Design Your Work

I started reading sci-fi to pass the time.

I continued because I noticed that
it gave me something: a stronger imagination, a disrespect for
the merely possible.

different ideas, ideas you can’t find by
reading the same TechCrunch articles, Medium posts, and
Hacker News digests as everyone else in Silicon Valley.

Settlements on the outer
planets, separated by millions of miles and hours of transmission
time, will start to develop their own dialects, their own slang,
their own music, their own trends.

Next will be political and economic drift.

They will demand a
government that represents their interests. With the distances
involved, we will be able to put down the first few rebellions, but
it is only a matter of time before they break away.

Economic integration will expand, but far slower than our speed
of colonization and exploration. By the time we are able to fully
integrate these colonies into our economy, they will long have
developed self-sufficient economic systems.

Finally, we will begin to see genetic drift.

The first reason is time dilation,

The second reason is the immense distances involved in
interstellar space travel. It is likely that the first to embark on an
interstellar voyage will not be the first to arrive — as they are in
transit, new technology will be developed allowing later
expeditions to overtake them.

A third reason is technology differentials.

Two systems with slightly different speeds of
technological development will find a huge gap
between them after a few decades or centuries. Their
societies may be so fundamentally different that
communication and exchange between them is difficult.

Technology sent to distant systems will be obsolete by
the time it gets there.

This will make trade based on
anything but raw materials extremely difficult.

War across vast distances will be futile, because any
attack force sent at sub-light speeds will be obsolete by
the time it arrives.

this could also mean a never-
ending war that no side can win,

imagine an ant
observing the behavior of a human. From the ant’s point of view,
the human doesn’t spend its time “solving hard ant-centric
problems.” Virtually nothing the human does is remotely
comprehensible, nor even observable, since the scale and
complexity of the human’s simplest action is far beyond the ant’s
conception. From what it can observe, I think the word this ant
would most likely use to describe the human is “weird.”

And this is how we will describe the actions and thinking of
super-human AI.

technology will slowly disappear.

shrinking its form even as it expands its
function.

its ultimate purpose is to work itself out of a
job — to finally outgrow its need for constant maintenance and
troubleshooting

the ultimate destiny of mankind is some form of collective
consciousness.

We
seem to regard the hive or swarm as the antithesis of everything
we represent as humans.

We crave connection like the air we breathe, and yet
vulnerability feels like a nearly existential threat.

what we need to be happy, regardless of
time, culture, age, or personality — intimate social relationships.

relationships
involve likely short-term risks and uncertain long-term rewards.

Collective consciousness is both our greatest hope, and our
greatest fear. Maybe the hardest part about creating a “human-
like” intelligence won’t be that we’re so smart, but that we’re so
confusing.

It describes a loose process of using the common elements of
sci-fi stories to conceive and test the implications of new
technologies.

uses fiction to explore the potential experience of
new technologies.

a rule of
thumb he uses to estimate how long something will be around:
the longer it’s been around, the longer it’s likely to remain.

When I look at successful people, I notice again and again that it
is this — the ability to systematically capture and review and
deploy their ideas, further strengthening their creative self-
esteem, leading them to value and generate more ideas, and so
on in a virtuous loop — that really sets them apart. Not the
original quantity or quality of ideas, not their brilliance from
birth, not luck.

The best of the best use organizational systems as a means to a
very worthy end: to create rapid, self-reinforcing learning and
feedback loops aimed in the direction of their goals.

we think of habits in
isolation.

This is typically Western of us, preferring analysis (breaking
apart) over synthesis (putting together) and understanding the
world in terms of modular mechanisms instead of holistic
organisms.

You can build a few habits using the
“highly targeted, analytical, structured” approach, but as soon as
you try to scale you run into plummeting and then negative
returns.

when I really ask myself “Why didn’t I have a
healthy lunch today?”, it usually isn’t a faulty trigger, a lackluster

reward, or flaws in any of the dozen supporting strategies I’ve
researched and taught.

It’s usually because I didn’t have a filling, healthy breakfast. And
that was because I didn’t get up early enough. And that was
because I went to bed late. And that was because I worked late,
because I didn’t get enough done that day, because I didn’t have
enough energy, because…I didn’t have a healthy lunch.

“Because I didn’t
do other habits.”

