It can be difficult.
Explaining atoms or molecules, or decision making, or what you do at your job…
The reason that it’s difficult is that in order to explain something, we need to really understand it first.
Not simply be able to do the task or ace the test.
But understand.
And the reason we avoid it is that we might not want to understand. We might not want to get past “because that’s the way it is” or “do what I say” to actually become comfortable with the underlying forces and axioms that make something work.
April 26, 2023
…when someone decides to selfishly push.
There’s an assumption of civility and fairness in all of our interactions. When a harsh competitor unilaterally breaks unwritten rules (because it’s “not technically against the rules”) the community then writes down a new rule.
The best way for a market to be a free market is for the participants to exercise self-restraint.
The second best way is for clear and useful rules to be stated and enforced.
What doesn’t work are unwritten rules that are often broken by selfish bullies.
April 25, 2023
For a decade, Cliffs Notes were the bestselling section of the bookstore. They were a simple way for any high school student to get insight, examples and answers about the books they were assigned and read (or didn’t read).
When Cliffs published a list of their thirty bestselling titles, I saw an opportunity and created a book that was the cliffs notes of the Cliffs Notes. Quicklit didn’t sell very well, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Used as intended, Cliffs Notes and Quicklit were a gold mine of insight. They opened the door for real understanding, and often got to the heart of the literature better than an overworked high school teacher might be able to.
The paradox? More availability of notes didn’t lead to more learning.
It’s not clear to me that widespread availability of these summaries and guides actually led to much in the way of understanding.
And so here comes ChatGPT and its cousins. Here’s ChatPDF, a miracle that instantly reads a PDF, summarizes it and gives us the chance to ask it questions. The results I’ve seen are extraordinary. Here’s a session built around a 48-page uploaded summary of my new book.
Except…
It doesn’t work until we choose to understand.
Part of the magic of an actual book is that the reader ends up understanding. It seeps in, the aha’s are found, not highlighted.
TLDR is internet-speak for “Too long, didn’t read.” It’s one of the consequences of too much to choose from, combined with a lazy quest for convenience. It’s a checklist mindset. And all we get after we finish a checklist is a bunch of checked boxes, not real understanding.
If you were on a long train ride with the smartest person in the world, what would you ask her? And how long before you went back to scrolling on your phone?
It doesn’t matter how much we summarize, at some point, effort is required. More summaries won’t automatically lead to more understanding.
April 24, 2023
Amazon took in more than $30 billion in ad revenue last year, money spent to elevate some products over others in the hierarchy of attention.
It’s probably true that someone shopping on Amazon is going to either buy something or not… the purpose of the “ads” isn’t to amplify consumption, it’s to shift what someone chooses to buy.
It’s a zero sum game–paying for a slot increases market share by stealing sales from the competition.
The thing is: all of that spend is paid for by the consumer.
Search and discovery would work just fine without the ads. Our satisfaction with what we bought would be at least as good if organic search simply highlighted the best match.
This is simply a transfer of money from shoppers like us to one company with a shopping search engine.
April 23, 2023
The best way to win a short-term game is to bet it all on one strategy. Someone is going to get lucky and it might be you.
But we rarely thrive in the long run if we persist in playing a series of short-term games.
Instead, organizations, individuals and teams do better when they understand the value of resilience.
In the last year, we’ve seen well-funded and heavily hyped crypto companies hit the wall and fail. That’s because it was easy for them to get funded and grow fast by making a simple bet, and in a bull market, everyone looks like a genius.
But their less flashy competitors are still around. They understood that resilience is expensive and resilience is worth it.
April 22, 2023
Of course there isn’t.
Time is all we’ve got.
Time is all there is.
We can’t waste time because it’s not ours to waste. It’s simply the way we keep track of everything else.
