What is Grit?

Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term serving a meaningful goal. Talent matters less. It's all about effort.

As the author puts it in the title of one of the first chapters, Effort counts twice.

1. The effort helps you build the skill.

2. And as you increase your skill effort turns that skill into achievement.

But it is not any kind of effort, but focused effort. Jumping from one thing to the other will not help. Grit is about obsessive focus.

Here are the key ideas I saved from the book:

The 4 Psychological Assets for Grit

These are the 4 characteristics of gritty people:

1. Interest. Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.

2. Practice. The discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday. Focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. “Whatever it takes, I want to improve!” is a refrain of all paragons of grit

3. Purpose. The conviction that your work matters. Purpose is found by contributing to the well-being of others.

4. Hope. At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.

Interest is discovered. Let’s go to practice.

Deliberate Practice

Grit is not just about the quantity of time devoted to interests, but also the quality of time. Not just more time on task, but also better time on task. Experts practice differently:

• First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance.

• Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses.

• They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet.

• Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal.

In summary: A clearly defined stretch goal. Full concentration and effort. Immediate and informative feedback Repetition with reflection and refinement Repeated until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.

What about Flow?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi observed that “skilled people can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states know as ‘flow’ ". Is that the same thing? No. Deliberate practice couldn't ever feel as enjoyable as flow. It's hard work.  

Deliberate practice is carefully planned, and flow is spontaneous. flow and grit go hand in hand. Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow.

Deliberate practice is for preparation, and flow is for performance.

What about Purpose?

Purpose is more than doing your job. The difference is best explained by the parable of the bricklayers.

Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” :

• The first says, “I am laying bricks.”

• The second says, “I am building a church.”

• And the third says, “I am building the house of God.”

The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling. Many of us would like to be like the third bricklayer, but instead, identify with the first or second. The differences:

• a job: “I view my job as just a necessity of life, much like breathing or sleeping”

• a career: “I view my job primarily as a stepping-stone to other jobs”

• a calling: “My work is one of the most important things in my life”

Hope and Learned helplessness

You need hope to get over the obstacles. Hope does not mean you have faith tomorrow will be better, but that you will make tomorrow better. Because it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.

I am not gonna go and spoil the story. But highlight some ideas that I keep thinking about since I finished it.

Happiness is a prison

Evey, one of the main characters, had a tragic life by the time she turned 16. Her mom died, dad was killed in a concentration camp, she had to work in a factory as a kid and saw prostitution as her only way out of starvation. V comes in and takes her under his wing. But she never embraced him. At some point, she finds herself an older man, but he too is brutally killed.

To make matters worse she is captured by the fascist secret police and tortured for a long period of time. She was turned into a ghost of her former self before being offered a deal: sign a letter of denunciation of V or get shot. She refuses to sign and at that same moment lights turn on and it is revealed that all was a fake. The inquisitors were not real and all the ordeal was staged by V himself.

When Evey explodes in anger, V calmly points out that her desire for a normal life is the problem. She always wanted to do the right thing, not take a stance ... she just wanted to be happy. "But happiness is your prison" V says:

The book makes a very big philosophical statement. Happiness is a mirage. A drug. Happiness does not exist. Only pain does. Happiness is a mental construct. A self-defense mechanism. Pain on the other hand is the only true element in existence.

If only pain is real, why hide from it? Why create happiness to hide away from pain? Why imprison ourselves?

V points out that only when Evey embraces reality, however painful it is, she can become free. She does and the scene ends in the rain, which performs a symbolic baptism.

While Evey embraces freedom, Finch, the policeman who kills V at the end, does not. All Finch wanted was to be happy. He cared for his family, he didn’t questioned the motives of his fascist colleagues. He only joined the Fascist party to have a normal life. But happiness imprisoned his soul. In an act of great irony, he takes LSD to see the truth. His hallucination revealed the brutal truth that his quest for happiness tried to hide him from.

Jungian Visual Style

Stylistically the book is the opposite of what the superhero genre got us used to. It lacks any visual details. Only the shadows are penned in black and mudded watercolours provide a gloomy atmosphere. If Karl Jung were to make a comic book it would be just like this.

The drawings depict ideas, archetypes and David Lloyd, the illustrator, seems to be aware that visual fidelity would only dilute the message rather than increase it. That's the reason why the people who read the novel were disappointed by the movie. By its very nature, a movie would weaken the message with all the additional detail.

I am quite happy I finally read the book. I highly recommend you pick it up even if you feel like you know the plot and the characters.

Quite a few ideas made it into my knowledge-base. Here are some of them:

What is Positioning?

Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.

Positioning = Context

Context enables people to figure out what’s important. Like context setting in the opening of a movie.

When customers encounter a product they have never seen before, they will look for contextual clues to help them figure out what it is, who it’s for, and why they should care. Taken together, the messaging, pricing, features, branding, partners, and customers create context and set the scene for the product.

Traditional Positioning is NOT Actionable

Al Ries, “the father of brand positioning”, in his book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” describes the basic approach of positioning as not a process of creating something new and different, but a way of manipulating what’s already in the mind, to retie the connection that already exists.

“The goal is to position the product in the mind of the prospect.”

Al Ries

The traditional statement as described by Ries himself is:

FOR target buyers, your offering IS A market category WHICH PROVIDES competitor’s benefits UNLIKE primary competitor WHICH PROVIDES competitor’s benefits

The worst part of a positioning statement exercise is that it assumes you know the answers. And coming up with the answers is the challenging part.

The 5+ 1 Components of Effective Positioning

1. Competitive alternatives. What customers would do if your solution didn’t exist.

2. Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives lack.

3. Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable customers.

4. Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a lot about the value you deliver.

5. Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of, to help customers understand your value.

Bonus - Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make your product more relevant right now.

April proposes a 10 step process to design an effective positioning, but that’s beyond the point of this post.

I wrote down so many ideas out of this book that it will be impossible to publish them all. So I am gonna pick some of my favorites: 

The Beginning of Infinity

It represents the possibility of the unlimited growth of knowledge in the future. This knowledge consists of explanations: assertions about what is out there beyond the appearances, and how it behaves. 

David Deutsch thinks knowledge is the answer to all humanity’s problems. While this realization may seem self-evident, for most of the history of our species, we had almost no success in creating such knowledge. Athens during the classical era may have been a potential beginning of infinity, Venice's Renaissance may have been another. But we are living through such a period, brought up by the Enlightenment. 

For Deutsch, the Enlightenment represents a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Enlightenment's quintessential idea is that progress is both desirable and attainable.

Conjecture & Criticism 

Scientific discoveries are guesses – bold conjectures. Human minds create them by rearranging, combining, altering, and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. 

Criticism is the other magical ingredient. Ideas need a healthy dose of criticism. 

And the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values that the Enlightenment has begun to discover. Which is interesting because Deutsch observes that the empiricism loved by so many enlightened thinkers is a false way to acquire knowledge, thus making the Enlightenment important philosophically more than scientifically. 

The Role of Science

Science is not about prediction. But explanations. Predictions are used to validate new explanations. A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of background knowledge is a rule of thumb.

Problems

Are conflicts between explanations or theories. Expectations are theories too. Similarly, it is a problem when the way things are (according to our best explanation) is not the way they should be – that is, according to our current criterion of how they should be.  

Solving a problem means creating an explanation that does not have a conflict. Since theories can contradict each other, but there are no contradictions in reality, every problem signals that our knowledge must be flawed or inadequate.

Problem Solving needs Optimism

No one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic.

A more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. If one is successful he will not get rid of problems, just upgrade the ones he stresses about. 

I am not kidding when I say I have tens more ideas that I scribbled down from this book, but I will live you with this quote:

“Here we sit, for ever imprisoned in the dark, almost-sealed cave of our skull, guessing. We weave stories of an outside world – worlds, actually: a physical world, a moral world, a world of abstract geometrical shapes, and so on – but we are not satisfied with merely weaving, nor with mere stories. 

We want true explanations. So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods! ”

I usually write about non-fiction books on my little blog but this one is a worthy exception. 

The purpose of Knowledge

To explain the idea that touched me the most I have to, unfortunately, go into spoiler territory. The end of the novel depicts a mental battle between 2 super-humans, individuals enhanced by the same super drug. The duel is not so much an action battle but an ideological debate. 