Each habit seems to loop back onto itself, influencing and being
influenced by many other habits

If it was a simple loop then this would be a simple problem, just
a matter of snapping the vicious cycle into a virtuous one. Classic
strategies like “Don’t break the chain” and “Never miss two days
in a row” attempt to do exactly that.

But it’s not a simple loop. It’s a network.

When a critical fraction of nodes [or habits] is removed
the network becomes fragmented into small,
disconnected clusters.

your habits are grouped
into “clusters” based on time of day, location, or interactions with
other people?

One cluster can fail without affecting the others.

This phenomenon is called percolation and it represents
an order-disorder type of phase transition with
critical exponents

Dependencies may lead to cascading failures… and a
relatively small failure can lead to a catastrophic
breakdown of the system

As long as we continue to think about habits in terms of simple,
linear relationships instead of networks, we will continue to
underestimate the difficulty of behavior change, be blindsided
by complexity, and miss out on the powerful tools network
theory puts at our disposal.

The first question I wanted to answer was:
“What are the most important habits in my life?

Network theory uses various measures of “centrality” to identify
which nodes are the most “important,”

Does [habit A] directly and unequivocally make [habit B] more likely
to happen?

I worded this question in black-and-white terms because I
wanted to avoid subtle, global effects

I was looking for direct, unquestionable
influences.

Imagine a future where we could map the topology of a
person’s habits

Instead of starting with moralizing sermons and arriving at one-
size-fits-all programs, with barely a word needed or wanted from
the “subject,” behavior change would instead be about finding
the intersection points between this unique and varied topology,
and the best research and tools available.

imagine if we could create an app that, with some
relatively simple inputs, could map your habits. It could tell you
exactly which habits were the most important, the ones you
should focus your willpower and planning on. You would know
which habits you could strategically retreat from when life got

crazy, and even if a keystone habit failed, you could have
contingency plans in place to limit the damage.

If you wanted to change something about your life, this app
could tell you not only which habit would be most likely to have
the desired effect, but how and where this habit would fit into
your existing landscape. It could give you strategies that have
worked for other people with similar habit graphs. If you wanted
to eliminate a bad habit, it could suggest ways of destabilizing
the supporting network around it, instead of attempting a
frontal attack in isolation.

“touch each email only once.”

this level of simplicity is
the ultimate sophistication — only a well-designed underlying

system can make such elegant action possible.

that subtle shades of
subjective consciousness are the only irreducible, indivisible
things in the universe — the quarks out of which souls and
narratives are built.

Productivity as we know it is based on delayed
gratification, which described a world that was predictable and
structured. It was clear what you had to do and in what order —
it was just a matter of scheduling and pain tolerance.

delayed gratification is obsolete in a world dominated by VUCA
(volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), because the
pain you’re pulling into the present might not even be necessary,
and the gratification you’re pushing into the future might never
materialize. It is not at all clear what must be done and in what
order; in fact, it becomes ever more clear that most of the tasks
we execute don’t make much of a difference, while a tiny
percentage randomly and dramatically influence the course of
our work and our lives. It makes sense to invest more and more
resources in making that distinction, because the absolute
fastest way to complete a task or reach an objective is to realize
you don’t have to.

As the number of things we have to know and do to achieve that
traditional level of security has exploded, a new generation
of process-first productivity frameworks has emerged with step-
by-step flowcharts and diagrams to help us decide between
them.

These frameworks sidestep questions like “What COULD I
do?” and “What SHOULD I do?” in favor of a much more
tractable, interim one: “What CAN I do?”

I
do?” and “What SHOULD I do?” in favor of a much more
tractable, interim one: “What CAN I do?” This is most clearly

GTD concept of “contexts.”

But access to tools, locations, and people is no longer the
primary constraint in doing valuable work. Nor do “energy levels”
come close to capturing the subtleties of human motivation. I
believe we’re entering a new era: Mood-First Productivity. States
of mind, or more colloquially, moods,

This leads us to a definition for “state of mind”:
difficult or expensive to reproduce (in contrast to simple
emotions)
illegible and more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts (in contrast
to cause-and-effect habits)
primarily somatic and affective, not intellectual (in
contrast to belief systems or worldviews)
temporary and ephemeral (in contrast to mindsets or
attitudes)

A given state of mind is difficult to reproduce even for someone
who’s experienced it in the past, often requiring elaborate rituals
or particular experiences (or drugs). They often elude those who
seek them for purely instrumental ends.

states
of mind, unlike productivity frameworks and business models,
are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to imitate.