April 21, 2023
Everybody eats
That’s the biggest problem. While plenty of people drive or play pickleball, eating is particularly widespread. Seven billion people multiplies into a big number…
Creating the food we eat has significant climate impact. Some of the factors, in unranked order:
- We clear forests to create farms
- We use petro-chemicals to make fertilizer
- We grow plants and then feed them to animals
- Chemical run-off and erosion have significant impact
- We transport everything using trucks
- Some foods use far more land, water and fertilizer than others
- Some domesticated animals produce particularly potent gasses
- We refrigerate, heat and process the food
Even if we wasted no food at all, the impact of all of these activities would be enormous.
Clean your plate?
But the food production, delivery and consumption chain is filled with waste. The biggest impact happens on farms. Food doesn’t all ripen on the same day. Harvesting it is expensive and time-consuming. Pests (and birds) harm crops. Food is fragile. The economics of putting more time and labor into grabbing one last peach is greater than the economic benefit that peach produces. And, the distance from where something grows to where it is processed or consumed is non-zero.
It all adds up, and it’s all out of the control of the typical citizen. Consumer food waste is less than a quarter of the total.
Of course we shouldn’t buy more than we need, or simply discard food that can be turned into another meal, or useful compost for a community garden.
But climate change is a systems problem, and it requires systemic solutions. When we price carbon accurately, the efficient market will start to pay more attention to harvesting the last peach, or shifting to drip irrigation, vertical farms or simple techniques that have enormous benefits.
In the US, restaurants waste nearly as much food as all homes combined–by the time the food is on your plate, most of the damage is already done.
We actually have the tools available to make an impact. Insisting on voluntary personal action is a long, difficult road, even if someone tries to build a business around it. There are hungry people all around us, and more efficient supply chains will allocate the food we’re wasting far more efficiently.
The cultural dynamic in many places of serving more food than your guests can possibly eat–as a form of status or generosity–is persistent and wasteful. But it’s just a small part of a system that needs fixing.
The shift in our industrial systems to climate resilience is a huge opportunity. It creates efficiencies and shifts our focus away from dead-end consumption. But we need to be clear about which systems have the most leverage and work relentlessly on them.
More details, references and insights on this are in The Carbon Almanac. The course that dozens of us made on LinkedIn is free this week.
April 20, 2023
No matter how many people come over for dinner, you’re only going to be able to engage with a few.
And no matter how big the crowd in the arena, the musicians can only see the faces of a few hundred.
An investor can only be engaged and smart about a very small number of companies.
And it doesn’t matter how many students are in the class, the teacher is only going to be able to get in sync with a few.
Microphones, network connections and other forms of scale are a miracle, but sooner or later, our brains get in the way.
April 19, 2023
It’s interesting to realize that mirrors weren’t perfected until a few hundred years ago. Human beings spend a lot of time considering our own appearance and our own feelings and most of all, our own needs.
The market produces a shift. When it’s a fair and open exchange, the customer gains in power. As a result, the selfish merchant or producer loses market share until they figure out how to build empathy into their work.
It’s not for you, it’s for them.
And if you do a good job of making it for them, then you get your needs taken care of.
Big companies and monopolies and other institutions seek lock-in so they can go back to looking in the mirror instead of paying attention to what their customers and prospects need and want.
April 18, 2023
It’s so tempting to simply begin painting a wall. After all, it’s pretty easy to lay down paint.
But it turns out that masking and dropcloths, painstakingly put into place, save many hours compared to cleaning up a mess afterward.
The same is true for what happens when we have a new hard drive or a blank document.
A file organization and backup system takes a few minutes to set up. It saves hundreds of hours in finding files, organizing versions and recovering from an (inevitable) system failure.
Using templates, master sheets and structured ways to hold data is far more resilient than simply putting some text and images on the page in a way that looks good.
Programmers who comment their code as they go ultimately get the real work done faster.
Establishing source control protocols among team members is a tiny price to pay for avoiding duplicated work.
If you don’t have time to do it right, how will you find the time to do it over?
You can tell if a house painter is any good before the first brushstroke is applied. And you can figure out if your designers, system architects or coders are good in the very same way.
April 17, 2023