Our hero, Greco, who tells the story, used his newly discovered intelligence to get a deeper understanding of reality. All his actions were selfish in nature, his interests being specifically tied to his curiosity. In the process he realized he needs new industries to help him accelerate the process so he jump-started a new industrial revolution, not to help the normals, but to get components for his future plans. 

Raymon, his nemesis, also a super-skilled super-human, had more “altruistic” interests. While Greco ignored the world, focusing on his own, Raymond was only interested in the “normals”. He had a master plan for humanity, one that would elevate and enlighten everyone. A utopian future. But as with all Utopias, sacrifices had to be made, and Raymond was not shy of sacrificing whoever stands in his way. 

During their discussion, it’s so easy to think that Greco is the bad guy. After all, he only cared about himself, while Raymond comes through as a Messiah figure, with deep care for his former fellow beings. But I think that’s a mistake. And it’s the other way around. Knowledge seeking can only be selfish in nature. As with anything else in the world. And once knowledge becomes a tool for power and influence, it loses its innocence. Understand makes that conflict apparent through a very short dialogue. 

The brain as a computer

A secondary idea that I liked is the analogy between a mind and a computer, more specifically the virtualization of consciousness. As with virtual computers, where a real physical machine can simulate many more “virtual” machines, our hero discovered the ability to spawn virtual consciousness to deal with certain problems. Which he did until the physical brain became a limiting factor. Thus the need for a new industrial revolution. 

Writing is (mainly) a tool for thinking

Writing things down is not a logging function. We don’t write things down to journal our process. Writing is the process. We have to write to think. 

Thinking is becoming more and more important as we are transition to a competence economy. The power lies in the hands of those who know how to solve unique problems. The productive people will be the ones who think clearly. And the tool of the trade for thinking is writing. 

Good writing is note-taking

Writing does not start with the blank page. The process of writing starts much, much earlier than that blank screen and that the actual writing down of the argument is the smallest part of its development. It starts with note-taking. 

Writing is just putting your notes in order and writing the connective tissue. The real challenge for good writing (and through extension good thinking) is what you do months and years before the blank page. If you turn your thoughts and discoveries into written notes and build up a treasure of smart and interconnected notes along the way, writing becomes a selection process. 

But this reality is counter-intuitive for most people who don’t seem to connect the quality (or lack of) of our notes with the panic of the blank screen. Most think that writing can be linear, starting from the top of the page and typing until you are done. Unfortunately, writing and thinking are not linear. You can not plan for having an insight. You have to constantly jump back and forth between different tasks. What you need a stash of ideas you can pick from.

Niklas Luhmann’s Slip Box

Planning does not work for intellectual endeavors. Students may use planning to pass an exam but give up planning after it’s done. Why? It is not fun. We need a system. Learning in a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas. 

20th-century German sociologist Niklas Luhmann came up with such a system. He developed a revolutionary method to turn his reading into a productivity machine. He started taking notes on small pieces of paper. Each contained the main argument and a reference back to the main source. He also realized that one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context it was taken from. Instead of adding notes to existing categories or the respective texts, he invented new categories as he went along. In time he built a database of 90,000 notes, that he described as his secondary memory (zweitgedächtnis), alter ego, or reading memory (lesegedächtnis).  He used it to write 60 books and transform sociology, a field he had no formal training in. His system is proof of the productive nature of note-taking. 

The process:

• Luhmann wrote down useful ideas from his reading on uniformly sized index cards. 

• The size was important as a forcing function. So he could have just one idea per card. 

• Each card had a unique reference number. The first card was number 1. 

• When a new card was added it was placed after an idea within the same context. So the 50th card can be placed after the 3rd and become 3a. And the branching could go on indefinitely. 

• The database was thus looking like a tree, not a list. 

Cards are the container boxes for the mind

Containers revolutionized supply-chains. They represented a standardization of transportation that gave birth to the globalized economy we live in. 

Standardized notes (like the one Luhmann collected in his Slip Box) are the shipping container of thinking. Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same place and is standardized in the same format. Instead of focusing on the in-between steps and trying to make a science out of underlining systems, reading techniques or excerpt writing, everything is streamlined towards one thing only: the insight that can be transformed into written text.

Purposeful Reading

A key mindset to make a learning system work for you is to read (or consume) with purpose. Focusing on understanding makes you consume differently. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus. 

Think about the mindset of the students attending a lecture, discussion or seminar. Their purpose to pass an exam sharpens their focus and keeps them more engaged. The problem is that the topic is dictated by a curriculum, instead of personal interest. And the end-goal, passing an exam, is not the best incentive for life. It is why one has to read with the pencil in hand to make sure that the activity is not wasted. 

Types of Notes

The traditional type of notes can be broken down into 3 categories: 

1. Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a day or two. 

2. Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandable way. They are always stored in the same way in the same place, either in the referenced system.  This is the reservoir of ideas one could pull from. 

3. Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discarded or archived after the project is finished. This allows you to show something for at the end of the day. 

The Art of Summarisation

Extracting the gist of a text or an idea and giving an account in writing is for academics what daily practice on the piano is for pianists: The more often we do it and the more focused we are, the more virtuous we become. The ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking behind the assertions of a text or a talk. Being able to re-frame questions, assertions and information are even more important than having extensive knowledge, because, without this ability, we wouldn’t be able to put our knowledge to use.

The quality of one’s reading depends in totality to the mental patterns he brings to the table. Without a toolbox of thinking tools, people will read every book like a novel. When the purpose is entertainment there is no growth. We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.

The Elaboration Method 

The best-researched and most successful learning method.  Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge. Nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way.

Creativity & the Myth of Erika Moment

Many exciting stories from scientific history make us believe that great insight comes in a flash, an Erika moment. 

But the reason why “geniuses” had these insights and not a random person on the street is that they already had spent a very long time thinking hard about the problems, tinkered with other possible solutions and tried countless other ways of looking at the problem. Our fascination with these stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.

The power of abstractions

Studies on creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the ability to make abstractions. The better an engineer is at abstracting from a specific problem, the better and more pragmatic his solutions will be – even for the very problem he abstracted from. Abstraction is also the key to analyze and compare concepts, to make analogies and to combine ideas; this is especially true when it comes to interdisciplinary work.

Brainstorming is for amateurs

The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there. Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing.

Exergonic and endergonic work. The virtuous circle of work

Exergonic means you constantly need to add energy to keep the process going. In the second case, endergonic means the reaction once triggered, continues by itself and even releases energy. The dynamics of work are similar. 

Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. Without a stash of ideas, we can pull from work will always be a pain. The more connected information we already have, the easier it is to create, because new information can dock to old information. Facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas. 

The hermeneutic circle

The standard advice is to decide what to write about before you start writing. Nobody starts from scratch. In order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an assignment, one must already have put some thought into a topic. To be able to decide on a topic, one must already have read quite a bit and certainly not just about one topic. And the decision to read something and not something else is obviously rooted in prior understanding, and that didn’t come out of thin air, either. Every intellectual endeavor starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for the following endeavors.

Flexible focus 

It is not a relentless focus, but a flexible focus that connects top scientists and renowned artists. “Specifically, the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of a flexible strategy application in relation to task demands.”  The key to creativity in any field is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame. 

This means planning hurts growth and development. Most professionals aim to be operators, following guidelines. But for the truly valuable tasks, there can be no universally applicable rule about which step has to be taken when. The aim should be to become an expert. And that does not happen linearly, it relies on experience and deliberate practice. Experts have good intuition. They can judge the situation correctly, the juniors just follow procedure. 

Intuition

Gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.

Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the future. Intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavors, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge. 

These notes are very similar to Luhmann approach. I recommend you read Tiago’s Forte more structured blog post if you want more. Or just read the book. 

I am clearly passionate about the topic. I happen to work on a startup that is working on making this system of note-taking more accessible. Deepstash offers standardised notes from all the best online sources. They organise themselves by topic but you are free to assign them a personal context. If you are excited about the idea of a brain extension holding all the valuable ideas you stumble upon maybe you give it a try. It’s free.

Ben Horowitz’s new book, What You do is Who You Are, is the kind of book I would have written: a book about management with lessons from history. Each chapter starts with a history lesson (he discusses the Mongols, the Haiti revolution or the Samurai Bushido code), then he extracts some high-level principles from the story & then puts them in perspective by sharing some recent business stories where those principles came in handy. A solid recipe. 

