Worth doing Badly

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. 

This is true because you start by doing something badly until you know how to do it. If bad is measured compared to people who are already doing it. If learning is not recognised as a necessary part of the process. 

We are better at that when we are kids, because most kids don’t receive a salary. Our judging system is different. Marks are a communication tool, just like money... except they usually aren’t constrained by supply and demand. 

With a functional education system, there is capacity for lots of students to do well. If well is judged by knowledge. 

As soon as education is judged by money and jobs, then nice disappears. 

Not enough jobs that require the skills you have? Not enough jobs paying more than you spend? Not enough jobs in the type of work you want to be doing? Cold, hard, reality. 

As a child, someone (normally your parents) holds space for you to be bad. Gradually, we stop holding space for each other. As an adult with responsibility, you need to get the balance between focusing on things supply/demand tell you to do, and holding space for yourself to be bad. 

One of the things that sucks about being an adult is we stop doing a lot of things we love, because we filter what we do, not only by what we are good at, but what we are best (relatively) at. We cut off parallel sources of joy.

Little Rugby Players

Big Man Holding Space

Wafer Thin

When I “stopped working” in 2014, I had ideas for projects I wanted to work on. What I meant by not working, was not working *for money*. 

I was just frustrated with what felt like a toxic environment. With answering the question “what do you do?” with what I do for work. With my default laid out, bar 20 odd days of leave a year. 

I still wanted to work on interesting problems, but with a different filter. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. There are a lot of things I wanted to do that I couldn’t justify. 

Another frustration was the amount of time I spent communicating what I was working on! Explaining myself. Communicating what needs to be done to people who aren’t doing it. When you get the sense that you are Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill just to roll it up again. When you aren’t convinced of the incremental change. What the late David Graeber called “Bullsh1t Jobs”. Or fake deadlines where someone tells you to get something to them by the time your head hits the pillow... then they don’t look at it for two weeks. 

Much of my anxiety came from a sense of killing time. Time is the thing that is most valuable. That was what I wanted. Time free from price. I am also aware of path dependence. I did what I did because of the cumulative decisions that were presented to me, and that I made. Changing paths is hard when the path is relentlessly repeating. 

There can be wafer thin boundaries between what we do, and what we could be doing... but we simply don’t have the time to breathe and notice.

Releasing Constraints

Building an engine (Capital which can work on your behalf) creates the capacity to stop focusing on yourself as an individual. We all have to eat. Many of us have dependents who rely on us financially. Which unfortunately means we can be seen as productive assets. Valued for the money that consumes the majority of our time. A few get the perfect combination of “what you are good at, what people want, and what you love”. Applying all three filters cuts out a lot of activity. Things you are good at and love, that don’t pay? Things people want, and you love, but you aren’t “good” at? People can get stuck doing things that people want and that they are good at, but they don’t love. Many people can’t pick and choose. They take the opportunities presented, and are too busy being a productive asset and meeting obligations to have capacity to breathe and change path. And life passes them by. If you want to stop seeing yourself as a productive asset, you need to build an engine that replaces your need to earn money. If you need to earn money (as most people do), there will be real world constraints of supply and demand that form the boxes in which we are paid. The hold of those constraints gets released if you can gradually create breathing space. 

 

Degrading Categories

I hate feeling incompetent. Almost as much as I hate the feeling of having gotten it wrong by someone. In a way that I can’t correct. Intellectually I get the idea of the importance of not caring what other people think. But I do care. And people, all people, have limits to their skills and knowledge. Money lets you hide it somewhat. You can pay people to do the things you can’t do. You can even convince yourself that that is because your time is worth more than theirs. That the thing you specialise in is more important than the thing they do. Particularly if it pays more. So, paying them to do the thing you can’t do is protecting your time. You can even convince yourself that you could do the thing they do, if you chose to. Underlying a lot of problematic prejudice is a fundamental belief in superiority. Dividing people into binary categories of “good enough” and “not good enough”. Second class citizens. Surrounding yourself with people you feel are good enough. Not doing the work to see the others. Underlying that is probably the internal voice telling you you aren’t good enough. The voice that is secretly aware of all the things you can’t do.

