I did a 5 hour exam seminar today and one of the things that the students perked their ears up at was the idea of writing not for readers, but for a reader.
This was half way across the country (it’s snowing here). On the train home, in a bout of nostalgic tiredness, I flicked through the blogs of people who I followed 10 years ago and something occurred to me. A lot of bloggers ended up having some kind of successful business, often hingeing on a personal brand. I found an interesting correlation between their business and their friends. It’s painfully obvious, but for me it has been hidden in plain sight for a long time.
They sell the things their friends would buy from them.
And by friends, I don’t mean people who follow them, I mean friends. Real life friends.
So to rephrase the writing canon:
Don’t sell to followers, sell to a follower.
The concept of selling to your friends seems a bit odd at first, but it’s the perfect litmus test of whether what you’re selling is worth buying. I think some people rely on the vastness of the internet to find their product and end up making spammy things that don’t sell, where in reality it’s probably not going to take off unless their friends would buy it from them.
The publisher has been the supplier of good books for her friends. The photographer who became popular has been taking her friends’ photographs for a long time. The lad who has a web development studio developed his friend’s sites. The girl with the jewellery store has been the to-go to person for nice jewellery before she had a bona fide store. My personal experience is congruent with this.
I think it’s a good way to think about small business. Think of a friend: what would you buy from them? What would you sell to them? I had a think of my friends and all they are good for is professional advice and good alcohol. Oh dear, rofl.
The social/economic mechanics of this are obvious and not worth chewing over, but it’s just a good way to think for some people who are thinking of monetising something.
There are few things I love more than blogging, but sometimes I leave the den to socialise…
It would be awesome to go to a place where you could mingle with women in business.
Why women? Places that aren’t woman-only, tend to be >80% men, something I learnt from experience. It’s not always conducive to making good connectons.*
So I went for a google for local female entrepreneurial stuff. It spat out a whole list of places. The websites scream empowerment through networking, in bright pink. One even offered good vibes. In bright pink. A bit like Ann Summers.
I also came to learn that women in business more often than not means C-suite employees of large corporations. Fair enough. Even here, with 1-2 exceptions, it is similar.
What I notice is that the average age is ~40. Also fair enough.
What I had been expecting to find was 30 year old entrepreneurs. I think that’s quite different.
But what does it mean?
That it’s virtually impossible to have built something by 30, in this part of the world?
That virtually no women in their 30s take business seriously?
*because it’s downright odd to come to a group of lads and say hello. They look so excited that it doesn’t feel like they have any interest in talking about anything serious.
Having to get up at 5:25 am to go to a distant hospital is remarkably effective at crystallising negative conclusions. On the bright side, knowing what not to do is super important. Via negativa and all that.
The train ride emphasised the UI problems in Amazon.
Amazon Audible:
“We don’t care that you paid for the service. Get us more clients.”
Look at this screen: why in the name of G-d is the main part of the screen a sharing button?
Why am I paying 40 quid per book and being constantly “encouraged” to make Amazon even more money?
I don’t mind a little bit of it, but this is the unmissable, ever-present centre-piece of the their user interface.
What a fail.
Coming home after a day of travelling and exploring a new hospital, I was greeted by a letter from Tesco. “Every little helps”, I think, as I open it…
Tesco
“The art of the one-directional equals sign”
So I asked for a new Clubcard cause the old one stopped working – and they sent it to me with this explanatory note on how to use a loyalty card (cause, you know, customers need one).
So if a=b, b=a… Am I right? Well, if €1=1 point, 1 point should equal €1.
But no, it actually equals one cent (you get a percent back as a coupon).
Marketing strategies that offend people’s intelligence are a bad idea.
(Also, it turns out that Irish Tesco is a considerably more upmarket establishment than its eponymous parent in the UK. The Irish branch exists as a separate subsidiary so as to not have to reveal the markups on their Irish lines, which I can only image are astronomical.)
Then Twitter came to just leave me no chance at a peaceful day of consuming products and services….
The latest set of people who sell things to you online on how to sell things online
via Twitter, of course
This reminds me of that time that my friends, having watched The Wolf of Wall Street, bought tickets to Jordan Belfort’s two-hour seminar in Dublin – where he promised to reveal all his woof-woof-woooolfy secrets.
If there was one thing that I learnt from watching The Wolf of Wall Street, it’s that one shouldn’t buy from people like him:
What did my friends say about the seminar? That they just paid 50 euro to attend a seminar that was basically a sales pitch asking them to attend a considerably more expensive two-day seminar in London. That’s where you really learn the secrets, you see.
The idea these people have is that “it’s a numbers game, so I will just follow everyone and see what I catch”. It makes people feel expendable.
Way too much offensive marketing for one day. I can’t be the only one pissed off by these marketing strategies, can I?
All publicity is good publicity and, naturally, if I had actually been very annoyed, I wouldn’t have written about the above. Twitter, Amazon and Tesco are still super-talented marketers. They have already won, and these are minor bloopers.