I enjoyed his book immensely even though I was familiar with most of his history lessons and his management advice is not really new material, having blogged about it and sharing it in lectures anyone can watch online. But still extracted some new ideas I wrote down.

Virtues>Values

We like to talk a lot about values. Individuals advertise them on social media and companies think that a list of abstract concepts will make their employees play well together. But in most cases, values are just intellectual aspirations. Values are what you think about yourself. 

The focus should be on virtues. Virtues are what we do: values in motion. As Ben points out, a company is more defined by the actions of its managers and employees than a list of aspirational tag-lines nobody really identifies with. 

Company Culture = “how we do things around here”

A company’s culture is not made of the perks it offers. Free food, yoga classes or dogs in the office is not culture. Mission statements are also meaningless in defining company culture. 

The culture is the collective behavior of a company’s employees. How people behave when nobody’s watching is what the company is all about. To that extent, there is nothing more meaningful in setting the right company culture than early management decision making. 

The 4 Steps for Changing a Culture

Drawing inspiration from the only successful slave revolution -  the 1791 Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, there are 4 steps to change an existing culture:

1. Keep what works: L’Ouverture used the voodoo songs (that he disapproved of as Christian) as a way of communicating orders. He also used a core of experienced ex-militaries to create the core of his armies. A manager should build on existing success not start from scratch. 

2. Come up with Shocking Rules. Shocks are important because people have to question why the rule exists in the first place. In the Haiti revolution that shocking rule was not to cheat on your wife. For a slave, who lived in a society in which you can die at any time and you don't trust anyone, this was very puzzling. 

3. Incorporate Outside Leadership: Inspired from Caesar, Toussaint L’Ouverture, recruited the commanders he fought against. He wanted to use their culture to transform his. The opposite of what the US did after invading Iraq. Building a great culture means adopting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or conquer.

4. Demonstrate Priorities by Walking the Talk: Toussaint L’Ouverture also spared all the slave owners to demonstrate his values. You can not start a new peaceful government with genocide. 

How to Create Shocking Rules

Great companies have shocking rules. Google started with “Don’t be evil”. Facebook’s “Move fast & break things” is also quite famous. And ben thinks there is a recipe to craft a shocking rule:

1. It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture.

2. It must raise the question "why?" Your role should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask "Are you serious?"

3. Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the way? It must clearly explain the cultural concept. 

4. People must encounter the role almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to the situation people face once a year … it's irrelevant. 

Communication & Trust

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. 

If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions at all, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interest. On the other hand, if I don't trust you in the sliders, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me because I will never believe you are telling me the truth. 

Integrity, honesty, and decency are not short terms of cultural investments. They may actually make the product later, loose deals or slow growth. But as a long term investment, it increases the level of trust required for a top-performing organization. 

The Cultural Checklist

Ben’s departing conclusion is a list of all the items a manager should consider when designing the culture of his organization: 

• Cultural Design: The culture you build should align with your personality because you will not be able to fake it & the overall purpose of the enterprise. Make it unambiguous and think about ways in which the rules can be abused. 

• Cultural Orientation: You have one chance to let new employees know what behaviors are gonna make them successful. Make the first-day count. 

• Shocking Rules: Have rules that reinforce key cultural elements. 

• Incorporate Outside Leadership: If you struggle to move the team in a new direction look for new blood. 

• Object Lessons: Dramatic lessons works best in communicating cultural elements. Yelling at slackers, firing an entire team or ceremonial promotions have this effect if they are strategic. 

• Make Ethics Explicit: And the best way to do it is to choose ethics over objectives. Always. Never cheat a customer or tell a lie to meet your quarterly quota. 

• Demonstrate priorities through actions & Walk the Talk: People do what you do, not what you say.

Some time ago I wrote a series of history-infused management articles in a Medium publication called Battleroom. You should read them if you liked the topic of Ben’s book. 

“In your daily experience, matter doesn’t really matter that much. ”

Sam Harris is obsessed with consciousness. As most theists that he likes debating, he believes that when it comes to our experience, matter (cells, molecules or atoms) doesn’t really matter that much. However, he doesn’t take the new-age spiritual path, nor doesn’t assume the existence of a soul, as many people do. It’s consciousness all the way to the bottom. 

Sam’s meditation app, called Waking Up, is all about understanding that all the things that we experience in our daily lives are appearances in consciousness (something that I accepted at an intellectual level before trying up his guided meditations). What Sam’s trying to do with his course is to make you experience this realisation. For this purpose, he deploys an arsenal of mind tricks, all trying to make you realize that whatever “you” think you are, does not really exist. I was familiar with the concept (called non-self in the Buddhist tradition) but I was not aware that I could have an insightful experience around this paradoxical observation. Sam will guide you to look for the center of attention, to search for the looker within, to seek the seer that you think is in control … you get the picture. Sadly none of these worked on me.

Still, I found his course valuable and took some take-aways that elevated my practice. Here there are: 

Watch yourself from a distance

It may sound silly but a lot of my early meditation failures had to do with too much struggle. Focusing on the breath, as simple as it may sound, was analogous to an intense workout, as I tried to get as close as possible to the nostrils. 

Sam’s advice to take some distance between the illusory center of self from my head and the nose proved to make the practice more pleasurable. 

Arrive immediately

If you see meditation like a gym session for your mind (which happens to be popular analogy), then you may think some prep work would help. After all, one doesn’t start pumping iron the moment he enters the gym. But here is where the analogy fails: awareness should not need any mental stretching to get going. 

Sam advocates for a sudden start. The moment you press play, it's game on and you should drop into a state of wide-open awareness. Check your environment, your emotions and you are already noticing the adventure of consciousness. 

Analyze your thoughts

This one is meditation practice 1o1. And sometimes I did catch myself meta analyzing my thoughts. Not always, and there were many sessions where I ignored this completely. Sam repeated this for so long (did I mention the course takes 50 days?) that it finally stuck. 

So there you have it. I liked the course, even though I failed to have the main Aha moment. My insights may be silly for an experienced meditator but super practical for me. Hope they help you too. 

The behaviour does not change after school. Unlike schools, workplaces have very deep formal hierarchies. But the tendency to group ourselves into affinity-driven informal groups remains. In any corporation there are unofficial crowds where decisions are being made. It’s what people mean when they complain that there is too much politics in a company or that decisions are not transparent enough. 

But C.S. Lewis (the author of Narnia series and famous among Christian apologists) noted that these separate, informal hierarchies are part of our existence. They are not even a modern discovery, as humans have been operating this way for millennia. He called them “Inner Rings”:

“[An Inner Ring] is not a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. 

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.”

CS Lewis brilliantly explained something that has no clear definition but that we all experience since we are born. Our instinct would be to label these informal groups as artificial and un-fair. But Lewis is quick to correct our instincts. There is nothing un-natural about inner-circles. On the contrary, there is stronger argument to label formal hierarchies as un-natural. It’s also hard to place an ethical label on a natural occurring phenomena. And that’s Lewis’s observation, that we all want to be part of these inner rings. 

The benefits and dangers of Inner Rings

Inner Rings may be considered harmful and dangerous because they have the ability to exclude and separate individuals. Especially today, when exclusion is automatically labelled as bad.  Yet, Inner Rings are in fact beneficial to our society because they divide the individuals into social groups where they can be comfortable with. We all want to be special to someone or several someone. We all want to be valued and valuable. And Lewis says that there’s nothing wrong with inner rings in and of themselves. They’re simply structures filled with people longing to be connected.

“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” 

What Lewis warns us against is our insatiable desire to pursue new rings. When we get inside a ring we want to be part of an even more exclusionary group. When we get to the bottom of it we seek the other shinny ring. It is a vicious circle. 

"Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. "

Escaping the Desire

But there is a way out. Lewis recommends that we participate in some activity that we enjoy and do it often. He offers music as an example. We start a group, then invite others who would like to join us in playing music. A relationship based on a common interest and friendship, not a silly desire for “power”. This is the real foundation for a community. When we form a community that grows friendship, we create what we seek, friends who care about the welfare and personal growth of one another. To outsiders, it may look like an exclusive inner ring. We all know, however, that it’s open to anyone who shares our values, even if this is simply valuing friends with whom we play music.

