A professional update, plus seven spaces I'm excited about
💌 The Roundup // 011
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Friends–
Before we get into it, I wanted to share a quick life update– after spending the past 4.5 years helping talented people navigate career transitions at Tradecraft, I’ve started my own transition to figure out what’s next. While I’m sad to leave an organization and team that have both provided me so much growth and intellectual fulfillment, I’m also excited to take what I’ve learned to the next adventure.
To those of you in the Tradecraft community, it’s been a privilege working and learning with you. Never hesitate to reach out when you’re in need of advice or friendship.
Perhaps this leads some of you to the inevitable follow-up question: “What’s next?” The short answer is– I’m not sure yet. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing a lot of reading, thinking, and coffee-drinking with smart friends. While I haven’t settled on anything yet, I thought I’d share a few of the spaces I’ve been exploring, in case any of you want to compare notes.
Seven Spaces I’m Excited About
📚 1. Parents taking the reins of their kids’ educations
As trust in institutions continues to wane, individuals are taking charge of critical functions they once outsourced. One particular trend I’ve noticed is parents expressing interest in reclaiming the responsibility for their kids’ educations that past generations ceded to schools.
Some predict this will lead to a massive homeschooling movement. I’m not sure most parents are willing to fully absorb the responsibilities of their kids' teachers. However, I do believe new solutions will start to emerge that empower parents to unbundle some of the benefits that school provides.
🎨 2. Tools and platforms that enable creators to earn a livelihood
The American Dream is being replaced. While older generations aspired to make more money than their parents, newer generations seem determined to spend their time in a more fulfilling way. Increasingly, young people realize that dream by building devoted followings around their creative passions. This shift has instigated a Cambrian explosion of new tools and platforms to help creators make and share their work. Chefs use Youtube and Instagram to share recipes. Writers use Substack and Mailchimp to spread ideas. Podcasters amplify their voices using tools like Anchor and Descript. Some even earn their livelihoods training creators to market their work using platforms like Teachable and Podia. Unlike previous visions of the future of work, this is actually one I would love to help further.
🧠 3. The future of organizational learning and development
From recent conversations I’ve had, it strikes me that a good deal of workplace learning and development is theater. Employees demand learning stipends that they never spend. Employers invest in learning libraries that no one uses. Nobody complains because nobody knows what they are missing out on. I suspect, however, that everyone is missing out on a lot.
Because of this, employees don’t grow as quickly or perform as well in their jobs. Meanwhile, companies spend lots of money building and maintaining capabilities by hiring from the outside. While some forward-thinking organizations are beginning to innovate on this problem, the current set of ideas and tools in the space feel akin to the state of consumer higher-ed in 2012 (MOOCs everywhere!). I’m excited to find companies that are at the forefront of figuring out what’s next in this area.
🤖 4. Coaching networks that collect and distribute best practices
It’s insane to think about how much time workers spend struggling to reinvent processes that have been figured out by others in their company/industry. One solution to this problem is what my friend, Jake Saper calls “coaching networks:”
Coaching Networks use machine learning to guide workers toward doing their jobs more effectively, finding the best strategies from the distributed network of similar workers using the software.
The software acts as a real-time, on-the-job coach, guiding employees to successful outcomes and gathering new creative behaviors that are fed back into the system. Rather than dispensing one-size-fits-all advice, Coaching Networks offer advice tailored to each worker and the task they’re doing.
I sense there’s a huge opportunity here for the startups that can create products that actually realize this vision.
🚛 5. Increasing economic dynamism by empowering people to pursue better opportunities
In 1985, almost 20 percent of Americans had moved homes in the past year. By 2018 that number fell to less than 10 percent. This lack of mobility has implications on America’s GDP, rate of innovation, and productivity growth. On a personal level, it means many workers aren’t growing their professional abilities or networks. Perhaps the solution is to make it easier for people to conduct a non-local job search. Or, the lynchpin could be lightening the burden of moving to a new place. But whatever the case, helping revive America’s economic dynamism feels like a problem worth solving.
🏘 6. New living arrangements that facilitate lasting friendships
As urban Millenials get married and have kids later, they have invested more of their lives into forming pre-marital friendships. I sense there is a growing desire to find some way to transition these friendships into new types of living arrangements beyond the atomic family. Some of these may resemble communes. Others might include shared activities like education or meals. Whatever the features, it’s a challenging problem to coordinate the preferences of so many parties who are operating on their own timelines. But, if it’s solvable, I think this could be a big step toward curbing the sense of isolation felt by many Americans.
🤝 7. Personal and professional development communities
Dr. BJ Fogg’s behavior change model suggests that for a behavior to occur, three elements must converge at the same moment: motivation, ability, and a prompt. Technology products can help users make better choices by giving us the ability to take action as well as a timely prompt. However, what technology lacks is the capacity to provide the third element - motivation.
Most people I know find the motivation to engage in positive behavior from other people. Humans are status-seeking apes who thrive when surrounded by peers that can push them toward their goals. While these types of groups can emerge spontaneously within companies or circles of friends, often, it is more effective to join communities that are designed to help members accomplish specific goals.
