What Does Not Change
I recently read Same as Ever. Great book, definitely recommend it. I’m not going to review the book here, but it did highlight focusing on things that do not change. So I’ve started thinking, “What will not change in my life?” With AI being the cranman of modern technology, what will not change even if AI changes everything else?
Incentivize What You Want
Having little kids makes this very apparent. Are we the simple product of stacks of incentives? No, on an individual level humans with character will go against a given incentive for what they believe is right. However, create a system so large and complex (see “Keep it simple” below) that no one person can understand it and you will quickly find that incentives often drive the system. Want to reduce turnover at your company? Treat your employees like adults, and pay them market rates for their work. Want your employees to innovate more or provide more value to the company? Don’t measure (and thereby incentivize) complicated processes or metrics that do not align with the companies goals. This ties into much of what James Clear discusses in Atomic Habits:
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Old Lasts
The older something is the more likely it is to stick around. This is called the Lindy Effect, and has some parallels to Chesterton’s Fence. I’ve done this more than I care to admit. It is rare to enter an environment in which you can fix all the problems by just rewriting/redesigning the entire system. Likely the same issues that created the currently broken system will also plague the new one. Working within the existing system to improve it little by little takes much more consistency, discipline, patience, and creativity.
Enter an environment and say “why is x like this??”. Then without attempting to understand why x is like this, propose that “x should be like y”. I’ve started to learn the value of asking “why”. This follows a lot with the five whys framework, in which you can frequently get to the root cause of a thing by just asking “why” five times. My 3-year-old has already mastered this framework! It is a fundamental question to ask when attempting to better understand root causes.
I’ve started to find this principle show up in many areas of life. Skills that will never be “out of date”:
- Problem solving
- Deep Thinking/Work (see Deep Work by Cal Newport)
- Distilling complex topics into simple conversations
- Curiosity
Technologies that have lasted for a (relatively) long time:
- Vim
- TCP/IP
- Ethernet
- DNS
- SMTP
Keep It Simple
I’m sure there is a mathematical explanation as to why complexity makes things exponenentially harder to manage. Perhaps related to the fact that we can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956). It then becomes very hard to reason about a system/problem if you cannot hold the entire state in your head. A few great examples of this are finances, technology (see, the Unix Philosophy), and health. There are no end to people who will tell you that complicated finances, technology, and health advice will make your life better. In rare cases they may be correct, but in most cases simple is better, not easy, but better. It’s simple to be consistent about getting physically fit and eating fewer calories than you burn, but it’s easy to buy a new supplement that will “fix all your problems”. It’s simple to consistently put money away for 30-40 years for retirement, but investing in every cryptocurrency, day trading, or real estate on Mars is easy.
Don’t Waste Time
Don’t waste time on reversible or inconsequential choices. If a decision is easily reversible or costs almost nothing to reverse then stop thinking about it. Just try it. As the difficulty in reversing a decision increases so does the time that should be spent on the decision. This seems to be a hard one for those in technical professions. When programming, which inevitably leads to debugging, a single character can waste hours of debugging. Therefore, we are much more careful and measured when it comes to decisions, which can lead to “paralysis by analysis”. I’ve yet to master this one, I still catch myself getting hung up on decisions that don’t matter. I tell my son frequently, “sometimes we don’t need more ideas, we just need to get it done”, otherwise we’ll never get anything done.
In an effort to “not waste time on reversible or inconsequential choices”, I’m going to push this post out now!