And then there is the utterly ridiculous, from Colgate:
Here are four five pretty unrelated things that have been on my mind:
Entrepreneurs: sell vs befriend
I, like I am sure millions of other people, keep getting followed by all sorts of dealers who promise to “help small business” and lead to “explosive growth” on social media. Why do these people exist? How have they not been banned by everyone? Or will selling hope always be big business?
It would be nice to have a community of entrepreneurs. But what do entrepreneurs do? They sell and they compete. Trying to have a community of entrepreneurs is like trying to farm spiders. They will eat each other.
A community of this nature could only form based on prior friendship, where social bonds are stronger than the need to sell. But most of these communities offer to put you into a network for a small fee: this doesn’t exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feelings. The circular nature of their business is also worrying. Conferences, seminars, mindset trainings, honestly…
I have, on the other hand, made many friends online, who happen to be entrepreneurs, but never directly in connection with their entrepreneurship. (You know who you are. Perhaps, some of you would like to meet my recently acquired Buddhist friend.)
Nietzsche: is it all lies?
I am quite worried about how things are unfolding in the US.
Nietzsche keeps getting brought up. He has to be the most misunderstood philosopher. Did his relatives doctor his writings too much after he died? Or is he just forever contradicting himself?
In other news, Google recently stopped Gab, apparently a sort of Twitter for people who get banned from Twitter, from being able to be downloaded from their Playstore. Apple stopped them a little earlier this year. Also, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom wants to curate the Internet.
France is tightening vaccination requirements. I support vaccines, of course. As a society though, are we better off having people die from preventable diseases or limiting their freedoms?
Diabetes is a preventable disease, but I don’t see anyone being confined to a gym by law. Though the herd immunity argument makes vaccines different. In addition, the fact that it is children who are affected makes vaccines different, but then again we can’t stop some people overfeeding their children with junk. I’ve taken enough trips on routes that serve hospitals to know that you don’t have to be above one year of age to be served Coke in your bottle.
Control
There is a philosophy that suggests that taking responsibility for everything that happens to you is the best way to live (e.g. William James).
I think that the world is one giant furnace of entropy and within that we each have a small island we call the self, where we can affect things. I cannot force someone to ask me to come to their party, but there is a myriad of things I can do to try to gently weasel my way into it.
The single most damaging thing I do, my worst bad habit, is fretting about things I cannot control. In other words, I feel responsible for things that are beyond my reach. I sit there and feel like a failure if I am not invited to the metaphorical party.
The question is: does this fretting push me to look for solutions that I wouldn’t have found if I just rested within my boundaries? Or are parts of William James and his followers’ philosophy just soothingly empowering wishful thinking? Or am I even doing damage by fretting and preventing myself from seeing ways to get into the party? Please share your thoughts on this last thing.
P.S. I couldn’t find a picture of a weasel, so here is a nice chilled out otter. I must take some of my own pictures soon.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. But this time it is really different:
What an uncomfortable graph. Sometimes when things scale, they are just a bigger version of the small thing. However, at times, they also develop new properties. A population of cells becomes an organ – and has new properties. A large teddy bear can be used as a pillow, while a small one cannot.
What can a large human population do that a small one couldn’t? What does it mean for the individual?
The above graph of world population vs time scares me because we’re going into the unknown. In a sense, each one of us is less important. It takes much more to compete. If you are “one in a thousand”, in 1800 that would have got you places. Today, not so much.
What does that mean for individuals? Can such a demand for food, water and energy be met, never mind sustainably? How do we find a place in such a competitive imminently expanding world? Albeit we’re no longer accelerating the growth, the sheer numbers are a little bit unnerving.
Not to fall into conspiracy theories or 1984/Brave New World despair, but for the sake of an analogy, consider cows, or minks, or any other farmed animal. I’ve always felt that breeding animals to kill them is a kind of (?necessary) evil, but it is somehow made better by the fact that they are bred. They don’t have to worry about food and get to have lots of babies. In a roundabout way, they have won in the Darwinian casino.
But then I wondered: if cows and minks are bred for their meat and their fur, are we kind of… bred for economic growth?
Each one of us has to comply with the assertion that success comes from having lots and lots of things in order for this to be perpetuated. Few people look for fame and fortune to exercise some kind of power (if you prefer “change the world”) – and to be fair I have respect for such people.
“Idle as trout in light”
I get the sense though that to most people, fame and fortune is an end in itself. Furthermore, I suspect it is a product of our culture rather than just hedonism. For a proper first principles hedonist, it would never make sense to work so hard to have things they will never get time to enjoy.
I’ve always found it fascinating that the very people I know from school that were so rebellious that they just wouldn’t comply with the simplest of instruction become exemplars of compliance and obedience when there is a paycheck involved.
It’s someone’s birthday?
“I’ve work tomorrow.”
Can’t stand the sight of the boss?
“I have to go to work.”
Wife giving birth?
“I better get to work, so.”
It seems that no amount of personal problems can stand in the way of being at work. And when it does happen, the rest of the working tribe treats it as some kind of weakness and/or deceit to get out of doing work.