Read more about CS Lewis's argument. You can also read The Art of the Community for more insights into what makes communities work. 

Sapiens, which attempts to summarise all of history in 400 pages, exceeded my expectations, although I think it will be more interesting for people who don’t describe themselves as history buffs. The book condenses our presence on Earth into 3 big revolutions: cognitive, agricultural and scientific. The followup, Homo Deus, deals with the future, and I found this part to be much more mentally stimulating than the first. The book surprised me many times but also challenged me to debate the author multiple times. It’s very rare that this happens with a book so a post was in order. Before we begin I wanna clarify that the following is my attempt to put down some of my struggles with the author’s conclusions rather than a simple review. Because of that I will ignore most of the wonderful and insightful ideas that are sprinkled throughout the book and focus on areas of disagreement.

There are stories & there are stories

Homo Deus starts where Sapiens left us of, the 21st century. Harari debuts with an optimistic bang by claiming we are on the cusp of eradicating famine, disease and war. The author follows a familiar line of thinking, one that was popularised by Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature. 

While famine and disease could be potentially eradicated through scientific advancements, the eradication of war line of arguments needs different (and better) arguments, as the science that we used to cure diseases can also be used to blow up cities. Noah Harari seems to be a big believer in deterrence  as the ultimate defence strategy (if we all have atomic weapons, or their equivalent in the 21st century, than what’s the point of war?). He also believes that conquest has little value nowadays. For example, Russia can benefit tremendously by invading a country like Ukraine, because it benefits directly from it’s oil and gas reserves. However this is the case only because their industrial economy is still trapped in the 20th century. But what would Russia get if they conquered Silicon Valley, the author asks? All the value there is trapped in the minds of the engineers and codified in algorithms hosted on servers across the globe. As Harari notes, there is no silicon in Silicon Valley. I would like to share the author’s enthusiasm. Wars do have deep economic motives but people don’t fight for macro-economic indicators. They fight for deep held values, even if some of them can be criticised and proven false in hindsight. 

These individual mental delusions (and as Harari would know from his Buddhist practice, we are all living trapped inside false narratives created by our minds) were less impactful in the grand scale of history until recently. Some values might have been empirically false (like the ancient Egyptian belief that the world is a stage for the fight between Horus and Seth) but they lasted because of their psychological practicality. Sapiens makes a very good case that have evolved our religions over thousands of years, telling ourselves better and better myths. Stories that were conflicting with human experience however have very little shelf value. Jedism (the Star Wars-inspired Jedi religion) may delude a few geeks to think they can control objects with their minds, but we don’t expect this belief to go on for too long. But, and this is a HUGE BUT, even a fundamentally flawed ethical system, like Jedism, can escape the evolutionary grip. All it takes is a crazy person with a big enough gun. 

Like a lot of other intellectuals, Yuval Noah Harari, doesn’t seem to take these myths seriously. Ironically he notices the fundamental role their played in our upbringing, but … maybe because of his attachment to Buddhism philosophy …. he downplays their influence on the individual. There are thinkers like Sam Harris or Nicolas Taleb, who practice more caution and don’t surrender vigilance to this naive narrative. 

The death of humanism

Before dealing with the future, Harari recaps the philosophical revolutions of the last centuries. He mainly focuses on Enlightenment thinkers and the placement of the individual in the centre of our ethical framework. A few hundred years ago we postulated the sanctity of each human and this allowed for extremely beneficial developments. We are now governed by democratic systems, our economy operates in free markets and capitalism has eradicated poverty and increased the comfort of billions. 

But it’s all based on a lie, Harari observes. There is no self that acts like an independent decision maker. And the idea of free will, that sits as the foundation of our society is equally false. Harari probably reached these conclusions through meditation, but he backs his claims with science. And he is right. For example, Gazzaniga's split brain experiments, show that there is no indivisible us that’s in control of our body. Further more, Harari notices, there is no material distinction between cognition and biology. To that end, our individual existence is only the result of billions and billions of events that were put in motion with the Big Bang. We are acting in a big cosmic play, rather than sitting in the director’s chair of our pathetic existence. So far so good. I was never a believer in free will, but found the discussion to lack any practical implications. Free will may be an illusion, but since we can’t even phantom to model the structure of the universe, it is safe to treat this illusion seriously. 

Harar disagrees. He separates consciousness from intelligence and proposes that the two are on different evolutionary paths. Intelligence, the author implies, will be taken over by machines. It goes without saying that the author thinks it’s only a matter a time until artificial intelligence leaves us, humans, behind. And that we would willingly surrender more and more of our consciousness to benefit from the pleasure generated by artificial intelligence systems. He looks beyond the AI applications that exist today and offers more sophisticated examples. Say we have to choose the person we would marry and find ourselves trapped in deep, long internal dialogues struggling with the best decision. We now seem to think that this sort of momentous fork in the road is too complex and too personal to have it turned into a sequence of steps that could be executed by a computer. What would be the situation a few years from now, when a Google like system, having access to all the data about ourselves, would make a very precise recommendation? One that would generate more happiness guarantee. Wouldn’t we all surrender our imperfect way of thinking to the uber-intelligent overlords?

The book, and its main argument, takes a dystopian sudden turn with this realisation. Harari predicts a future in which:

• the rich will augment and upgrade themselves, thus becoming immortal gods, while the poor will, be trapped in a cycle that resembles our currently dreary existence.
• a new religion will appear, one that takes the Enlightenment’s postulation of the individual, to its natural conclusion. If the self does not exist than the only thing that remains is data. Humans, and life in general, are nothing but collections of algorithms, some functioning better than others. 

I find both of these lacking. Let’s take them one by one:

Rich Gods and Poor Mortals

Harari has very utilitarian (almost nihilistic) narrative of the world. It’s something that I would expect from a deep meditator, a person who is trying to mitigate suffering by severing our ties with desire for worldly goods. While he is chasing personal enlightenment in Buddhist temples, Harari is not so generous with his human human beings. He (arrogantly?) thinks that most people are trapped in cycles of chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, thus being ruled by a functional value system. It is true, Yuval notices, that in the past capitalism was the force for good as it distributed the benefit of scientific discovery better than anything else. Antibiotics, access to energy and so on have huge benefits for billions of people. But that period of growth is reaching its end, Harari thinks. He postulates that all the previous development was fundamentally caused by the greediness of world billionaires, as it was profitable to have healthier people working in the factories. But with automation taking most and most of the jobs, the profit motive would seek to exist and so the greedy capitalist would use their wealth to escape death and suffering while the poor remain mortal and miserable. 

I find this argument to be both miss-informed and unrefined at the same time. Although he cites Hayek in certain parts of his book, his definition of value is very shallow at best. I wrote about this in my counter-argument to the AI-driven apocalypse scenario. Harari’s premise, one that is never explicitly stated, seems to be the same marxist idea (although tightly wrapped in intellectually sounding meta-philosophy): that the means of production are solely or mainly responsible for the economic output of a service. As I wrote a few moths ago: 

We are complex beings and our needs, as consumers, are complicated as well.

The functional needs, represent just a small part of the characteristics that we humans appreciate when we make a purchasing decisions. When asked to justify a recent acquisition, we may point to discrete functionalities, but in most cases these are just after-the-fact rationalizations. 

Our human limitations may keep us from being able to define our value judgement algorithm but there is still hope for the product person. HBR proposes that universal building blocks of value do exist, and advanced 30 of these elements of value. These elements fall into four categories: functional, emotional, life changing, and social impact. Some elements are more inwardly focused, primarily addressing consumers’ personal needs.

Dataism and the death of SELF

Let’s deal with his second prophecy. That we will renounce our religious attachment to the individual, and we will reform our moral system to value data instead of the human being. Intelligence, the author thinks, only needs data. Like the previous section, I challenge Harari’s premises: 

• That intelligence exist as a one-dimensional metric
• That intelligence can be separated from conciseness

He seems to start from these premises because he has a very Platonic interpretation of intelligence. Intelligence, as I understand it from my reading of his book, is described as a an absolute decision making algorithm: Some people have a better algorithm than others, but fundamentally they are all imperfect, because our processor is working with interpretations of data (emotions) and our access to data is incomplete. Thus, Plato's philosopher king will most likely be a very advanced computer, making better and faster decisions, independent of the interference from the biologically constrained human. 

