists. Many consultants are quick at applying models and a minority are good creating new ones for novel scenarios. But few end up writing about them in helpful ways. Clients demand easily digestible PowerPoint decks, and overly detailed roadmaps, workstreams and swim lanes. White papers written by consultancies are marketing tools rather than documents intended to guide corporate policy in the way think tank papers intend.
Conversation as a writing hack
Strangely, talking is a much more pleasant experience than writing even for Will, who writes for a living. I find this to be true as well. Our brains are simply better equipped for it, and the instant feedback and improvement of ideas that happens within good conversation feel dopamine-esque to me much of the time. Will said the old days of blogging at a rapid clip in response to other folks’ blogs had a back and forth discussion quality that made it easier and more motivating to write. I’d imagine it’s hard on some level to put think tank white papers into the sort of rage-writing zone that many bloggers found themselves in. However, if you start your process by creating a relatively simple mental model, and then use conversation to flesh out the details, you can create some of the motivation that dialogues create. On average, I’ve been talking about a given idea for at least 3 months and normally a year before writing about it. These sorts of timelines won’t work in many instances, but if you have a week and a sympathetic (or captive) audience, you can increase productivity a significant amount by increasing motivation. Whether writing about sales for BTS or for this blog, I find myself in the lucky position that I can mostly write about ongoing conversations and 80% of the time avoid staring into the abyss.
Business leaders and executives are high powered, rapid decision engines, but we know very little about why, what and how they think. I want to look underneath the jargon-filled soundbites at what myths and beliefs inspire those decisions, how they live, how they understand themselves as actors on the grand stage, where they believe the next act will play out, and paths young people can take to create a decent future.
These are the people that shape our world, and I want to step back with them and take the long view.
Target interviewees
F500 CxOs, initially non-CEOs. Likely a focus on non-tech executives who already get a disproportionate amount of focus
How to execute
Initially do 6 over Skype and if they all work, publish simultaneously and do blogger/media/B school outreach. If successful, pitch to F500 CxOs and offer to come to their HQs and do a live interview with some of their high potentials and allow for Q/A from audience.
Sample questions
Did you always want to be a CxO?
I know you (insert some brief history), but tell me about your path to where you are now. (Follow up on how influential event affects how they view X)
What do you think about YOU caused you to end up at the top of a global organization, rather than XX?
How do you structure your day/time?
In any way of living there are tradeoffs, executives aren’t exempted. What are the major tradeoffs you feel you make in your life?
What do you see as your core purpose as ROLE at ORG?
What big theories are inspiring your work at ORG?
Who do you think are the brightest lights in the business/strategy/marketing/operations world?
What are the last 3 books you’ve read? (find out in advance and read them)
What are the 3 books that underpin your view the business and the world? (find out in advance and read them)
How do you see American enterprise’s role in the world?
What are the 3 greatest forces operating in the world right now? (Dig on positive/negative)
What are the 3 greatest challenges facing the world as you see it? (Dig on how they interpreted–welfare, growth, environment, etc)
What role do you see college playing in the future?
Given your view on X and Y, how should people think about prioritizing their careers?
If you were in a top business school, and dead set on climbing to a Fortune 500 C suite, what advice would you give yourself?
Will X exist in 10 years? 20?
If you could be a young person and move anywhere, where would it be and why?
In lots of ways, the status of large enterprises has fallen in American society’s estimation (exempting large tech orgs), do you think this is fair-compared to the status GE had in say the 70s?
Large orgs are often disparaged as slow and uninnovative. This is almost treated as a law of nature. What dynamics do you think give rise to this perception? In what ways is this perception false?
I started this blog because I wanted to investigate what people will do for money and meaning in the near and far future. As I approached it obliquely, it may have gotten a bit muddled, but it remains my main concern. To understand where we are going, I needed to construct a model of where we are. I haven’t yet done that, but I have observations on what people like me and unlike me do for meaning today..
Travel
There are two types of meaning being derived from travel. Business travelers often complain about the demands of their job, and they likely genuinely mean it. But I witness and have succumbed to a small delight in the implied status of the fact that “I, personally, am physically needed somewhere else”. The other type of meaning is the one that certain people get from “seeing the world” or interacting with other cultures. This meaning is harder to describe and prove exists, but it’s become such a generic value that I suggest you try telling people at a social gathering that you “don’t like to travel”. You’ll like be looked at askance and interrogated. And will likely lose status in the average person’s eyes. You will have challenged a common mechanism of generating meaning.
