What Makes Money

Income and money operate at a very explicit level. Pay for what you see. Fully acknowledging what makes money and what doesn’t, and not using force to get your way, allows you to go deeper and wider. 

You can shift to embodied learning. To things we can’t explain. To the tacit knowledge that is held by people on the very front lines with zero distance from decision making. Knowledge built through immediate and repeated feedback cycles and real wrestling with real problems. Understanding that is impossible to pass up the chain. 

Research and development can take a lot of time and become a part of you. Where the payback is hidden. 

Competitive advantages I like are ones you can do in the open. In “The Art of Learning”, Josh Waitzkin talks about his jiu-jitsu teacher publishing his training videos. This surprised people, because he was freely giving away his secrets. His answer lay in his confidence that if you were concentrating on what he was doing, he would be a step ahead, because he had gone deeper. 

If you have to safely guard a secret, it’s not really a competitive advantage. It is a fragile wall. 

With an enduring advantage, you can tell people what to do, but the time, commitment, and effort will scare them off. Particularly if that mastery doesn't make money. They will head towards the six easy steps to financial freedom in six months. Not the life of hard graft that will set up the next generation.

Time - Commitment - Effort

Real Change

Be very sceptical of get rich quick schemes. Particularly if they rest on secrecy. My favourite ideas are ones that everyone knows work - but seem too hard. Does your idea work if everyone could copy you? Want to run the Comrades Marathon? Train. Want to be healthy? Eat well, exercise, and learn to breathe properly. Out the box thinking and being different aren't always necessary. Sometimes, you just need to be willing to do the work. Think inside the box. Put in the time. 'We overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten' (Bill Gates). Real change is slow. Real change compounds.

Real Change Takes Time

Hide or Learn

A good idea is not good enough for a good business idea. The tricky bit is finding something that can be monetized. To find a market, you need to find something where there is demand and the supply is restricted in some way. People need something that you can do or make, that they can't just get anywhere. 

If they can get it anywhere, it is a commodity. It may be useful but it is difficult to make money out of it. People who make money out of commodities do so either because they are much better than others at creating/extracting the stuff, or they are traders (i.e. they have lots to sell when supply is limited, and build up their lots when there is plenty).

So lots of discussion in monetizing will revolve around the 'thing' being unique, and the barriers to entry. How do you keep things secret? How do you entrench your advantage? In my view, this sucks the joy out of it. Two of the best books I have read in the last year show the advantage of being able to do things without fear of losing your advantage. To being at the edge of learning in the open.

Josh Waitzkin tells the story of Marcelo Garcia, a five-time World Champion in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Unlike most martial artists who are very secretive, Garcia often lets people watch his training or even posts videos online. He believes that if people are trying to figure out what he is doing, they are playing his game, and he is the best at his game. If they beat him, it is because they have found a hole and he will learn from them. Losing is the best form of feedback.

Austin Kleon talks of how artists can learn from each other and says they should steal. Ordinarily artists go nuts if someone is stealing their technique. They will create art, but try to hide how they created the piece. Kleon & Garcia would argue that if someone steals from you and does it better, you will have learned something. The problem is, that kind of learning doesn't put food on the table. It may be a good idea... but it does make monetizing hard.

Garcia gets away with it because he is really good. If you back yourself enough, you don't have to be secretive. The thing you are doing or making isn't your competitive advantage. You are.

Making New Mistakes

Don't talk about Religion, Politics or Sex. Don't mix friendships and work. Barriers start to become harder to enforce as information starts to flow freely. They also become harder to enforce when the people around you don't come from the same place, look the same, have the same broad beliefs etc. We spend so much time at work that if we don't share something of ourselves, there is the chance that you lose it. You end up spending significantly more time at work than with your friends and family. The things that really define you in your eyes become the things you don't talk about with the people you spend the most time with. Professor of Business Ethics at NYU-Stern Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) studies the intuitive foundations of morality. His work is trying to find the common ground that we can't find through rational thought. He is the one who came up with the Elephant-Rider metaphor I love so much. In The Righteous Mind he looks at why good people disagree. I think it should be prescribed reading for politicians, religious leaders or anyone who is attempting to steer a path towards improving peoples lives.

San Francisco seems to be at the epicentre of one of these clashes of people trying to figure out how to reconcile conflicting ideas. Getting more involved with Twitter recently (@trevorblack), I am amazed how many American's define themselves very strongly in their profiles as being Anti-GOP or Anti-Democrat. I am sure those are just the noisy ones, and there are more silent pragmatists in the middle. America has conquered a lot of the big ticket barriers to liberty and so these points of common ground are forgotten. California is very Democratic but is right at the front of some very cut-throat Capitalism.

'If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.' - Clemenceau talking of his son

The heart of Capitalism is a recognition that we don't know how to price things because we all want different things and there isn't enough to go around. Enter Adam Smith and the theory of the invisible hand that helps us out by with supply and demand. The price of something has nothing to do with the effort that was put into making it. It has to do with how much there is of it, and how much people want it. As it turns out this is a really effective way of driving resources to where in reality they are most wanted.

In doing this though there are incentives to affect both supply and demand. In 'Hide & Don't Speak' I spoke about how appealing the idea of collaborative work is. The Netflix documentary on '3D printing' looks partly at this idea and the conflict between Open Source and Proprietary Development. This is a conflict between our romantic idealism and the competitive fuel that keeps us running. The documentary is also an interesting look at some of the other areas of conflict in the capitalist approach. One interesting one is how an employee can invest themselves in a company and receive payment and at some point be thanked and asked to leave. The rationalist in us believes they have been paid and that exchange means all is fair. We don't account for the unpriced/unpriceable part of themselves that they lose. It doesn't just happen to employees (although that is most common). Steve Jobs was famously ousted at Apple. Bill Gross has left PIMCO in the last few days after around four decades.

We aren't purely rational. In the Ultimatum Game, the first of two players is given a sum of money to divide and the second player can either reject or accept the offer. If they reject it both get nothing. In a rational world, the first player would offer a tiny amount and the second player would always accept a non-zero number. This isn't how the game is played by real people.

It is tempting to see our rational sides as the masters of our destiny and believe that by calming our emotional side, we make better decisions. In a world where the other players are people, I don't think that is the case. All this directly ties into our happiness and how we choose where to work, what work to do, who to work with, whether we want to grow, how we want to grow and what to believe in.

I think the work that Haidt and others are doing is fascinating. I also think looking at the stories of the successes and failures of others is a great way to avoid having to repeat the mistakes of others. We get to make new mistakes. You don't have to, and in fact can't, go it alone.