But is intelligence one thing? Harari has no problem adhering to a modular theory of the mind and obliterating the idea of an indivisible self, but he is not as inquisitive with intelligence. If self is an umbrella term for a collection of mini-consciousnesses shouldn’t we at least explore the idea of a multitude of intelligences? It is something that Kevin Kelly advocates for, pointing out that there are a multitude of intelligences. Intelligence, Kelly notes, is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept. Most technical people imagine an intelligence the way Nick Bostrom does in his book, Superintelligence, as a literal, single-dimension, linear graph of increasing amplitude:

Our brains run many different modes: deduction, induction, symbolic reasoning, emotional intelligence, spacial logic, short-term memory, long-term memory etc. Like with the self, treating intelligence as single-dimension seems to be false and it leads Harari to questionable conclusions. 

What about intelligence existing in a different dimension from our consciousness. Can we operate without purpose, which is deeply linked to our (faulty) interpretation of self? Harari thinks that it can. He does it by reducing existence to data and postulating algorithms that don’t need human’s fuzzy value systems. As an examples he asks how would a computer choose between a Beethoven composition and a Justin Bieber hit. His solution proposes to reduce both songs to bits,  making it easy for a computer to recommend Beethoven because his music is more complex and thus contains more bits than Bieber’s silly pop repetitions. I find this oversimplification to be quite laughable. 

I don’t know if intelligence can be detached from consciousness and to be honest I can not postulate how that would work, if possible. But I am always amazed when people (like Harari) take upon themselves to suggest an answer. I am not convinced by their argument but I respect their courage. 

You may think I am critical of the book. I want to say it once again: I enjoyed Harari’s book(s) tremendously. I found myself amazed by some of his insights and arguments and I would recommend his book(s) to all of you. But writing things down is a one of the best tools in my arsenal for achieving clarity. It’s very rare that this happens and the fact that Sapiens and Home Deus made me put down pages of philosophical argumentation is a good testament to the value of the book(s). 

 think history is one of the great ways to learn anything and I sometime like to make parallels between history and the business world.  I also use my blog to review books or write about innovation and entrepreneurship. Wanna stay in touch? You can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this RSS feed. 

That is the method I feel Marx used to get to his theories. You would think that the protector of the “abused” workers had strong “in the field” interactions with people in factories, a strong understanding of the economics of business models from detailed conversations with capitalists …. Yeah, he didn’t do any of that: 

• He grew up in a wealthy Prussian family and he never gave up on the life style he grew up accustomed to. His first contact with the exploited workers was facilitated by Engles long after he put fwd his socialist ideas. While never rich, he spent most of his life as a middle class intellectual. 
• He developed his ideas as a purely cerebral hobby, hanging out with a group of fans of Hegel. Long nights of alcohol infused political debates served as his intellectual awakening. Not hanging out with the factory workers, whose interests he so feverously defended. 
• The Communist Manifesto was written in 2 weeks, the focus being on literary beauty, not practicality. Das Kapital, his magnum opus, was also a purely rationalistic exercise, written by Marx in the solitude of his London apartment. Honest discussions with either the capitalists he preached against or the exploited factory worker were replaced by motivated research, statistical facts being used to punctuate his grand theory.  
• He seemed to have been conditioned to favour a revolutionary world view. His father suffered discrimination because of his admiration of the French revolution. Marx himself suffered for a skin disease that leads to a feeling of self-loathing. These facts acts as alarm bells to me is that self-hate does not (usually) lead to love for others. Most usually low self esteem is associated with fear and anxiousness towards people not with deep trust-based social interactions.

His work is surely very mentally stimulating (no wonder that his ideas change the world), but resembles utopian fiction, more than true economic theory. I am not here to criticise his theory but his way of thinking. This matters because there is a Marx looming inside each of us. As the work we do moves more and more into the abstract, the more we use mental models, and systems thinking we risk of falling victim to armchair strategizing. 

The power of Ideas

Marx was definitely in love with his own ideas. Not that that is something terribly peculiar. Most philosophers, from giants like Plato to Descartes being just as guilty of this as the great socialist revolutionary. But unlike Marx, their ideas never got momentum with the people in charge. They wrote mostly to explain the world. Not Marx:

Like Marx, there is a large group of workers who are very susceptible to be caught in this narrative fallacy. I am part of this group: Entrepreneurs, product managers, executives. Knowledge workers in general, people working with abstract concepts and shipping equally abstract outputs: plans, strategies, models etc. Like Marx the theories we put forward are not just a hedonistic compressions that we use to entertain ourselves during otherwise boring cocktail parties. Our beliefs are tools in our daily work:

• We use our theories to bring new products or services to market
• We structure and restructure companies based on the stories we tell ourselves 
• We communicate in certain way because of these thoughts

Compared to his predecessors, Marx was much more action oriented. But so are we. We may not want to overthrow governments and start revolutions but we too see ideas as agents of change. In a knowledge-based economy, our thoughts and ideas are all we have. And unlike our socialist intellectual, our ideas get battle tested quite rapidly, as the market (the great systemic evil in marxism) has the tendency to brutally correct our irrationality. A beautifully created story about how the world works will rarely save a ill-conceived product … and that’s a great thing.

Intellectual knowledge is not knowing

The world is moving faster. New products are born everyday and old products die. Companies come and go at a rate that’s unprecedented in our history. Success nowadays seems to be more tied to correct understanding of reality, not the emotional attachment to a beautifully constructed interpretation. 

We humans are so complex, and the societies we build are so mind-blowingly complicated that we seem to be naturally attracted to simplifying theories. Unifying theories are indeed beautiful but they are rarely true. In the market and in the political sphere. I for one, catch myself felling into this trap and it seems to be the modus operandi in a lot of startups and big companies alike. We fell into this trap : 

• When we make up stories to explain a phenomena without any “on-the ground” investigation
• When we design products based on user personas, but have trouble naming one person that would fit into our beautifully crafted boxes
• When we spend a disproportionate amount of time polishing the executive presentation compared to testing the hypothesis we put forward. 
• When we ask the higher-ups if “the plan makes sense” and optimise for social appeal rather than putting it to test. 
• When we practice “vision selling” in front of the our customers or investors.
• When the chart we use to make predictions that justify ambitious plans are done by drawing the Excel formula to right. Look mom, BILLIONS!

Breaking out of Heads

There are lots of antidotes to this way of narrative driven modus operandi: 

• Steve Blank famously advice us to “Get out of the building”. To face the world you are trying to change. 
• Eric Ries proposes to test your ideas with the minimum amount of work, with something that is now called an MVP. 

We barely understand ourselves. Our close ones, our family, our friends are probably even less transparent to us. When we look at groups of consumers, large ecosystems of equally complicated humans, being right on very few small items is worth more than having a very beautifully constructed grand explanation. I try to remember that. 

I think history is one of the great ways to learn anything and I sometime like to make parallels between history and the business world.  I also use my blog to review books or write about innovation and entrepreneurship. Wanna stay in touch? You can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this RSS feed. 

This is the life pattern most of us grew up with and one that still reverberates strongly today as most of the social institutions are set up for this modus operandi. But lots of us can fell the wind of change. We may not be fully capable to put it into words but “times they are a changing”. It is something I have been thinking for a while. I think your Spider senses are tingling too.

I was happy to find that one of the bloggers I follow has actually wrote a book on the topic, called “The End of Jobs”. Taylor is making the case that entrepreneurship is the safest, sanest (aka most responsible) career choice for the 21st century. He doesn’t make any definitive predictions, but he treats the topic as an opportunity that he makes a compelling case for. His arguments are not new, as he borrows ideas from thinkers like Nassim Taleb, Peter Thiel, Viktor Frankl, Tim Ferriss and others. It is a fascinating topic, one that I will briefly discuss below, while following the line of reasoning put fwd by Taylor. 

So... are jobs going away?