Buckminster Fuller comes to mind:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
“Inspectors of inspectors”… The irony. A friend of mine, a former employee of a multinational once pointed out: we have trackers for trackers. Entire days are spent changing amber to green and red to amber.
Some also theorise that very few jobs require 9-5 x 5 days a week. A lot of time is spent being idle. Why then do the employers insist of you being there? I would argue it isn’t the employer: it’s the culture. Some people won’t take their job seriously if they are given the autonomy to manage their own time (though I always bet on the opposite when looking for people in my own ventures).
If you think about it, it’s kind of disrespectful to insist that someone is there just so that their boss has the option of coopting them into some work engagement. Another interesting (?side) effect is that predictably a person has no strength to create anything outside of work. An eight hour day of being surveyed and judged, a draining commute, an uncomfortable suit and a toilet seat you cannot sit on… As Taleb puts it:
“In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they were to disobey authority –something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flouted they scorn of material possessions.”
I wonder if it is becoming harder, though, to be a gyrating roaming monk (these days they have a Mac and are called digital nomads) given that the population is growing. Is there room to be an individual? Nietzsche has his concerns:
“Those who commend work. – In the glorification of ‘work’, in the unwearied talk of the ‘blessing of work’, I see the same covert idea as in the praise of useful impersonal actions: that of fear of everything individual. Fundamentally, one now feels at the sight of work – one always means by work that hard industriousness from early till late – that such work is the best policeman, that it keeps everyone in bounds and can mightily hinder the development of reason, covetousness, desire for independence. For it uses up an extraordinary amount of nervous energy, which is thus denied to reflection, brooding, dreaming, worrying, loving, hating; it sets a small goal always in sight and guarantees easy and regular satisfactions. Thus a society in which there is continual hard work will have more security: and security is now worshipped as the supreme divinity. – And now! Horror! Precisely the ‘worker’ has become dangerous! The place is swarming with ‘dangerous individuals’! And behind them the danger of dangers – the individual!”
It’s pretty clear that Nietzsche’s talking about institutional employment.
This essay of mine isn’t about robbing the rich or some other way of getting out of work. It’s not promoting Zuckerberg’s universal basic income. It’s about the fact that work is indeed glorified. Much of what is called work is being trapped in purposelessness.
And it’s not even work that is glorified: nobody cares about the labour of a painter who hasn’t (yet) made their hobby into a job or a blogger, or whoever. It is the stamp of approval from some institution that people really respect. Perhaps, it is just easier to relate to.
I suppose, being Russian, I can’t help but be reminded of how easily institutions fail. Countless Russian firms have risen to unbelievable heights and quickly died in the last 20 years. Even the USSR itself: seeing such a behemoth collapse shatters one’s faith in institutions.
And it wasn’t even that weak, with real industry and gargantuan natural resources. In a completely different context, where I am now – Ireland – also has become a State and gone through a couple of different names in the XX century. That empire disappeared too.
Nietzsche above and Taleb (in multiple works) have spoken about this security that people look for. The security that people trade a portion of their freedom for. Clearly though, it is an illusion. Remember 2008?
The chap in the pink shirt knows how to party like it’s 1728
Meanwhile, the seaside restaurant beside me boasts having been established in 1728. Chin chin, Mr Taleb, and chin chin to everyone being creative and working hard to not lose your individuality among the impending billions.
Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level
Ernest Becker
Fear of the passage of time
I recently came across the term chronophobia in the context of people doing exams: knowing that exam day is ever closer makes people anxious. Chronophobia was defined as an experience of unease and anxiety about time, a feeling that events are moving too fast and are thus hard to make sense of, in “Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s” by Pamela Lee.
Chronophobia isn’t a formal diagnosis, neither does it feature in scientific literature. In other words, it’s not really a phobia. It is more of an unpleasant feeling – one that is often expressed in art.
It is common in prison inmates, students in long academic programs and the elderly. When one is anxious, it is not only possible to be anxious about the event, but also its inescapable approach. Chronophobia is less about the doom and more about it being impending.
Salvador Dali: The Persistence of Memory, 1931. The melting clock describes the feeling of chronophobia rather well
Chronophobia appears to be connected with heightened awareness of the passage of time that is inherent in distant deadlines for significant events.
This morning during my 10 minutes of mindfulness, something interesting bubbled up. I randomly remembered myself on an airplane travelling back to Moscow to visit family about 2 years ago. I felt a strong urge to be that person again, a bit like when I’m on vacation and towards the end, with a sigh, I think back to how liberating the first day off felt. Or when I reach the last bite of some dopamine-explosive dessert, I think back to how happy I felt when it was just put in front of me. We all love vacation and desert. However, my wish to be 2 years younger makes little sense. I was in the throes of a challenging 70-80 hours per week medical rota. It took much ingenuity to carve out enough time to travel. Is it regret? It wouldn’t be fair to say that the last 2 years were somehow a waste of time in any regard. Why do I feel so drawn to the thought of going back in time?