My investigations
I flew more in 2017 than I ever have, including 3 trips to Europe and 26 flights total. I explored a fair number of European cities. It’s hard to estimate how much meaning these travels generated, but based on how frequently I talk about it (even if negatively), I would say some. I’ll now introduce a meaning scale from 1-10 of how much meaning it generated for me. This, of course, is approximate at best and will vary considerably by individual.
Meaning rating: 3
Exercise
Thinking about exercise as meaning producing activity is strange. But it’s hard to argue that Crossfitters, yogis and SoulCycle-ists don’t seem to form a part of their identity around exercise. Those specific activities are easy to pick on because they’re group activities that come with obnoxious life advice—but that’s the point, they’re exercise as meaning creation taken to its logical end—not bastardizations. Marathon training is a solitary activity, but anything you do for that many hours a week must be throwing off a lot of meaning.
My investigations
Over the last several years, I’ve run 3 miles a few times a week fairly consistently, but if I felt like I could get away with stopping, I would. On top of that I’m often invited/dragged to yoga, bootcamp style classes, and SoulCycle. I’ve always liked group exercise, but the group and meaning part always made me cringe.
Meaning rating: 1
Art
Strangely, the most predictable and most ancient “hobbyist” way of creating meaning—the production and consumption of art—seems to be on the wane. Or rather, new arts emerged and have taken the place of old arts. Whatever bizarre number of hours Americans watch tv/surf the internet surely count as arts consumption—and truly this is the golden age of TV and hot takes. I’m just not sure how much identity and meaning is drawn from those things compared to going to a metal show or sculpting things with your hands. It’s possible I’m just a Luddite on this topic—no doubt Youtube video hobbyists and internet bloggers would take issue with it.
My investigations
Over the past year, I’ve listened to more albums intentionally, read more fiction and way more non-fiction than any year prior. My film consumption declined. I went to some really amazing concerts. I’ve shared more book and music recommendations than in the past. Art consumption has always been a big identity driver for me, and I think that it grew this year. Art production has been mixed. I took fewer (zero) art classes this year. Conversely, I started writing, which has been ok.
Meaning rating: 6
Altruism
Doing good things for other people generates a warm glow and a sense of purpose. Donating money to earthquake victims, volunteering at a soup kitchen—these things make you feel meaningful. Unfortunately, generating meaning isn’t the same as generating utility most efficiently. Oftentimes meaning and effectiveness are at odds. People who derive a lot of meaning from altruism have been those who reject effective altruism the most in my experience. Their emotional investments are so high that they can’t accept that their work/time/money has been less meaningful than they feel it is.
My investigations
I volunteered at the Austin homeless shelter by running the computer lab. This mostly consisted of sitting around while the clients did what everyone does on the internet—read email, watched Youtube videos, scrolled through Facebook and occasionally applied for government assistance or jobs. I liked doing this, it generated meaning, it felt good to tell people about doing it. But it wasn’t very effective. I also have gotten very interested in effective altruism and have put some time into how best to implement effective giving into my life. The ideas, conversation and people around EA are very interesting and feel meaningful. Giving away 30% of my income anonymously on the internet…doesn’t feel meaningful, even if it would generate the most utility, which is why I give away dramatically less than that to GiveWell. The meaning-utility gap is likely the biggest problem EAs have to overcome.
Meaning rating: 2
Tribe
Tribe is a catchall for both a community you are in dialogue with (think a church congregation) and an identity group that you consider yourself a part of (the Democratic Party). People clearly generate a lot of meaning from both, but I would argue that communities generate a lot more. This is likely because you are a participant rather than an audience member. I see a lot of shifts from community to identity group that go unnoticed because both generate a tribal feeling that occludes your changing role in the tribe.
My investigations
I struggle with being a member of a tribe, so this was really challenging to investigate. This attitude is probably what makes it easier for everyone to join identity groups—I always vote straight ticket Democrat (unless, this being Texas, the real race is between the GOP and Libertarians), but I doubt I could be in dialogue with the party if I tried. The only big community investigation was my attendance of a Rationalist MegaMeetup in New York. It was essentially a bunch of folks interested in rationality staying in a giant house and talking about stuff. Oh, and Scott Alexander was there. I went with some friends from Austin, so that made it reasonably easy. I really enjoyed meeting a lot of smart, interesting folks doing cool work, but for the most part, I didn’t like the community aspect. I know the whole point is to create an in-group, but that was exactly what I didn’t like.