Let’s get some definitions before we dive in. My definition for a job (and one that I feel Taylor would agree with) is: the work that you get paid for that you wouldn’t otherwise do voluntarily. Jobs are transactional in nature as the employee sells his time and set of skills for a negotiated compensation. Most people have jobs, and they hate it. Why? Because jobs are usually devoid of meaning and, as Viktor Frankl, noticed in his hugely influential book “Man's Search for Meaning”, meaning is the most important part of happiness. Why are (most) jobs devoid of meaning? Because jobs are routed in obligation, which is the inhibitor, not the catalyst, of creative meaningful work. Creativity and meaning are routed in freedom. To illustrate this point Taylor asks his readers to think what sort of phone would have been made by Steve Jobs, if he would have been employed rather than the guy in charge? Probably something that resembled a Blackberry more than the iPhone we know today. 

Why is meaning becoming important all of sudden (relatively speaking)? Our parents and grandparents seemed pretty ok without inventing any multi-billion dollar gadget. I don’t have a good answer to this question and the book doesn’t try to do it either, but if I were to guess is that we live in a much more abundant time that gave us the luxury to consider second order benefits. Maybe the existentialism worldview, that assumes life quality to be directly correlated with consumption, has an invisible ceiling, beyond which more stuff (iPhones, movies, clothes, computer games, fancy food) has little effects on happiness.

What is the opportunity again?

The solution, implied by the previous section seems to be to pursue a much more meaningful job. But what does that mean? What is meaning and how do we find it? Taylor doesn’t address this fundamental question in his book although he dances around it in various chapters. I will dare to provide an answer.

Most people look at meaning as something that falls on you, a spiritual experience that would reveal itself to you at an unknown time. However meaning is not a passive process, but an active one. Meaning is discovered and I (believe) there are 2 main ingredients for the magic to happen: 

1. Challenging projects. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the importance of challenges in his classic book “Flow”. Getting out of your comfort zone is the first in this process. Is why lots of life advice gurus tell students to have as many experiences as possible before setting in their rather boring adult life. Because as Csikszentmihalyi remarked, a fulfilling work life requires challenges.
2. Personal responsibility. Stepping up to the plate and own the outcome of the projects you get involved in, whether is your own startup or one in a large company. 

The realisation that meaning is something we can work towards is a key element in the puzzle. Because the scope of work is changing so that the pursue of it is much easier than ever. 

But where are theses meaningful jobs?

If meaning is the answer how can we find work that has the right measure of challenges and opportunities for stepping up to the plate? To answer it let’s look at the Cynefin model, created by IBM to classify work into 4 main buckets:

• Simple Jobs are those in which the cause and effect is well understood and where the process to get from A to B is usually turned into a procedure. Think about the factory work or the McDonalds burger flipping.
• Complicated Jobs require a level of expertise because the problem needs to be categorised first (before doing the work to get to a solution). Think about the mechanic who has to repair your car. His expertise is why you called him in the first place.
• Complex Jobs deal with “unknown unknowns”, mainly because the environment is in not only complicated but in a constant state of flux. The broken machine from the previous example pales when compared with an ecosystem like a jungle or an economy. 
• Chaotic Jobs: In a chaotic context, searching for right answers would be pointless. Mainly because the problem is hard to define. The environment is also almost devoid of signal, being mostly noise. 

Until recently, most jobs were simple and repetitive. The way one advanced his or her career was by aiming towards more complicated jobs. Developing expertise was the sure-way to advance one’s career. As we develop more advanced products and automation is well “automating” more and more complicated tasks, a move towards more complex or chaotic activities seems to be a reasonable decision. The challenges posed by these new set of jobs are also the pre-requisite for anyone’s search for meaning. All that people have to do is step up to the plate. 

Taylor calls these people entrepreneurs. I am not sure on the definition (mainly because it is usually confused with the founding of companies) but he’s got the solution right. Entrepreneurs deal with the uncertain future, creating new products and services based on their predictions. The other side of the coin is …. risk, that comes packaged with this exercise in taming the unknown. Entrepreneurs can loose money, time, social relationships in the process, and that can play a big and important role. I consider myself an entrepreneur and I don’t think this appetite to heroically put order into chaos is everyone’s cup of tea. While it is naive to think that everyone would become a startup founder, the skills of managing uncertain situations are very useful for side gigs (Taylor calls them micro-multinationals) and most recently inside huge companies. You can get skin in the game without risking all you have. More on this in the next section. 

Risk is not what it used to be

Meaning, as we defined it above, has a huge component of personal responsibility. Which is risky by definition, and that’s why people shy away from it. What if things go wrong? What if my company fails? What if I get fired for trying new things at Acme Inc? 

The good news is that becoming a problem solver, creating your own professional adventure (whether you are doing it on your own or inside a big company) can expose one-self to much less liability than it used to be:

• The costs to start anything are so low that it is unlikely a failure will be life threatening
• Globalization means that you can access talent from across the globe, usually at prices lower than if you would be tied by your city borders
• Investment is more accessible than anytime in the past

Becoming a problem solver, an entrepreneur, in this new economy can actually be less risky than most of the (available) sucky jobs. This is best explained by Taleb with his Thanksgiving turkey analogy: 

"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests, as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”

Like the turkey, most of us have this tendency to make predictions about the future using patterns from the past. “My job was safe until now. This will likely continue indefinitely”. Taleb proves this to be very risky, because inductive reasoning is a very bad strategy for economic forecasting. 

Summing Up

Finding meaning in your work is getting more and more important. The old type of jobs may not be able to provide this for you because meaning starts in freedom and is about making great work. But the world is changing so that is getting much more profitable and less risky to go for jobs that dwell in uncertainty. 

If you want to explore the topic further I recommend you pick up Taylor Pearson’s book. And I look fwd to your thoughts and criticisms. 

However, I believe Tim Cook (like most of his peers) is shortsighted and that his predecessor had much better grip on human value than him.  In one of his famous keynotes, Steve Jobs described Apple as the intersection of technologies with the fine arts: 

"Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts"

To Jobs, humanities was Apple’s secret ingredient. His appreciation for the fine arts, for the deep spiritual human experience is why Apple products had taste. They looked better, worked better and connected with the user in way in which the rigid offers from Dell, Microsoft and others paled by comparison. 

Some looked at them as expensive beautiful computers, but this simplistic characterisation is ignoring a lot of the attributes that made Apple such an iconic brand. Beauty is a complicated concept. The fine arts are not about productivity. Instead they are about our dreams, our hopes and our values. Steve Jobs understood this part of humanity and made it the differentiator for his products. 

Now we are reverting to a Bill Gates version of the world where simplistic solutions are offered as saviour panacea for upcoming world disasters. Like Bill, most of Silicon Valley leaders assume that the efficient solution to all the existent and upcoming problems is to have more developers.

Exhibit A: Developers earn a lot & there are not enough of them. Solution: If all Americans will be developers -> problem solved.

Everyone will be working at Microsoft, Apple or Facebook & be a fulfilled human being (just like everyone else).

It’s my belief we should not pursue efficiency, but purpose. Tech pundits seem to care more about who’s going to code the world of tomorrow than who will write the specs. And good requirements come from a deep understanding of humanity that we don’t seem to appreciate nowadays. We should be concerned with the values we build into the programs of tomorrow and the principles we use to develop the software that’s gonna be embedded everywhere. And for that we need humanities not coding, something that Steve Jobs understood better than his successor:

• History is our lab with millions of human experiments that we can look into. History is practical and realistic, because it deals with real humans acting in situations with huge stakes. History represent our collective memory and I would like the product mangers of tomorrow to be better at being human than at coding. 
• Humanities can teach us how to read and write properly. Which is something very few people know to do. But to read and to write is to think. And I would argue we need thinking before we need coding.
• Economy represent our never-ending journey to build a theory of human action, one that would explain the events of the past and that would guide the decision of tomorrow. More people need to understand supply and demand, how prices and markets work than how to find the shortest path of a graph. 
• Philosophy is a framework for integrating knowledge with action, a journey each person takes during his life to discover the values that drive him forward. It’s probably the most useful topic as philosophic enquiry can help orient a person towards a higher purpose. I would take that over understanding complex algorithms. 

All of these are prerequisites to good technology. Coding is just a tool, and if history is to gives us a hint we tend to automate most of the operation of tools. I am not saying that all coding is robotic and I am well aware there is a lot of poetry behind the matrix. Just that in a world that is becoming more and more automated, deepening our knowledge of humanity may be a better investment than coding. 