Salvador Dali: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954. Dali saw the fish as a symbol of life
Fear of opportunity cost
Aged 27, I frequently contemplate what it would go back to a previous point in time. I think it’s the understanding of the limited nature of time. I also worry about opportunity cost. In economics, there is the term opportunity (alternative) cost is the value of the option that we don’t choose when making a decision. [If I have 1 euro and buy a 1 euro can of Coke, I would have to forego the 1 euro Mars bar in order to have it. I would thus potentially worry about what it would have been like if they got a Mars bar instead.] The feeling is different to decision-anxiety. It’s not even about second guessing one’s choice, but more about imagining alternative paths.
The word decision literally means the cutting off – of other options. Thinking of the alternatives always reminds us of the unyielding nature of choice and how we really can’t literally “have it all”.
Robert Frost’s famous (infamous?) “The Road Not Taken” is a brilliant and often misinterpreted examination of the nature of choice. It is important to recognise the speaker’s deliberation: he says the roads are much the same: “just as fair”, “really about the same”, “equally lay”.
“The Road Not Taken”, a frequent feature of post-card philosophy, is often oversimplified to say that the speaker chose the less travelled road – and, woohoo, that’s amazing. It’s more complex than that.
The speaker admits that he left the first road “for another day”. While he knew he would never go back, the torment of admitting the final nature of choice is just too much.
One can get very detailed when describing their particular fear. I certainly don’t support the idea of including “fear of opportunity cost”, “fear of the passage of time” or even “fear of choice” as phobias into the DSM. Indeed, this is perfect ground for thinking by induction. Is there a common thread here?
Hans Holbein the Younger: The Ambassadors, 1533. Note the anamorphic skull in the foreground. It surely is a reminder of death
Boiling down fears to a common denominator: could it be death?
Why does chronophobia affect students? Time forces them to deal with events that will affect serious aspects of their lives such as their future careers – and thus even more permanent things like social class, the kind of people they will be likely to marry and so on. Exam results’ effects are by no means definitive, but probabilistically they are significant.
It has become popular to say that there are only 2 human emotions: fear and love.
Everything negative is a form of fear. It kind of makes sense: anger is a way of defending one’s point of view, property or whatever other boundary. Being sad is a fear that one will never be as happy as they were before as a result of an event (not talking about depression here). Disgust is a fear that something will negatively impact one’s existence. You get the gist.
The other popular thought is that all fear is a form of the ultimate fear – of death.
Going back to chronophobia again, why does it affect the elderly? Time threatens the existence of the elderly. It threatens all of our’s existence, but the elderly are more aware of it – mostly for social and cultural reasons. Now, none of us are deluded enough to actually think we’re not going to die. However, as Ernest Becker points out:
we have 2 ideas of the self: the physical and the symbolic.
In my opinion, our rationality only extends as far as the physical self. We are preoccupied with ways to immortalise our symbolic self. As per the “Mahabharata”:
“The most wondrous thing in the world is that although every day innumerable creatures go to the abode of death, still man thinks that he is immortal”.
Salvador Dali: Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937. Dali had an interest in psychiatry
The recent debate that followed my discussion of the role of validation in our self-esteem sparked some follow on thoughts. In short, it showed that people with narcissistic tendencies experience much emptiness or even self-hatred – and validation is used to take the edge off. However, as all creatures who make choices, people with narcissistic tendencies are subject to avoiding pain and seeking pleasure (thank you, Dr. Freud). Clearly, they find narcissism more tolerable that the alternative. How could this be?
What if those who crave validation to feel good about themselves chose to be this way because the alternative – knowing that one is inherently valuable, without any validation – makes the thought of inevitable death absolutely intolerable? If one feels that they’re not that valuable, dying isn’t quite as scary or tragic.
Realising that a person is valuable, getting attached and then letting go is much harder than never getting attached – in this case to your self, as is the case with death. This devaluation allows people to cope with the fear of death. At the same time, the person with narcissistic tendencies maintains the upside of being able to work on “their immortality projects”, like winning medals and getting promotions. This is just a hypothesis of mine. I understand that I have no idea what Steve Jobs was really like. A lot of people say that he was an obnoxious narcissist. He said this, which happens to be congruent with my hypothesis:
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
There are other psychologically sneaky ways that we deal with the fear of death that have stood the test of time (well, since 1974 or so when “Denial of Death” was published):
Becker argues that everything we do: writing books, starting businesses, having children are all ways to transcend – and not have to deal with – death.
It makes sense too: the thought that everything one ever does will disappear into oblivion is so hard to accept that in order to keep going we find ways to defy death’s erasure of our existence by leaving a legacy.
One’s own death is hard to imagine. It is as if we believe we will still be alive on some level after we die, but unable to act on our dreams and stuck reminiscing of the time we were alive and lamenting we didn’t do more.
If leaving a legacy isn’t an option, then one can choose to believe in the afterlife to help themselves cope with the concept death.
Paradoxically, dying may be a way to transcend death. Physical death could be a route to symbolic immortality. Just think of war heroes.