Cultural
states of mind powerfully resist measurement and analysis,
because they flow through the little understood channels of the
human subconscious.

States of mind drastically influence the amount of energy it takes
to complete a given task, which gives them leverage.

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the first stage in reaching that
“state of flow” we all crave is actually struggle. You cannot reach
the state of “optimal experience”

without that initial feeling of anxiety and
fidgetiness.

This is the true toll of constant interruptions: with
each distraction you stop and start the process again and again,
never quite getting past the struggle stage

the long-term path to GTD Mastery: “…optimally taking advantage
of self-created contexts and triggers to produce creative ideas,
perspectives, and actions that wouldn’t normally occur.” What is a
“self-created context” if not a purposefully created state of mind?

“In performance training, first we learn to flow with whatever comes.
Then we learn to use whatever comes to our advantage. Finally, we
learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own
earthquakes, so our mental process feeds itself explosive
inspirations without the need for outside stimulus.”

“feeds itself.”

moment of creative breakthrough is almost always driven by a
mysterious internal process variously called the Muse, the
Resistance, and the Gift. Only internal feedback loops can reach
the speed and internal coherence necessary for the act of
synthesis.

unusually
creative people are characterized by “their ability to mix
seemingly incompatible states of being depending on the task,

controversial beliefs: that in the
near future companies will offer their employees a full range of
psychotherapeutic, psychosomatic bodywork, cognitive
behavioral therapy, and related services as a means to
expanding their emotional engagement and enhancing their
performance.

Psychological Capital
(PsyCap) seeks to “evaluate the overall resourceful state of
workers” in terms of self-efficacy, optimism, resilience, and hope

— this is the right idea, but I think these are better described as

ephemeral states of mind, not some sort of commoditized
resource.

The more states you have
access to, and the better you are at juggling them from situation
to situation, the more you will be able to leverage intellectual
knowledge with more-difficult-to-Google tacit knowledge.

how misfortunes, undesired circumstances, and
mid-life crises can become the seeds of great strengths: people
avoid these things so aggressively that the states of mind they
impart are rare, and valuable.

I’ve left behind the beliefs but
fortunately retained access to the state of mind.

every state of mind is highly
adapted to a specific context, like a specialized tool.

we are
actually different selves across time, and reaching our goals
requires getting them to cooperate.

The main difference
between these selves is not information content.

states of mind

requirements for any group of independent “agents” to reach a
goal.

Alignment: getting the selves to push in the same
direction, so they’re not fighting against each other
Specialization: getting the selves to complement each
others’ efforts by focusing on the activities they are best
suited for
Workflow: getting the selves to hand off tasks to each
other efficiently, so they can be completed in stages
over time
Aggregation: the assembly of the previous results into a
final product

If we consider that our numerous selves have very different
priorities, Alignment of their actions becomes more important,

and harder. Instead of forcing all of them — past, present, and
future — to line up with an unchanging predetermined outcome
(a “mission” or “purpose”), it makes more sense to start with what
excites your current self right now, and then work from there to
define that motivation in increasingly subtle shades over time.

The more precise your understanding of what exactly excites you
about any particular project, the better your ability to generalize
it to other projects and topics

Assuming these numerous selves have different skills, it makes
sense for them to Specialize.

matching each self to the right task.

There are
two basic ways of doing this: learning how to change your mood
to match the task at hand, and to change the task at hand to
match your mood. Both are useful under different circumstances.

Changing your mood to match the task is the realm of self-talk

and environmental cues,

Changing the task to
match your mood is the goal of distributed, self-organizing tools
like kanban boards and ticketing systems,

each person
works on whatever matches their skills and state of mind at that
moment. Personal kanban boards are an example of applying
these tools to a team of selves,

Because these different selves show up rather unpredictably at
different times, a Workflow is required to coordinate their
actions across time.

“There is no need
to plan when a particular agent should execute a particular
task, as long as enough agents are available so that a sufficiently
skilled one is ready to take over soon after the previous task is
finished.”

This requirement is the real motive for an iterative
summarization approach to note-taking

when the creative
mood appears, I want to be able to integrate as many sources as
possible before that temporary state of mind passes

the true purpose of note-taking is transporting
states of mind (not just information) through time. This is why
pictures, sketches, and diagrams often work better than text. We
don’t usually think of them as notes, but songs, smells, and tastes
work even better.

the only way to
crystallize a state of mind is to use affective triggers to decide
what to take notes on and keep. Instead of making a mini-outline
of each book and article and podcast you consume, trying to
preserve the logical structure of the argument, just wait in low-
power mode for reactions like surprise, delight, intrigue, and
outrage.