And he does a brilliant job proving that our thinking about learning is rooted more in superstition than in science. And boy this book is filled with science. It is extremely evident that the author is a science nerd because this book is 95% filled with studies and experiments on lots and lots of topics related to the learning: memorisation, forgetting, associations, perceptions etc. This could make the book boring for a reader hungry for the bite-size advice (who has the time for any of this?) but I found the research fascinating and I went the extra mile in a lot of cases by going through the source material. 

The long story short is that most of the things we take for granted about learning are wrong. Here are a few highlights: 

• “Take notes on the material you are studying” is a common suggestion. Not that bad of an advice but not the best effective technique as this will only increase your “fluency illusion” - the belief that because facts are easy to remember right now, they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. Constant self-testing works way better. 
• “Lock yourself in a room and concentrate” is another one. Bad advice too. It seems that people learn and remember more when they space their study time instead of concentrating it. This is what is called the spacing effect. 
• “Testing should follow learning”. This one seems to make a lot of sense. After all, how could we test someone on a topic before we expose them to the information. We only think this because we look at tests as evaluation tools. But Benedict Carey is interested in learning, and this can turn our biases on their head. Numerous studies show that pre-testing is a very effective study tool. Even if you bomb a test on day one of a class, that experience will alter your experience and you will absorb the material way better because of it. 
• “Put the phone away. How can you learn anything when you are constantly interrupted by these noisy notifications?” Who wouldn’t stand behind this?  Go figure: Interruptions are helpful to learning. Interrupting yourself when absorbed in an assignment extends its life in memory and pushes it to the top of your mental to do list.
• “Focus on one topic at a time”. The data actually points to something different. Varying your practice and studies, known as “interleaving,” is more effective than concentrating on one skill or subject at a time, because it forces us to be able to adjust and think quicker on the fly.

These are some of the many insights from the book. They are full of surprising “plot twists” and practical advice than can elevate your learning game. 

What I like most about Carey’s book is that we takes an individualistic approach to learning. He is not (that) interested in education policies and rarely worries a macro-view of the topic. But still the question on policy looms in the background throughout the book as theselandmark experiments destroy our preconceptions on education. “If we have all this evidence on what works and what doesn’t why don’t we change or tweak the system?” Carey briefly touches on the topic at the end of book. His explanation is that, as a specie, we have just began showing interest in the topic. We exist for many million of years but for the most part we focused on stay safe from predators, worried about food and shelter. Socrate’s school may seem like something that happened a long time ago but 2 thousand years are a nothing but a blip in the grand timeline of our existence. As learning and personal education becomes a greater differentiator factor in our everyday hierarchies we may pay better attention to the science of learning. 

This might happen because the word “hero” evokes memories of out-of-this-world mythical creatures we read about in our comic books. And while we could discard heroes as a childish constructs, they are foundationaly important to us. Let’s think about it: Our parents were our first guardians, real super-humans who not only took care of us but who knew the answers to every question we could think of. We moved into adolescence inspired by many adventurers and troublemakers. These stories were so inspiring to the early people that they became the catalyst for the development of writing. It’s through these stories (like Gilgamesh’s saga) that we understand our past and our place in the universe.  We may think less about heroes these days but deep down we (all) would like to be one. Maybe we don’t hold imperialistic ambitions as some of the conquerors from our history books but we would all want to be the Steve Jobs’es of our companies or the perfect parents to our children. Heroism is nothing more than the vessel of our dreams and aspirations. 

So are heroes born or made? Or to put it another way: who’s cooler Batman, the self-made eccentric vigilante or Superman, the benevolent Kryptonian God?

• The Superman camp: Some of us are attracted by the all-powerful cape-wearing superhuman. His powers awe us but it’s his altruism, his love for the small and vulnerable that make him the best superhero. We tend to think heroism results from a pre-existing condition and that benevolence for the weak is what separates the hero from the villain. Superman was born a God, and like him, all heroes exhibit a mark of destiny we, the regular people, don’t. The underlying belief is that big important people owe their success to factors outside of their control, like wealthy parents, access to a certain education, being in the right place at the right time, access to people or resources are beyond the reach of the majority. Life looks more like a choice from a series predefined options and we like to think more of what we should become if we take a certain path rather than what we can create from a blank canvas. 
• The Batman fan-club: Some of us appreciate the sheer insanity of becoming Batman every-night. Unlike his more-powerful colleague, Bruce Wayne had to work to become Batman and every time he wears the suit he put his life on the line. What’s strikingly different from his alien frenemy is his motivation. He became Batman pursuing a selfish reason, seeking revenge for the murdering of his parents. We, Batman fans, drew inspiration from the struggle of an ordinary human who practiced many years to be able to sit at the same level as a celestial deity. We believe we should be more concerned with our own interest and support our life through our own efforts. Life is more of decision to pursue greatness, a journey filled with traps and dangers that will strengthen the fabric of a true hero. The true heroism is in the journey itself.

And these two camps can have distinct approaches to life, and these have been the subject of philosophic debate for thousands of years. Which leads me to the quote below (one of my favourites - thank you Tim Ferriss):

The search for true heroism

Archilochus, a Greek poet and soldier who lived 2700 yrs ago, is credited with this saying. I am always blown away by the deep ideas our great-great fathers were concerned with during times of constant insecurity and permanent danger. What I find remarkable about this instance is that Archilochus opinion put him outside the main orthodoxy of the time. He was part of the Batman fan-club in a time and place where everyone was madly in love with Superman-like figures. The Greeks at the time were deterministic and all their early heroes are instruments of fate more than will. Greek tragedies are filled with characters that act more like hamsters spinning their fatalistic divine wheel. They all commit amazing deeds in their perpetual struggle to escape their fate, only to realise that it is because of this evading effort they have meet their fate. 

Almost all of our early stories exhibit strong predestrianism (or fatalism) - the inability for people to change their destiny. Stoicism stands aside as an ethical framework focused on personal virtue, a practical approach much appreciated by the Romans. However the deterministic view was shared by most of Greeks philosophers and they passed it on to the Christian Church fathers, who used them to add a layer of intellectual polish for Jewish tribal myths. Influenced by Plato, Augustine of Hippo, the saint that gave Christianity its philosophic kernel, advocated for predestination, a conclusion deriving from the existence of an all-knowing and all-powerful creator. He postulates that God is the only one who can perceive the passing of time, since time is nothing more than one of God’s creation. For a petty man, trapped in the present, expectations are illusions we use to think about the future. And since our destiny is already decided St Augustine concludes that our virtue becomes nothing more than  man’s will over his body to adhere to God’s commands.

The fall of the Roman empire put almost all philosophic development on hold, giving the Church a monopoly on thought. The Renaissance marked our rediscovered appetitive for the Greek thought but it wasn’t until the Enlightenment that we saw Batman fans getting the limelight. Liberalism, a philosophy focused on the rightful pursue of one’s happiness became the philosophic foundation for the modern world. 

After a troubled 20th century, marked by the conflict between authoritarian regimes and the protectors of the new found liberal ideals, the discussion about heroism is as important as ever. 

Heroism and YOU

So are heroes born or are they made? A simple question that most of us offer a simplistic answer, dictated by the daily influences. Maybe you like Batman more …. Maybe you admire the divine representation of Superman. 

Our interpretation of heroism can reveal some of the heuristics we base our every-day decisions on. We can humour ourselves with an intellectual answer but our true feelings will be revealed to us by our daily decisions:

• In business: If like Archilochus we believe in the power of training we will emphasise execution over vision. We can notice the dichotomy with our father Steve Jobs. Some of us think Jobs’s uncanny ability to see the future was his top heroic skill, while the other group gets inspired by his relentless drive.  
• In areas of personal development. Most of us, as evidenced by the plethora of materials on the subject, believe motivation is the secret ingredient that heroes use to reach their expectations. The other group, like our Greek soldier, discounts the power of motivation and places consistent practice on the pedestal. 
• In areas of public policy: The left-leaning citizens act like one’s heroism is dependent on others. We could all be heroes … if only others (usually the more-gifted) people would help us more to break through the heavy societal smog. As the right-wing members of society we value personal responsibility more and take it upon ourselves to achieve greatness. 

So, what would you say? Are heroes born like Superman? Or are they made, through training as Batman (and Archilochus) wants to make us believe. I look fwd for your opinions. 