...what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…
Constant reminders of death were common all throughout the last millennium: having a skull on one’s desk was kind of like having sticky notes or an extra mouse. An experiment where people were asked to write about death before they were asked about their country’s war efforts showed that thinking of death made people more enthusiastic about war -as it adds meaning, purpose, a sense of belonging, a feeling of impact…
The purpose of my reflection isn’t to say we shouldn’t fear death, and it will all be fine. It is more of an inquiry into what behaviours of ours are motivated by the fundamental, underlying fear, which so far appears to be that of death. However,…
It’s not death we fear, it is not having an impact
Is it really death we fear? I think a better way of putting it is that we fear that we’re inconsequential, insignificant, that we made no difference through our existence.
For those who insist that it is a fear of death: it’s that of the symbolic self. For those who insist that our biggest fear is to not be loved: to have someone love one is probably the biggest impact one can have on another human being. Perhaps, it is the ultimate, or the one that really count. I am not sure. However, my point remains: it is about impact.
It could just be a millennial’s take on it. With a lesser role of traditional religion in today’s society, millennials have the unfulfilled need for meaning – and have a habit of finding it in the most peculiar places.
My recent discussion of meaning according to Nietzsche prompted many to comment that the fact that we die and that the universe will ultimately end (something to do with the Sun and physics) implies that there could be no meaning in our lives. I don’t follow this argument. To me, it is like saying there’s no point in eating because you’ll get hungry again. Clearly though,
for a lot of people death is the ultimate enemy in a game rigged against them.
I used the word impact above for a reason. I could have said consequence or meaning, but something stopped me. Both of those words are overused and call to mind all kinds of associations. Furthermore, I thought of animals. They are driven largely by the same evolutionary forces as we are, and I think we overestimate the extent to which animals are different. They may not have insight, but they are a reflection at least of how nature intended things. To illustrate, I will use an example I recall from watching a BBC documentary on giraffes. Two massive male giraffes were fighting for a female. How on earth do giraffes fight, I hear you ask. Well, they violently swing their entire necks to strike. The force of the swing is enough to shatter their skulls. The battle went on to the point of near death… for the sake of a female. The giraffes decided/were driven by nature to go that far just to reproduce – so death is less important than an opportunity to have impact, which, for giraffes I think is reasonable to assume, is to have progeny.
I don’t think that the fear of not having an impact is the same as the fear of failure. One can fail, but still achieve a lot and have an impact. Failure is defined in terms of a percentage of the way to realising a dream. Impact, or lack thereof, is much more real.
I feel that a human being on their death bed is likely to think of what impact they have had, not where they ranked compared to their dream.
Salvador Dali: The Elephants, 1948. Not quite giraffes, but close enough
On the bright side…
There is a “cure” for fear of choice
Going back to my own ENTP-torment of being more interested in talking about choices rather than actually making them, I am looking for some kind of resolution. N. N. Taleb, a favourite writer of mine, is popularising the concept of optionality. He argues that having options is a great thing:
Optionality is the property of asymmetric upside (preferably unlimited) with correspondingly limited downside (preferably tiny).
It’s not really a way to get out of making choices. Instead, it is a way to do what you were going to do anyway, but leaving cheap enough nets here and there to see if one day something nice washes up in one of them such that covers the cost of having had the nets n times over.
He argues against specialisation (i.e. going down too far in the decision tree of choices or going down to the end of just one branch). We are all familiar with specialisation success stories. The Nobel Prize goes to the person who studied a particular enzyme for 30 years. The startup that solves a specific problem in one particular niche is the one that does well. Kim Kardashian has one thing going for her, and she’s taken over the world…
Taleb reminds us that there are cemeteries of specialised ventures and people. Just because the successes that make into the media are specialised, doesn’t mean all of them are. Specialisation comes from the propensity to make choices. It is not the only way to achieve something. Hence, it is possible that the act of making choices is overvalued.
Richard Branson has over 400 companies. Is it because he is greedy – or perhaps because he understands that specialisation is a dangerous game to play? Venture capitalists and angel investors back things in a non-specialised way. All financial investors do. It may look like it is specialised on the surface, but it really isn’t. Biotech, or robotics, isn’t a specialisation. These are incredibly broad fields. It’s like saying blogging is a specialisation. Investors take directional bets once is a while, i.e. ones that really require a choice, but they do so in a way that for every 1 euro they invest, they stand to gain 10, and only invest a tiny fraction of their euros into these schemes. This is exactly congruent with Taleb’s definition of optionality.
I have fabulously rationalised away the pressure to make choices here. However, the real work is in putting oneself into situations where optionality can be exercised.
The older I get, the more I realise that there’s quite a lot of engineering involved in all of this. It’s not so much about going after specific visions, but creating situations where visions can flourish – and ultimately have an impact.
Maybe, the millennial/Gen Y variety of man (and woman) are a bit different…
As part of my Christmas escape from routine, I’ve been trying to read more. After the off-putting Ego is the Enemyand the chilling American Tragedy , I stumbled upon an interview with Simon Sinek. He talks about how millennials are difficult to deal with in the workplace and attempts to explain how this is a product of our upbringing in a cautious non-accusatory manner. It’s kind of fun to watch because the set up is clearly intended for dialogue, whereas Sinek goes off into a suspiciously well-structured 15 minute TED talk while the poor host nods along.