This System 1 processing is much faster, less energy
intensive, and more intuitive than the more analytical System 2.

your notes will not be neat and
ordered,

They will be
dominated by the contrarian, by paradoxes, by the inexplicable.
Which is exactly the point. Contrarianism is the fastest method
for discovering the paradox at the heart of every inexplicable
phenomenon.

Aggregation is necessary to turn all these diverse efforts into a
final product. Having access to more diverse states of mind
allows you to create more diverse definitions of success

flowing with whatever
comes.

using whatever comes to your advantage.

multifinality. Whereas multitasking
refers to seeking multiple outputs from multiple simultaneous
inputs, and is impossible, multifinality refers to attaining
alternative objectives from the same inputs,

multifinality
doesn’t take more time or resources or effort — just a more
diverse set of lenses to see that any action can have multiple non-
exclusive outcomes.

States of
mind are a better guide to modern work than values (which don’t
always motivate), goals (which often change), and processes
(which try to prescribe the unprescribable) precisely because
moods are the only things that change just as fast as the world
around us.

vulnerability — “the willingness to show up and be seen when
you have zero control over the outcome “ — underlies all acts of
real courage.

“People say that what we’re all
seeking is a meaning for life,…[but] I think that what we’re
seeking is an experience of life, so that our life experiences on the
purely physical plane will have resonances with our own
innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture
of being alive.”

“It took me four years to paint like
Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” You could say that his
work was a technology of forgetting. It’s encouraging to realize
that many of the states of mind we seek are not “out there”

They are states
of mind belonging to our past selves — we wouldn’t crave it if we
had never experienced it.

Your future lies in your past. Learning is forgetting. We’re getting
close to a paradox here — a promising sign.

The history of employment can be summarized as “companies vs.
employees.”

This tug-of-war was always viewed as zero sum: any gain by labor
was, by definition, a loss for management and shareholders, and
vice versa.

“Employees work just enough to not be fired, and
employers pay them just enough to not quit.”

The interests of employees and
employers are fundamentally opposed.
This tension was resolved until recently by making the work itself
a common ground:

The only goal the company and the employee had in common
was getting the work done. This mutual interest allowed them to
call an uneasy truce, temporarily setting aside their differences in
the pursuit of profit.

employees agreed to give up most of the
upside of their work

in return for
protection from the downsides,

With the work itself as the overriding priority, employees are
encouraged to leave most of themselves at home. Their health,
their hobbies, their relationships, their mental and emotional
wellbeing

Unfortunately, these are the very things from which creativity
springs.

And this cuts both ways. Employees are encouraged to see the
relationship as transactional, so they do, ignoring anything that
isn’t explicitly in their job description: contributing to a healthy
culture, cross-functional responsibilities, mentorship and
leadership, long-term strategy. Unfortunately, these are the very
things that long-term company survival depends on.

Paradoxically, making work the dominant priority leads to both
parties ignoring the very intangibles that make work possible and
profitable in the first place. Our fixation on the tangible output to
the exclusion of all else starves the ecosystem that gives rise to
truly novel ideas,

the current generation of utopian workspaces is even
more dystopian than the previous one: now what companies
want is not just your labor, but the very essence of what makes
you human — your imagination, your dreams, your dynamism,
your spirit.

The only way forward is to revisit the core assumption that
underlies it all. To renegotiate the contract

What if, instead, we chose to believe that the interests of
employees and employers were naturally aligned?

make the business
a platform for each person to reach their individual goals,
harnessing that source of energy to reach the business’ goals as a
byproduct.

switch the right-hand side of the
equation: instead of work being the common ground between
companies and employees, employees must be seen as the
common ground between companies and work.

companies don’t have a
purpose; they aren’t innovative; they don’t even exist — people do.

The purpose of companies is to build a culture that supports
their people.

Not to formulate a 5-year plan and dictate every
last task to every person. Not to codify an abstract Mission and
ram it down everyone’s throats. And definitely not to force
everyone to “be creative,” as if creativity is programmable like a
computer.

The job of employees is to use that culture as a platform to
perform their work as productively and creatively as possible.