Meaning rating: 2
Work
It is perhaps unfair to split out work from tribe. At least for people, like me, who work for tribal organizations. What most people think of as meaning being generated from work is the productive use of time to make the world a better place (for some business or person). In companies, this means taking your individual skills and combining them with those of other talented individuals and doing something neither of you could do alone. This productive part of work has not started to generate more meaning than it has in the past. It has just always been a huge meaning machine.
Conversely, as other communities have shifted into identity groups, (and perhaps as art has declined in its generic meaning rating) the relative value of productive work has risen. And organizations have responded to the generic decline in meaning by increasing the community, and thus tribal, aspects of their workplaces. I can’t say if this is good or bad.
My investigations
For the past 4 years, I’ve worked for a strange, Swedish consulting firm that helps Fortune 500 companies do something really hard. We help people change how they think and act at work. On average, I think BTS helps organizations and increases global GDP at the margin. The productive work I do is to help explain this work to clients and shape new offerings. But it’s the community aspects of the company that drive such high meaning.
Meaning rating: 6
Family
Family is difficult because almost everyone has one and almost everyone would say they derive a lot of meaning from it. So I will try to look at what people really do. A large majority of people have children, which is a very concrete action and from which most people say they derive a lot of meaning. Given the time and resource expenditures, they seem to be telling the truth. Conversely, very few people live in multigenerational households caring for aging parents or other relatives. Part of this is increase in healthy lifespan, but part of it must be that they deem it to not be worth it. Perhaps people derive more meaning from family they produce than other family.
My investigations
I did not have a child. But I am quite close to my mother and siblings—we all talk on the phone at least once a week. I didn’t change anything this year that would generate meaning.
Meaning rating: 8 (see the first sentence of family section)
Meaning and Yield Curves
I’ve begun to think about meaning as a sort of capital stock that an individual can grow or shrink via investing time in different meaning generating activities. For instance, my returns to time from art would be higher than my returns to time spent exercising, and thus my stock of meaning would go up.
A potential flaw in this logic is you seem to attribute more meaning to things as the time spent on that thing increases. It’s likely that there is a class of meaning activities that have positive yields that increase as you spend time on them, and others that hit diminishing margin returns (exercise, for me).
There are, of course, also activities that have neutral or even negative yields depending on duration.
As college seniors who don’t yet have job offers and don’t know what to do with their lives start the annual gauntlet of getting their first real job, I have a suggestion that is broadly applicable and will lead to above average outcomes:
Go work in sales at a Fortune 1000 company.
Reasons why:
You don’t know what you want to do.
Good, sales jobs don’t require you to know how to do anything specific except have structured conversations. College students who don’t know what they want to do tend to go into finance, consulting or law, so your competition is less fierce.
All jobs require some amount of sales skills.
Want to get anything done in a large organization—you have to sell it, so the skills you learn in your first sales job will translate into any job you have afterwards.
Things about large sales orgs:
They hire a lot.
Large sales orgs hire hundreds or thousands of entry level salespeople per year. Your odds are simply better at getting a sales job than they are for any other function.
They aren’t looking for experience.
Sales orgs won’t be looking for job experience. A lot will privilege sports or club leadership experience, but they know you won’t have sold before.
There’s a lot of training. Way more than anywhere else.
Since they know you won’t have any experience, sales orgs are one of the few places that spend a lot on training recent college grads. When you look at learning and development budgets for F1000s, there are two major categories: sales training, which goes primarily to salespeople like you, and leadership training, which goes to people with 10+ years of experience.
How it could work out:
Some people are naturals.
Here’s the good news: if you’re naturally great at sales, then you now have a job that you’ll find easy and enjoy. You’ll likely be on the fast track to leadership.
A lot of people can get good.
Not naturally a rockstar? That’s ok! Lots of people get good because of the massive investment F1000s put into developing sales skills.
It’s highly compensated.
If you’re good at selling, regardless of how you became good, you’ll make in the low six figures consistently. Sales compensation follows a power law, so if you’re really good you can have a $1m year before you’re 35.
If it doesn’t work out:
You’ll learn at least two businesses deeply.
You will have learned the business of your employer AND you’ll know the ins and outs of your customers’ business. Consider your time spent in sales as a hands on Intro to Business course.
You’ll learn to fail.
A lot of smart college kids have never really failed at anything. Entry level sales gigs give you the opportunity to fail on a daily basis. And if you aren’t succeeding in the role, you’ll now have experience of slowly failing at a relatively important thing.
You’ll have a foot in the door to a large org.
This organization has spent a lot of time and money on you already, they’d certainly prefer to rotate you into a position where you can be successful. This will likely be in marketing or customer success.