Sinek says millennials are accused of being entitled, narcissistic, unfocused and lazy.
He remarks on the fact that corporate purpose and bean bags aren’t cutting it. He talks about the reasons. According to him, there are four.
1. Parenting
According to Sinek, millenials have been subject to “failed parenting strategies”.
Sinek postulates that millennials were repeatedly told that we could have anything we wanted and that we are special.
I guess our parents belong to the generation when toxic compulsive positive thinking really took off, so that would make sense. “Just wish for it – and it’s yours”.
Sinek argues that we got into honours classes not because we accomplished enough, but because our parents complained.
I am not so sure about this mammy getting us things. If anything, if I had been born 20 years before, my mammy would have had an easier time calling in favours and getting me into a position I didn’t deserve. This is just an impression too, but to me, the world seems more equalised and transparent – at least in education, in Europe.
The underlying premise of Sinek’s argument is that millennials are different due to these 4 causes, but he doesn’t really provide any evidence to say that, beyond the obvious, these reasons are unique to our generation – and thus their explanatory power is questionable.
He argues that participation medals (8th best…) corrupted us. When millennials meet with reality, where coming in 8th doesn’t bring all that validation it did before and mammy can’t get us a promotion, we immediately question our specialness, feel we’re inferior and blame ourselves.
I do recall moving from Moscow to Dublin (for the n-time by in my teens), after not having really lived there for 2 or 3 years, which on that scale is forever, finding that
1. Maths is a dark art to most people
2. Everyone has a medal in something.
At that point, I had barely ever won anything. I recall talking to my dad and wondering how these mildly impressive people were top this and top that. I even talked to my classmate about the dissonance. My dad explained the reality of the differing attitudes in education:
in the West, medals are used for encouragement, and they don’t mean the same thing or serve the same function as the medals of my former Russian prodigy classmates.
My friend took a different approach – together with our other friends, she gave me a little trophy that said “Official Trophy Girl” and my name. That was my first trophy. Sinek clearly knows what he’s talking about.
2.Technology
Sinek’s argument is that our Instagram-filtered highlight reel lives raise the standard to the point that unless you are exactly perfect, know exactly what you are talking about, you shouldn’t talk. So when we do talk, we come to out uber-experienced boss and lecture him or her on how it’s done (while having no clue and even less insight). The 2 factors above work against out self-esteem according to Sinek.
Instagram and other social media are very naturally selecting.
I would argue that whatever harm is done through participation medals, it is probably shaken out of us by the cold reality that our ramens need to be quite good before people start liking and replaying them.
He explains how technology is addictive and introduces dopamine. He makes the grotesque comparison of alcohol and social media. Sinek states that the relationships we form are superficial and we’ve no coping mechanisms other than a dopamine hit from the likes on Facebook. He makes a very sweeping assumption that almost everyone is addicted to social media.
Yes, possibly.
However, weren’t there other ways to get hooked on dopamine before? It doesn’t have to be alcohol. Has he heard of Dungeons & Dragons? Maybe, Counterstrike? Back to back episodes of Sabrina on Nickelodeon?
Here, his argument is quite weak . There’s nothing to say that we are more addicted with poor coping skills – compared to any other generation.
3. Impatience
We live in a world of instant gratification: Amazon next day delivery, Netflix binges, Tinder dates: “swipe right – I’m a stud”. He argues that the meaningful things (confidence, impact, etc) are slow and meandering.
Again, all of this is true. But was it ever any different? Obviously, it wasn’t Amazon-related, but there were other ways to get instant gratification. For example, fast food is all about instant gratification – and millennials don’t really binge on that at least. Perhaps, impatience is just part of being young. This quote attributed to Socrates reveals so much about the timelessness of the nature of youth:
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
4. Environment
Sinek says that the corporate environment takes more interest in the numbers rather than the personal development of their employees.
First, that’s normal.
Corporations owe it to their shareholders, not their employees – that’s the premise of capitalism.
Yes, there is CSR, etc, but they are very much at the margins of corporate life. In fact, there’s nothing necessarily evil about the financial purpose, as at least in theory financial gain is a reflection of the usefulness of something to society – albeit through the prism of a supply and demand intersection.
However, it’s not the act, it’s the cover up. The fact that corporations so often come out with unfalsifiable statements that seem to want to please everyone and stand for nothing as their “values” and “purpose” is really off-putting. Working there makes one feel like a low-ranking accomplice of a gargantuan fraud – without even the freedom to admit it.
The thing that is actually going on here is that the entitled whiney millennials “ruin everything” are specifically the corporate office workers. In generations that came before, fewer people worked in offices of big corporations. Now that there are sufficient numbers of young corporate workers, the generalisation has been spread to millennials as a whole.
In these large corporate institutions, millennials don’t know their boss. Their actual boss is a hedge fund who owns the shares. The person they call their boss is just a slightly more senior employee, who has 10% more of an idea why they’re doing what they’re doing than the poor millennial. There’s no actual real work to do. Going around with balloons for people’s birthdays and making presentations – even pulling all nighters while at it – makes people feel unfulfilled and trapped. There’s no genuine purpose beyond the obvious financial one. That’s the clincher. Justin Bieber knew what to sell to his audience [his recent tour was called Purpose].