The story oppening is unusual for a space opera: We meet Ye Wenjie, the young daughter of a prominent professor of physics, witnessing her father beaten to death by Red Guard fanatics during the 1960 Cultural Revolution. Years later she finds herself conscripted into working at Red Coast, a secret government radio telecommunications facility involved in intercepting satellites transmissions from the enemy capitalist nations. But things are not what they used to be and the author keeps on building on the premise until it reaches monumental proportions by the end of the series. If Interstellar blew your mind this will take it to the next level.  

The books are so crammed with fantastic ideas that the author could have filled a library. As with some of my favourite SF books this series is using science as a the background for exploring some of the deepest philosophical questions:
- What defines ethics? Are ethics absolute or are they shaped by our biological necessities?
- How is language constrained or enhanced by human nature?  
- Can we make moral choices in an immoral universe? 
- What is the value of love in a cold but aggressive cosmos?
- How should think of existence in a multi-dimensional space?  
- What’s the meaning of life? Why there is something rather than nothing? 

All of these difficult questions are explored through politics, systems of ethics and religions with majestic virtuosity. One of my favourite elements of the series was the importance he gives to ideologies. Galaxy shuttering wars are being fought in the world because of competing dogmas, and the characters are all driven by complicated beliefs. The books paint a political climate that could only come from a Chinese author. 

Not everything is rosy. Some characters are rather dull and while grandiose, the ending, reminded me of Space Odyssey, a poetic technobabble that takes the saga to an end, without offering any intellectual fulfilment. But these shortcomings don’t matter that much and the books are still a blast. 

I would give A+ to the trilogy. Please drop me a comment if you have book suggestions in the same vein as these ones. 

Let’s continue the series on why the A.I. takeover are overblown. I recommend reading part 1 before digging into this one, although the arguments in this essay are different enough to be read separately. This time I would like to talk about our static worldview and our over-reliance on prediction. 

Who let the pessimists out? 

Did you notice that all the alarmists have a static worldview? It’s quite ironic that most of these people self-identify as scientifically-leaning progressives while they concern themselves with conserving the economy and fighting any invention like Luddites used to do centuries ago. 

Peter Thiel touches this subject in his book, “Zero to One”. His 2x2 matrix divides the world in 4 categories: 

"The definite optimist has a concrete plan for the future and strongly believes in that future being better than today. The indefinite optimist is bullish on the future but lacks any design and plan for how to make such a future possible. The definite pessimist has a specific vision for the future but believes that future to be bleak. The indefinite pessimist has a bearish view on the future but no idea what to do about it."

Thiel makes the claim that it’s the definite optimists who turn 0 into 1 and push our society forward. People who look at the future as slightly-altered continuation of today will tend to focus on conservation of status-quo sprinkled with interventions when some random event disturbs the emotional tranquility of the society.

One only needs to look at SF movies to notice this trend. The best fiction of the past was technological triumphalist, even independent of the political ideology that was informing the narrative. The utopic yet-communist Star Trek and the imperialistic fascist Star Wars served as inspirations for many young people (myself included) to create, to innovate for a better, brighter future. It might be anecdotal but I am of the opinion that movies serve as an accurate barometer of cultural mood. And the SF of the past seems like a bright ray of light compared to the dystopian movies of today. Avatar and Interstellar deal with a future devastated by our abuse of natural resources. Mad Max’s humanity is divided between exploitative, abusive, power hungry elite and the oppressed commoners. That the world is going to be destroyed by capitalist selfish tendencies of future industrialists is a given.  Returning to AI, we only need to look at Terminator, Ex Machina or the much beloved Black Mirror, to discover out-of-control machines only interested in our complete annihilation. 

The most common provided solution, a combination of ecologist, vague spiritualism and love (love is the secret ingredient of all interventionist policies) speaks more to the not-so-distant past than the exciting future. It’s like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his ill-conceived appreciation for the noble savage, became a SF writer. 

Our predictions are not that reliable

Let’s return to the doomsday scenario. Lots of unemployed people, chaos and destruction. Before addressing the validity of the prediction let's remember that we have seen this movie before. 

Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialise to take their place. After all, if we look at the year 1800, some 74% of all Americans were farmers, whereas by 1900 this figure was down to 31%, and by 2000 to a mere 3%. And yet, this hasn’t led to mass unemployment. In 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we’d all be working just 15-hour weeks by the year 2030. Yet, since the 1980s, work has only been taking up more of our time, bringing waves of burnouts and stress in its wake. One could say that we are distancing ourselves from the idleness passionately advocated for by Bertrand Russell, not trending towards it. The more we automate, the more work we have to do. But this time will be different. This time the machines will really get us. 

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” said that baseball-playing turned philosopher, Yogi Berra. Nassim Taleb devoted a lot of his time fighting the elite’s tendency of mapping the future. His most famous book “Black Swan” accurately describes the impulse of forecasters to ignore large deviations and focus on averages to predict the future. His core argument is that complex systems are impossible to predict and that preemptive policies more unexpected consequences than benefits. 

The most worrisome blindspot of all this pesimistic worldview is the opportunity cost. A point brilliantly argued by the economist Henry Hazlitt, who noticed that new jobs are less noticeable tha lost ones. It’s much easier for us to notice the fired US factory workers than all the new professions that did not exist 10 years ago. 

Thinking about the future requires imagination. It seems to be extremely hard for the pessimists we examined above to think about new industries, let alone trust the human ingenuity to create a new shinny ways forward. When the car replaces the horse carriage it’s easier to see all the displaced construction workers and fired carriage drivers than to predict the rise of uber.  

Not to say that we can not or should not look at trends. Just to be careful, as Scott Belski remarked, not to confuse the forecast for the future with an investment thesis. "The future won’t happen until the present is ready for it."

Both are equally fascinating. They are even more revealing if you subscribe to the idea that these books act as a barometers of the current generation's dreams and aspirations.

However one student stood up, with an essay that presented Mao as the world's greatest hero of the century. No words about any of the atrocities or about the politics of fear that are still felt by the Chinese people. To his surprise, the student happened to be among those gifted in sciences, a genius in math and a skilled computer programer. You may think that my father had the luck to stumble over a contrarian who wanted to spark a debate to stand out. But the reality is much more unremarkable and conventional: this pupil just copied his piece from the "wrong" place. Some may remember that in the early days the Internet lacked few "trustworthy" sites, and search in the pre-Google era could drift you to some dubious websites. And some of that disputable content “miraculously” transferred onto his paper. 

The story is old but relevant as information is easily obtainable but the fake news are getting worse. Although the web evolved tremendously over the last 20 years, we can see how our friends feel no embarrassment to share stories that are as misleading and fabricated as the paper glorifying Mao. 

I remember my dad remarking at the moment that without any foundational knowledge the information explosion enabled by the Internet will only amplify people’s biases, while making us stupider and sure of ourselves.  Because when we have no elementary information understanding of the world, any data point is as valid as the other. 

Which leads me to an aha realisation: A person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.

Education and wall building

We have a long history of building walls to protect us against threats. The Chinese built a huge wall to protect themselves against Mongol invaders. Hadrian, the Roman emperor from the early 2nd century, also practiced a policy of protectionism. Similar policies are regaining traction nowadays. More and more of us look at wall-building as the solution that will protect us against immigrants. But also against incorrect news or misleading information. I notice with worry that the same people who criticise tighter border controls are now demanding media providers or social networks to regulate speech by offering mechanism that will filter out fake news. But who decides what is fake is what is not? Is fake news such a big problem that we need to relinquish our freedoms of speech rights to some benevolent corporations or the government? The cure in this case would be worse than the disease. 

Especially since we already have the antidote against the spread of miss-information. We had it for millennia. It’s called the library. 

Unfortunately active learning has grown out of fashion. We are mostly interested in information gathering as only a tool for career advancement. As information permeates our lives through all our connected gadgets we started to confuse access to information with knowledge. 

The approach I am advocating for is an individual one. Never-ending active education, the expansion of the foundational knowledge should be our way to fight back. Assuming responsibility for our own brain and its operating system is the first and most important step. Personal education serves as our defence mechanism against miss-information and we all have a duty to ourselves to cultivate it. 

It does not require Facebook changing its newsfeed algorithm. It does not require new laws or regulations. It only requires us to pick up a book.  

Otherwise we may all end like our student above: skilled but stupid.