In the end:
You’ll either find a highly paid job, a different job at your employer or customer, or at the very least will have bought a year or so of getting paid reasonably well to figure out what you want to do with your life. It beats freelancing or waiting tables.
Update: Bryan said it “seems plausible it could work for someone”–which is close to saying impossible, without doing exactly that. Not sure, but plausibly the most positive attitude toward an alternative educational approach.
Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education has persuaded me that a majority of the education premium is essentially really costly signaling of ability, conscientiousness and conformity, and that it’s reasonably good at this task since employers are willing to pay that premium.
This led me to consider how else one might certify these qualities in a non-educational/productive way. In Caplan’s book, he argues against the “IQ laundering” argument for education saying that the test tax really isn’t that high and that education is discriminatory as well and clearly employers are allowed to use credentials as hiring criteria. And essentially argues, that the education premium isn’t solely IQ laundering, but also filters for conscientiousness and conformity as well.
But IQ is a big part of the premium. And in the letter of the law, you are allowed to use IQ tests if it’s necessary to your business.
So here’s the pitch: start a professional services firm doing generalist work and hire anyone who scores above a quite high threshold on an IQ test or equivalent (for ease, just limit it to people who score 1600 on the SAT, this way you can brand the firm “1600”) and pay them whatever the current average starting salary of a college graduate is (perhaps even more than this). You’ll quickly filter for smart people who don’t have a college degrees. A large percentage of them will be recent high school graduates, but not all. Promise them the finest education imaginable—lessons from the real world.
In year 1, the work they do will largely be non-client facing, but you can promise clients high quality work at a fraction of the price compared to standard professional services firms. This will prove that they are conscientious enough to do professional quality work. Those who fail will have gotten paid to try and can always go back to the standard education system.
In year 2, give the now experienced staffer a raise to the average starting salary of recent graduate school graduate and put them into client facing scenarios. They’ll continue to learn and will build a network that would make any MBA envious. Their ability to navigate interpersonal situations should certify their ability further, and to a lesser extent conformity to workplace norms.
After year 2, most employees will likely choose to leave, but will have certified their ability and conscientiousness while earning an income rather than paying for education. They will not have certified conformity as much, but I think this trait is in declining demand among elite knowledge workers.
It’s pretty simple. Build a professional services firm, hire solely based on very high IQ, base salary solely on IQ, sell your services at a steep discount from those who are paying massive education premiums for similar talent, and ensure your employees and alumni are considered elite. You’ll have built a parallel certification system that takes advantages of market forces to avoid the pitfalls of other alternatives. It won’t take down the entire education system, but could work at the margin. Most importantly, you’ll have saved the world from wasting some of its smartest peoples’ time and effort.
A Theory Of Moments That Can Change Your Trajectory
What is it?
Opportunity flow is to you and me what deal flow is to a VC firm. It is the sum of things like conversations about research breakthroughs a grad student friend had, the inside access to a job opportunity, and an old coworker pitching you to join her startup as a cofounder. (Although I’ll mostly be discussing in the context of paid work, it could be used avocationally or in personal relationships.)
Opportunity flow is the sum of moments that could alter the trajectory of your life. And like any sort of deal flow, depending on your investment hypothesis, you could consistently get opportunities to incrementally alter that trajectory or infrequently get the option to radically change. Most people land somewhere in between, but closer to the former.
Why is it an important concept?
If you can generate 1% more lifetime income or utility, then both you and the world will be richer and happier. While the concept of opportunity flow by itself likely won’t generate that, thinking in more structured ways about your future will.
Opportunity flow is an additional tool rather than a replacement for your other planning tools, as it will be high variance across both the population and at the individual level. However, even a small increase in opportunity identification and execution would increase global wealth and utility—which I believe is the most important moral consideration.
How to get started
Understand your risk profile.
Decide how much risk you are willing to take on. Are you simply looking for a new job or are you looking to invest a high percentage of your liquid net worth in a high risk venture? Most people will be in the middle. Decide if you will make many small bets or one big one.
Set aside your risk capital.
You will invest both time and money in generating opportunity flow. Initially, this will probably be writing down your ideas and previous work, reaching out to people who will mostly ignore you, going on awkward coffee meetings, and flying to events and meetings.
The amount of time and money is clearly individual, but I would suggest setting aside more than feels comfortable. Once you have identified an opportunity you want to execute on, the time and money needed will be uncomfortable, so it’s best to start feeling that way now.
Be aware of all your skills. Not just your best or most obvious ones.