I suspect that millennials who are out there chopping wood aren’t as morally dissatisfied as the corporate office worker millennials. Now that wood is chopped, but that presentation you made is probably never going to make any difference – to anyone, anywhere, ever. And you worked so hard to make it into that position – good grades, college, years of delaying gratification – only to end up making dead presentations. You were promised that you would be making an impact. Yeah.
Second, Sinek also assumes that it is the responsibility of a corporation to develop and help the personal growth of employees – which is a bit too invasively brave new world for me. Certainly, my experience of corporate life was that acting like everyone else and generally participating in group think was part of the job. There wasn’t the group of nerds to rescue me this time.
There’s no real mobility and or even a promise of real success in corporate life. So no wonder we’re out there – overeducated and whinging about issues other people feel are outlandish. Bob Geldof’s recent soundbite about transgender bathrooms is an example. My points isn’t about LGBT.
My point is that you can laugh all you want, but transgender bathrooms give people something they can fight for that is meaningful to them – as it makes people feel significant, makes them feel they made a difference and belong to a group. This is what’s actually missing for millennials.
This phenomenon occurs where religion plays a minor role in one’s upbringing, as was the case with millennials.
Young people who lack a purpose and a sense of belonging can very easily be swayed by politicians into things like violent nationalism.
We’re seeing something in that vein in the recent political developments.
Another threat comes fro the fact that millennials seem to glorify working in corporations – especially if they are tech-related like Google or Facebook, because for years we were taught that that’s the best work there is.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but for some of us the veneer of corporate glamour is stopping us from making honest assessments. Remember, “if it’s repeated – it’s true“; that’s just the human brain.
I wonder if it was different for other generations. Yes, corporate office work wasn’t as big a phenomenon, but how did people get through it without complaining as much as the millennials? Maybe, it was quite a prestigious thing in and of itself – providing the feeling of being special. Now it’s pretty standard. A long time ago GS Elevator came out with a tweet that there aren’t many jobs out there for which you actually need a degree. Cynical as this tweet is, the first year of a corporate graduate programme is likely to confirm that assertion. Getting the most educated, most competitive people and putting them into that environment is a shock to them. Perhaps this didn’t apply for the generations above us who enjoyed their careers more than the millennials as there were fewer people with degrees.
It is also quite possible that it was all the same for previous generations – and their parents also told them that they were lazy, entitled and all the things millennials are hearing. It’s simply their turn to complain.
On the bright side, it has become cool in our generation to be an entrepreneur. While the seasoned entrepreneurs go on about how this romanticised view of building businesses is toxic, I feel it is good to encourage non-bet-the-farm entrepreneurship at least. Or even freelance. It is creative, it has as much purpose as one wants and it is both self- and socially-serving.
Most of all, millennials, myself included, should remember that there’s no use in waiting for someone to come along and give us this magical real purpose we so crave. It is up to us to make our own purpose.
*If none of this makes sense – and you happen to like video games, try Stanley’s Parable. Whoever made the game must be the great-grandchild of Descates and Huxley’s first cousin. They understand corporate life better than those who created it.
Small business entrepreneurship is a tough game, especially if you are being yourself and trying to create something that is genuinely of value to other people, not reselling iPhone covers or slimming pills.
One of the reasons it’s tough for me is that I don’t come from an environment where there are lot of entrepreneurs. In fact, it is kind of daunting that I am veering from the expected path. The internet is great in that it helps to find a lot of people, but it requires a lot of work to find the really great people.
One day quite a long time ago I came across a lovely lady who is super genuine. She has become somewhat of a role model. Her credo is relentless transparency. Sounds a bit like Ray Dalio’s radical transparency – and it’s as good through in an entirely different context. Her name is Jessi Kneeland.
She was then a fabulous fitness coach who showed the exact right techniques for the plank etc – I found her during my own HIIT love affair. She really stood out as she talked about fitness in the context of women’s lives. It seems that fitness is just one method for someone to work on their context – which seems to be what really interests Jessi. It seems like she’d been contemplating this risky yet perfectly brave and – in my opinion – right transition: she is going into being a coach who advises women digging way beyond the surface in issues like body image, anxiety, etc. She, in keeping with her transparency framework, is super honest about her own life. She shares her own lessons and stories rather than giving people a 7-step plan to unadulterated happiness for $99. Reading to her emails is a bit like reading a novel, only it’s real. It also lacks the sickening “think positively” aspect that many people in that space shovel. The fact that it is so uniquely female scared me at first, I steer clear of the man-hating vibe, but there’s none of that with Jessi. To anyone reading, male or female, have a look at Jessi’s Instagram or better yet join her email list to understand some of the problems women deal with but don’t usually talk about.
