Descaling our Lives

Money is a communication tool. Like words and numbers, it helps us organise ourselves and share our skills, knowledge, and resources. Slightly smarter than barter, but still mostly unaware. We don’t trust each other enough for full transparency. We all need to eat, so even if we know there is a better solution somewhere else, we still want to sell our skills. Secrecy and politics protect our interests. Competing interests. Money-making boils down to matching an ask to an offer. How many people want the same thing? How many people can offer it? A key ingredient is scale. If you can find something lots of people want, where only you have the solution. That is clearly difficult in a world where information flows freely, secrecy is harder, and the winner takes it all. The best competitive advantages don’t have to hide. They are “in the box thinking” which, like exercise and diet, everyone knows about but doesn’t necessarily do. A real competitive advantage is not having to scale. Breaking free from supply, demand, and secrecy. Changing the rules. That requires building Capital to do the money stuff, so we can do something else. Descaling our lives and leaning into the other communication tools.

That, is a Bat

In Dutch and German, an Employee is “werknemer” and “arbeitnehmer”. A work taker. One of my pet peeves is when managers tell employees to “think like an owner”. It is like Nagel’s paper “What is it like to be a bat?”. You either are a bat, or you aren’t. You either are an owner, or you aren’t. If you are a work taker, you are paid for the work you are doing. If you are an owner, you have a share in the problem being solved. A rule of thumb for if something is a good business idea is “does it scale?”. Taking work doesn’t scale. Ownership does. We have limited time, energy, knowledge and skills. Capital has no such limits. Work gets a salary. A salary is a price. In a healthy economy prices come down and Capital grows. The way you become an owner, without needing permission, is by squeezing a gap between what you earn for taking work and what you spend. Then get your money a job. That, is thinking like an owner. That, is being an owner.

Does it Scale?

Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Not all good business ideas are good ideas. One rule of thumb to separate good ideas from good business ideas is the question, “Does it Scale?”. Advice givers are stuck with this dilemma. High quality advice is clearly a very good idea. The world is complicated, ambiguous, and random. We are all hopelessly incompetent and ignorant in our own special way. The world, and knowledge of the world, is simply too infinite for us to be adequately equipped to make all our decisions on our own. High quality advice isn’t scalable. We all experience reality as a controlled hallucination. What we see is based on what we have seen. To see what others see, you have to develop a relationship. You have to share their hallucination. It’s intimate. It is time and energy consuming. If you need to monetise this, the only way you can make the economics work is by pushing the price up. That’s not a good business idea, its just better story telling. Another approach is for things that scale to finance things that don’t.

At Scale

'Big Solutions' take a lot of people agreeing and a strong vision of where the destination is. Bringing empowered people along with you is difficult at scale. Like herding cats, getting a bunch of strong-willed individuals to 'get on board' requires top-down control, and (strength to unsustainably overcome un-)willing followers. Complete individuality doesn't scale either. We have to cooperate given we don't live on desert islands by ourselves. There is a middle ground. Voluntary Association can scale. Pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone in who we mix with, but not so much that we break. Accepting our foibles and dark-sides as people, but not at the expense of rejecting the better angels of our nature. Micro-ambitious 'solutions' may just be questions, but the spreading of questions may be more powerful than the spreading of answers.

Accepting the dark side?

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