It’s easy to define your skillset as the graduate degree you have, or the function or industry you work in. However, in any high risk venture you will likely have to do a lot more than that anyway, so it’s best not to box yourself in from the jump. If you are a physicist, you can clearly do the statistics involved in forecasting. If you are a marketing person, but are willing to make sales calls, congratulations—you are now your venture’s salesperson.
Connect with people who have complementary skills—not people who are like you.
Many people looking to generate opportunity flow go to industry or functional events. This is fine as far as it goes if you’re looking to learn from whomever they could convince to speak. But if you’re looking for opportunity, don’t go to a place where there are a thousand people who proclaim to have the same expertise as you.
Go to where your skills are scarce. This could mean a researcher seeking out business types or someone from the developing world offering access to their market to a group of folks from the developed world. You will be rare and interesting, and opportunities will flow to you.
Come at problems from an angle.
If there is a problem that you understand, then seek out people who have no expertise in it, but have expertise in an adjacency. Look for people who deeply understand the first principles of the problem but likely have never considered your higher order problem. If you have an engineering problem, find a physicist. If you have a marketing problem, find a biologist. The flipside also works, if you have a psychology problem, find an art director from an ad agency.
If the people already working on your problem could have solved it, they already would have. And if they are going to solve it, then they likely won’t invite you into the room filled with people like you.
Privilege talent and passion, rather than a specific way of solving a problem (or even a specific problem).
This is a VC firm truism that probably doesn’t work for them. But I think it works for an individual’s opportunity flow. For VC firms, the number of people who have the talent and passion to dramatically alter the world is vanishingly small and their ability to identify them is…questionable. However, the number of people with the talent and passion to dramatically alter their own worlds is…well it isn’t vanishingly small. Fuck—it isn’t even small. Your ability to identify them is also likely much better.
If you find an opportunity with someone who is wildly smart with the passion to will their vision into existence, then I suggest you join them regardless of the problem they’re trying to solve.
The topic of a recent piece I wrote for BTS, reflects the fact that the division of labor, specialization and ops research is making its way to sales–a function often enthrall of itself as more art than science.
Firms are shifting to inside sales because their customers want it—many buyers prefer to communicate over the phone and email, are used to handling meaningful business virtually, and don’t want the interruption of a sales rep coming to their workplace.
On the organizational side, through specialization and lack of unnecessary travel time, sales organizations see big productivity gains. Inside sales reps are able to spend a higher percentage of their time having meaningful selling conversations with customers, and any field reps that remain can focus on those buyers and deals that really do require face to face interactions and skip those that are unwarranted (or even unwanted).
Read the whole thing if you wonder how it’s different than the traditional inside/outside split, want to know what will happen to field reps, or want to do this for your own organization.
I shoot to read about an hour a day. Falling short perhaps half of week days and often reading for multiple hours per weekend day. At any given time, I’m probably actively reading 5 books, with maybe an additional 5 cast aside. There are seemingly cultural and aesthetic reasons I endeavor to read this much, but really I read 7-10 hours per week, starting 20 books and finishing 5-10 per month because I currently believe:
Reading books is the most efficient way to seem a lot smarter (both crystallized and fluid intelligence)
There aren’t easy ways to separate seeming smart from being smart
Being smart is beneficial in a knowledge economy
So seeming smarter (than you are) is beneficial economically
If the above is true, then what is the optimal amount of reading a knowledge worker should do?
The largest returns will clearly go to someone who jumps from 0 books per month to 1 book per month. Carefully curated (acclaimed overviews of scientific fields, historical eras, groundbreaking economic texts, etc), 12 books a year would make you seem a whole lot smarter, able to make cross-disciplinary connections, and generally more engaged with the world. Choosing the initial 12 would also be quite easy to select because classic texts are relatively obvious.
Increasing your pace to 2-4 books per month will likely accelerate returns as you can more quickly build up a corpus of knowledge AND make connections between fields of knowledge faster. At 4 books per month (almost 50 books per year!) you will seem considerably smarter than you did before.
After perhaps 4 books per month, curation begins to be more challenging and in reality is difficult to sustain. I think this is the point of diminishing marginal returns and that each book over 4 increases “output” minimally.
I expect the economic returns of reading 2-4 books per month will be highest for people in client-facing or persuasive roles (sales, commercial banking, wealth management, business/corp development, fundraising, etc) and fields that value analytical horsepower (law, consulting, finance (IB, PE, HF) and tech/engineering), but should generally flow to any knowledge worker reading this much.
Ok, so read 2-4 books per month. Easy, right?
I’ll follow up with a post on approximating the economic return on reading, why people don’t read what seems to be the optimal amount, and whether I need to update my belief that the above argument is correct.