In a broader context, I think Jessi’s success can largely be put down to the way she uniquely combined hardcore fitness with a vulnerable but brilliantly feisty honest female vibe. I imagine it was super scary for her to open up that way to people on the internet. She’s the only person I’ve ever come across online who talks about the ugly stuff without being anonymous or distancing herself from it. Even her photos. I wonder if she’d ever thought: “What if my old English teacher finds this picture of me doing the warrior pose in a unflattering light that accentuates my cellulite?” These kind of thoughts bother me a lot – not that I am in this space, but the logic remains. The landing page of MailChimp currently says: “Being yourself makes all the difference.” It’s certainly the case with Jessi. She’s a real asset to the online world. I admire her bravery a lot and can’t recommend her enough.
There are of course ways of being an entrepreneur without making it so personal. However, the fact that being yourself is so valuable gives the rest of the community the confidence we sometimes really need.
Only about 40% of the world’s population have an internet connection today. The largest group are the Chinese with 0.72 bn users, but only 52% penetrance (i.e. only 52% of the Chinese population have access to the internet). With that, certain services are off-limits to ordinary Chinese people. The countries with the highest penetrance include rich European countries such as Iceland and Denmark (it’s cold and dark outside – so no wonder). Interestingly, the English speaking world – US, UK, Australia and so on – hover around 80-90%. This means, in Ireland for example, 1 in 5 people aren’t online. I find that hard to believe. [Source: Internet Live Stats]
As the internet becomes cheaper and more accessible, we are likely to see large influxes of users from India and China. With a population in India of nearly 1.4 bn the penetrance is only 35%. Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan also have huge populations with relatively low penetrance.
While it would seem obvious that there is a huge part of the internet that I have never seen, I wonder what way the online world will change as more people join. Without any judgement on whether it is good or bad, the internet that I know is dominated by white English speaking people. I am also familiar with the Russian province of the web – it is much like the English one, only in Russian. They also lack certain services, such as eBay, etc. However, they replaced it with their own homegrown analogues.
The Economist recently said that for those who spend a lot of time in both China and the West, using online services from the West in like going back in time. WeChat is something else apparently. Musically is another Chinese creation and has taken the West by storm.
I wonder what the internet will be like in 10 years. I think there will be even more video – including through VR. My cousin recently came back from holidays and instead of showing me photos – showed me a bunch of 360 video clips. Video is taking over the world. In my own experience of Facebook advertising, the cost of a video ad versus a text ad is out by at least a factor of magnitude. I think that the West will lose some of it’s domination over the internet. If the next Facebook is from somewhere like Shanghai, it’ll be very interesting. It sounds silly, but the only thing that has really taken over the West that isn’t Western is Pokemon – at least in my echo chamber. The fact that it is so popular is a net gain for all of us. It carries with it a culture and a philosophy that’s a bit different. We’re a smaller population than India and China, so our network effect isn’t as strong. Having said that, there is not only freedom of speech – but freedom of what we choose to hear on the internet. A great example of this was seeing the reaction of those who though that Brexit and Trump were impossible. While the internet does result in what Taleb called a monoculture, it still allows for resonant echo chambers. Good or bad, they are a natural way to segment the internet. Probably though, more internet will mean more globalisation.
There will come a point when the internet will be replaced by something related, a bit like home phones and TVs were replaced by smartphones and social media. I wonder what way VR will come into our lives. Perhaps, I will be sitting in a set of slick glasses walking around a virtual Prado as my driverless car is going… Actually, I wonder where it will be going if I can get anywhere through VR and drones can deliver everything else to me.
Fear of failure comes in many different guises. For me, it is mostly the fear of being left all alone – abandoned, rejected, etc. I feel that most of my friends are conservative – not politically, but just in a first principles way – this is how we do things, and that’s it. For example, you can believe in all kinds of liberal values and still be set in your ways. True open-mindedness is incredibly rare.
It’s especially difficult to be creative when you have a lot of fear – especially fear that your work will be judged. Creativity only blossoms when we’re not in immediate danger. Fearing for one’s sense of self may as well be danger. I now understand why creatives get depressed reading comments. A thousand positive comments can be spoilt by one negative one.
I can’t even remember where I heard this, but someone has a rule: if this person – who just rejected me – isn’t going to cry at my funeral, their opinion doesn’t matter.
In a world interconnected by the internet and propagated so strongly by social validation, it is especially tough to constantly remind oneself to not care of what other’s think. I wonder if we would have ever known about people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer if they did their work in an environment such as today’s. It is hard not to be tempted pander to the crowd when social media allows one to reach a wide audience through certain tricks with timing, the right content format (e.g. video seems to be taking over the world in 2016), etc.
I also have a fear of someone I know from ages ago googling me – and finding, well, I don’t know, this. With a name like mine, it’ll be a tough job telling them it’s some other woman, God only know who she is… And that they will think that this is nonsense. That this isn’t what I should be doing. Maybe my millennial hopping from area to area isn’t at all bad – I just feel that it is because I fear being judged. By who though?
There are two types of people: those who create and those who comment. Being yourself requires so much bravery. At the same time, what is the point of living if you’re not going to be yourself. If my friends aren’t going to like what I make, I will find a way to make friends with the people who do.
A millennial's musings 