Wound Up

Numbers are blunt tools for communication. The message they convey is more important to us than the countable thing they are supposed to represent. How a number is heard, interpreted, and felt, can wind us up. How they relate to ranking criteria or how we are judged. 

Key performance indicators to measure us. Seeing what you have done. Seeing what you haven’t done. How the environment has changed. Have you put sufficient effort in? 

Has effort resulted in output? How clever are you? Should you be given more responsibility? Should you be given coaching/mentoring/the boot? All the various ways we use to decide if someone is good enough. 

It is always interesting to see how this is connected to the broader questions, and the broader community. Many problems are solved in complex groups. Wealth creation is a team sport. Attributing who did what, and ranking those contributions, can be an impossible task. One that pretends that contribution = value = reward. 

If you look at the long-term growth of countries' “gross domestic product”, it exploded with the industrial revolution. Newtonesque jumping on the shoulders of giants. 

We tend to look at meritocracy as the marginal contribution of the individual (“if they hadn’t been there”) rather than the hard Tim Minchin truth that “If I didn't have you, someone else would do”. 

Accepting that we are inherently replaceable *in the world of money*. People will miss you, but someone else will do the job. Don’t get wound up the numbers. They don’t represent you.

Then you Build

Wealth building is not wealth extraction. It is not a negative competition. Yes, you are engaged with people in a way where you push each other, and challenge each other, but there is no need for schadenfreude and benefitting only if others do badly. 

We can gradually let go of that and have the genuine intention to solve rather than perpetuate problems while drawing rent from them. There is the temptation to have easy containers where the only competitive advantages are fake. 

Real mastery and resilience can cope with, and thrive under, openness and transparency. A really good business idea can be judged through the filter of how it would work in a world with full transparency, zero transaction costs, and perfect replicability. 

If someone knows what you are doing, they could do it too. Real competitive advantage comes from embodied knowledge. You can tell someone what you do and how you do it... and they still won’t be able to, or won’t want to, because it isn’t what makes them tick. You have a relationship with them, and that is something they will keep coming back for. 

The way you see the world can change, and adjust. We can go deep into different areas. Make different choices. 

My goal has always been to develop a resilient world view. One where there is nothing that everything relies on. Where changing one thing doesn’t bring everything else down. Where you hold each part lovingly, but you are not so attached to it that it defines the whole reality. 

Then you build. Choose. Go.

Building doesn't have to leave a hole

From What is There

One way to build is to have a vision, and then fight your way through the obstacles in the way. Another way to build is to see. To give something that is already there a name. The nameless exist beyond our stories, but our stories help them exist in our minds. Naming connects us. The 150 group I am a part of is one of several that are there already. The group is (1) replicable, the idea is (2) scalable, and the purpose is (3) sustainable. Engineers bend the world to their will. I want to find fellow sculptors. To chip away and reveal the beauty beneath the stone. Like Michelangelo's, our sculptures are unfinished.

Unfinished