Your Own Fate

I find the initial stages of learning confusing. In a physical way that affects my breathing, my tingling skin, and my wide eyes. Education often does more filtering than teaching. Levels sort the good from bad, and move on. Searching for naturals. Searching for the chosen ones. Chosen by fate. Except different skills are needed in the early stages of gaining skills and knowledge. My secret power is I am as stubborn as a donkey. I take the next step. In my Actuarial exams, I was very structured. Early exams took 100 hours each. Later ones 300 hours. I put the hours in. How often do we put 100 hours into something, before deciding we can’t do it? How often do we ask whether the way we learnt is the best way to learn, before deciding we can’t do it? Two mentors stand out for me as teaching me practical methods on “How to learn”. Mr Saayman (my History teacher), taught me as a 12-year-old how to summarise. Pin down the main thing. When I was 20 years old, David O’Brien,(an Actuary who had finished what I was starting) reinforced the idea of spending 8 minutes on a 5 mark question, and no more. Move on. Exams are a process. No individual question is the main thing. Part of learning is accepting confusion as part of the process. Make your own fate.

Make your own fate

Through the Chaos

The reality we experience is a controlled hallucination. We interpret everything in the context of what we have experienced before, through the filter of a constructed story. We change our memories to suit us. We create containers to allow us to think contradictory things. We find people with shared hypnosis to hold our hands and hearts. The world is too complicated, ambiguous, and random for us to process. We process our slice. Buffett talks of a “Too Hard Pile”. You don’t have to have an opinion on everything, so it is worth filtering where we allocate our energy. With investing, the filter I use is Money as a Labourer. If you hold cash, your worker is doing nothing. Government sets its salary with interest rates (at the moment, that is almost nothing). A Bond is lending your worker to someone else. Equity (Stocks and Shares) gets your money a job. It can get quite a few jobs. I like the number 20. Small enough for me to understand the job I get my money. Big enough to admit I don’t understand all the things that can go right or wrong in any of those jobs. Controlled enough to focus on creativity and learning as the underlying driver of sustainable growth. Through the chaos, keep breathing, keep moving, keep creating.

"Chaos" George Frederic Watts

Twitter

I use Twitter as an unfiltered filter of content on the internet. It provides direct access to some incredible people as they share both their thoughts, and things they are reading. By limiting the number of characters, each tweet can be screened quickly to find things of interest. Links can then take you through to longer reads. By looking at who people I find interesting are following, and who is following them, I am able to find an 'infinite library' of fascinating people engaged in conversation. It doesn't take time from me. It helps me focus my time. 

My handle on Twitter is @ trevorblack 

Unfiltered Filter

I joined Twitter in April 2009 largely at the request of a good buddy who was an early adopter. I really didn't get it for a long time. I made various stabs but for a solid 5 years struggled to understand why he was such a passionate evangelist. I thought of Twitter as an 'sms to the world'. More recently I have become a power user and the penny has dropped. I think the power of twitter is primarily twofold

Unfiltered
You have direct access to some incredible people. For a planet with 7 Billion people, this has democratised thought leaders. You can engage with Nobel Prize winners (@RobertJShiller and @TheDesmondTutu), celebrated scientists (@neiltyson or for some controversy @RichardDawkins, authors (@nntaleb and @GilbertLiz), politicians (@narendamodi) , comedians (@Trevornoah or @rustyrockets - Russell Brand), Philosophers (Nigel Warburton @philosophybites , @PeterSinger, @alaindebotton), Psychology gurus (@paulbloomatyale and @jonhaidt), Religious Leaders (The pope tweets himself @pontifex and the @DalaiLama) and celebrities of your choosing.

As confirmation that they really see your tweets... watch this very funny clip:

Filter
There is so much information on the web, it is daunting to find the stuff that is worth while. Twitter acts as the filter. You find people who are looking for stuff themselves. When they find something interesting they share it. If you find people who are genuinely sharing stuff they find interesting, this is different from traditional media which normally has a particular brand to present and an editorial bias. Here it is individuals - still biased but less constrained. You can use your friends and the world's thought leaders as your filter and you can help provide a filter for others.

But...
As with real human interaction, I think the real power of twitter is when it is used as a conversation rather than a broadcast of just your own ideas. No one likes someone who just talks about themselves. Most people like people who are also interested in them. Most people don't like people who are unpleasant (don't be a troll). As a tool to participate in the important sharing of ideas without borders or thought police - twitter is the embodiment of free speech.

Exciting times.

www.twitter.com