A supportive culture (with just an edge of competition) allows for
the learning, risk-taking, and experimentation that are necessary
for meaningful advancements in actual, day-to-day productivity.

Each contribution comes full circle. We’re not investing in culture
and productivity just for fun, after all:

The purpose of the work is to serve as a vehicle for learning
and personal growth for each employee, however they define
it.

Work is a constant source of new challenges to feed
people’s hunger for learning

Work provides a stream of opportunities for people to
inject their creativity and judgment into the process
(self-expression), resulting in a greater sense of
accomplishment (self-affirmation)

Work provides a forum for visible accomplishments,
critical for social learning, status, and prestige.

Work can provide the freedom to make decisions and
prove one’s self-sufficiency, which is important to self-
worth

Work can provide a voyage of exploration (a “career”)
while mitigating many of its risks (self-discovery)

The cycle culminates in employees’ ultimate contribution to
the company: sustainable, long-term innovation. Can you see
why it’s impossible to proceed directly to innovation?

Without a culture where people feel safe and heard, without a
high-performance workforce proactively improving its
productivity, without the learning and growth that people value
much more than a salary, innovation cannot grow. And if you try
and force it anyway, you’ll strip the soil for years to come.

Innovation is an emergent phenomenon, arising unpredictably
from the interactions between the building blocks of culture,
productivity, and personal growth.

where do vision and leadership fit in
here?

Employees and employers are naturally aligned, but this
alignment is unstable.

The purpose of leaders is to preserve and refine this alignment,
to help people align with their work, and the company to
align with its people. Notice the order there. First, you help
people identify their goals; then you identify the company’s goals;
finally, you help everyone manage the gaps and leverage the
overlaps.

In the past, companies were designed to predict and plan for the
future. But the faster things change, the less value in planning
and prediction, for three reasons:

1. You may get it wrong, leading to wasted effort and
   

resources

1. The more resources you spend, the more attached you
   

get to the sunk costs of your vision

1. You end up suppressing the chaos and serendipity that
   

are the essence of innovation

These failures don’t happen despite planning and prediction, they
happen because of them. They happen because we insist on
planning and predicting a world that is no longer predictable.

1. Problem selection: choose a clear and important
   

problem

1. Resourcing: capture resources by promising to solve it
   
2. Solution: solve the problem within promised
   

constraints

1. Rigidity
   

Choosing a problem based on “importance” usually means
accepting established ways of looking at and thinking about it.
Defining a realistic vision of what “success” means is necessary
to get people on board, but this often means limiting creative
possibilities for those who come later.

1. Positive uncertainty
   

Uncertainty can also bring unexpectedly
good ideas and novel ways of solving problems.

Sticking to “the plan” ends up
turning any source of uncertainty into a negative.

Immersion means intentionally exposing yourself to streams of
ideas,

not with the goal of knowing
everything, but to stay sensitized to developing opportunities
and threats.

The faster the stream goes, the more ideas and
information you get exposed to.

Experimentation recognizes that our technological, networked
world presents us with quickly falling downsides

as well as
rapidly expanding upsides

The only strategy that makes sense in such a situation is placing
many small bets in many different directions, in hopes of riding
the huge upside of any idea that happens to succeed.

The only strategy that makes sense in such a situation is placing

More
experimentation leads to more failure, but that’s actually a good
thing: the faster you fail, the faster you learn, because it is
usually faster and cheaper to learn from failure than to attempt
to anticipate and plan for every single thing that could go wrong.

Leverage is the ability to rapidly shift resources to new, more
fruitful directions.

the world has
switched from “containers” to “streams.”

Containers are the boxes we draw around things to understand
them.

units we break the world down
into.

world that was
relatively static, simple, and slow-changing.

stream is an “open, non-hierarchical flow
of real-time information from multiple overlapping networks.”

a stream is “a life
context formed by all the information flowing towards you via a
set of trusted connections — to free people, ideas and resources
— from multiple networks, both technological and not.”

much of the incredible creativity and
resilience of cities

comes from this diversity of networks.

this explains why the
Internet as a whole exhibits a similar creativity and resilience.

exposing
themselves to as many different streams as possible, especially

ones that provide:
rich feedback
self-correction
ongoing improvement
continuous learning

it happens through thriving ecosystems with as many
diverse people as possible working on a problem in as many
different ways as possible.

the “luck of
networks” — by increasing the size and scope of the network, you
make your own luck.

the faster things change and improve, the
more your current thinking represents a constraint on the future
efforts of yourself and others.

Your capabilities will be so reliably greater a year from now than
today, it makes sense to replace at least some long-term
planning around current constraints with a different activity that
provides greater short-term rewards: tinkering.

We can define
“tinkering” as trial-and-error, iterative improvement.

testing
and adaptation designed to uncover unexpected new
opportunities, without fixed goals.

tinkering can equally be defined as “play,”

the future of work lies in today what we
consider play.

tinkering

it is driven by people’s
natural curiosity;

Following this curiosity leads in
the direction of maximal interestingness

“collaboration”

a
mechanism for averaging and combining the interestingness
instincts of people with diverse backgrounds and skills, in the

hope that it will lead to profitable opportunities that no one
would find on their own.

staffing of projects (allowing people to choose their work based
on what interests them), promiscuous forking (creating parallel
versions of a project to allow them to evolve in different
directions), and teams drawn from across roles, functions, and
departments (to combine different flavors of curiosity).

to ensure that this experimentation process
remains connected to the real world

RERO (Release Early,
Release Often).

The temptation and danger in an environment of
accelerating change is to wait longer before releasing your
creation into the world.

This tendency is dangerous because the outside world doesn’t
stop changing as you add your finishing touches; it goes on
evolving just as quickly and unpredictably.

the longer you
wait to release, the longer it takes to capture the feedback and
learning that represent the real metrics of success

The only way for
execution to track rapidly shifting priorities is to get constant,
concrete feedback

updates frequently.

build this rapid release cycle into the culture and
product development process itself.

Making experimentation the core of your business paradoxically
requires developing the ability to abandon failed experiments as
quickly as possible, thereby minimizing sunk costs.

Immersion and Experimentation are largely bottom-up,
decentralized phenomena.

“leverage”: to align people and
resources behind the experiments that happen to succeed.

Traditionally, consensus-seeking was about getting everyone to
agree on a detailed long-term vision, while leaving immediate
next steps fuzzy.

As our time horizon moves closer and closer, it
makes more sense to do the reverse:

define next steps clearly,
while deliberately leaving the long-term vision as fuzzy as
possible.

This not only avoids wasting resources on long-term plans that
are likely to change anyway, it’s also much easier to get people
to reach rough consensus than to update a complex, detailed
plan.

allow you to take action quicker,

this feels scary

the purpose of long-term
planning is to uncover risks and constraints.

be able to mitigate
them.

But in an era of accelerating change, predicting the risks is
impossible.

the constraints you identify may not be as limiting as
you think.

makes more sense to have an abundance mindset
that assumes rapidly expanding resources, capabilities, and
opportunities.

There is no definitive list of
“leverage points” in this new environment. The idea is to create
your own.

int

Gall’s Law,

“A complex system that works is invariably found to
have evolved from a simple system that worked. A
complex system designed from scratch never works”

Someone could create a centralized R&D department

with the mission of generating new
viral ideas “from scratch.”

they could not
compete in terms of quality OR quantity with the citizen

scientists, Do-It-Yourselfers, self-trackers, guerrilla marketing
agencies, biohackers,

The best ideas have to be grown, not built. The greenhouse is
replacing the factory floor.

being smart is no longer
about raw brainpower, or having all the answers.

The greatest source of leverage in the world today is network
effects,

It requires reacting to uncertainty by opening things up, instead
of locking them down, so that more unexpected things can
happen.

breaking assumptions about how
resources can be used,

questioning zero-sum thinking
that sees all resources in terms of their scarcity.

staying open to and recognizing serendipitous
solutions to problems

The smartest way to solve a problem is no longer to attack it
directly.

You have to create a network to
defeat a network.

surplus and spillover effects:

you can make your own luck to a
certain degree, by making your information and your
organization as transparent, searchable, and hackable (in the
productive sense) as possible. It is the organizations that open
up and dissolve internal and external barriers the fastest that
will succeed in this new environment.

It sounds like a blank check for laziness. But something interesting happens when you try it: by eliminating the “barrier to entry” of even getting started, it calls your bluff that some external force (lack of time, money, or energy) is the true constraint.
By reframing the black-and-white choice as a menu of options tailored to any level of effort you’re willing to expend, it calls attention to the fact that the most difficult step is 0 to 1, not 1 to n.

s,