Who should join a development community? From recent retirees looking to give back to pregnant couples trying to look ahead, it’s hard for me to imagine a group that won’t benefit from this. As our society contemplates what institutions will fill the religion-shaped hole in our hearts and minds, I think development communities are an essential part of the puzzle.
Those are some of the spaces I’m currently exploring. I’m sure, over the coming weeks, others will catch my interest as well. If you know of people or companies who are thinking about or doing interesting work in these areas, I’d love to hear about them.
Recommendations
🕸 Your Life is Driven by Network Effects
(40-minute read from James Currier)
While I was at Tradecraft, I taught a workshop on how to build and maintain professional relationships. I would start by asking the group why, given the high value of their time, does it make sense to devote effort toward the goal of building a professional network? The answer I looked for is: other people have stuff that you want. Much of the knowledge, connections, and capital in the world can only be accessed by building relationships with other people.
Reading this post, I’m annoyed I wasn’t able to send it out as pre-reading for the workshop. It looks at seven pivotal life choices, including your first job, where you live, and who you marry and describes how network forces shape those decisions. There’s too much good stuff in here to summarize, so I suggest you give it a read.
💸 How to Start Angel Investing
(15-minute read from Julia DeWahl)
After all these years, it’s happened– you’ve experienced your first major liquidity event. You finally have enough digits in your bank balance to take part in the time-honored Silicon Valley transition from operator to investor. But how do you ensure you don’t squander your hard-earned money by giving too much of it to the wrong companies?
Julia DeWhal’s post covers the ins and outs of angel investing, including:
What size of checks to cut
How to get deal flow
Prepping for meetings
Conducting diligence
It’s an excellent read for anyone who aspires to get rich betting on the unicorn races.
⏳ Three Theories for Why You Have No Time
(10-minute read from Derek Thompson)
Over the past 100 years, the American Household has been transformed by electronic labor-saving devices like refrigerators, dishwashers, and laundry machines. Collectively, these appliances could have given American homemakers many hours of leisure time– but for some reason, they didn’t.
In 1920, full-time housewives spent 51 hours a week on housework, according to Juliet Schor, an economist and the author of The Overworked American. In the 1950s, they worked 52 hours a week. In the 1960s, they worked 53 hours. Half a century of labor-saving technology does not appear to have saved the typical housewife even one minute of labor.
Why didn’t these technologies give us back our time? Derek Thompson theorizes that once it became easier for us to take care of our home-lives, we ratcheted up our standards. Clothes that were once washed semi-annually started being laundered monthly. Fresh produce was bought more often to stock the refrigerator. In short:
Technology made it much easier to clean a house to 1890s standards. But by mid-century, Americans didn’t want that old house. They wanted a modern home—with delicious meals and dustless windowsills and glistening floors—and this delicious and dustless glisten required a 40-to-50-hour workweek, even with the assistance of modern tools.
These elevated norms were partly the product of the same status competition that motivated workers to put in longer hours on the job and parents to ensure their kids’ free time was devoted to studying. This status competition still plays out in the workplace of today. Although we have all sorts of time-saving software tools at our disposal, it has not decreased the number of hours we spend at work. Instead, bosses ratchet up their standards for the model productive worker that employees compete to embody.
😡 The Internet of Beefs
(21-minute read from Venkatesh Rao)
In past issues of this newsletter, I’ve mentioned Venkatesh Rao’s concept of “the cozyweb,” where denizens of the internet can retreat to engage in private, civil conversations among trusted peers. But, what happens to our public social spaces as the sane people retreat into their virtual wine caves? Social media becomes a battleground for perma-triggered culture warriors, who transform it into the “Internet of Beefs.”
Online public spaces are now being slowly taken over by beef-only thinkers, as the global culture wars evolve into a stable, endemic, background societal condition of continuous conflict. As the Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird, the public internet is turning into the Internet of Beefs.
The Internet of Beefs, or IoB, is everywhere, on all platforms, all the time. Meatspace is just a source of matériel to be deployed online, possibly after some tasteful editing, decontextualization, and now AI-assisted manipulation.
If you participate in online public life, you cannot entirely avoid the Internet of Beefs. It is too big, too ubiquitous, and too widely distributed and connected across platforms. To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting — all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.
The article is such a fun and accurate account of the state of our social media that I’m tempted to quote the entire thing, but instead, I suggest you treat yourself to some excellent writing.
🧱 The Tetris Effect
(4-minute read from Daniel Gross)
Speaking as someone who’s made a couple of big life decisions lately, I’ve noticed that upon informing others about your choice, they are often curious about the moment you decided. Typically, I’m tempted to search for a single event that tipped the scales, but in truth, these decisions are always the result of copious data points. As Daniel Gross points out, this is useful to remember when you’re trying to influence the decision making of others:
It’s hard, often impossible, to predict the exact block that will cause the wave function collapse. The events aren’t sequential, and you often don’t know the entire board. In situations like sales and recruiting, your best bet is to work to increase the odds that you’re going to drop the right block by showering your customers with goodness they’re interested in.
Concretely: optimize the environment. Spend a lot of time with people you’d like to hire. Send them content they’d enjoy. Do the same with your users. Do the same with your food. Etc. Less time optimizing a specific thing, more time improving the environment around that thing.
🥦 My Nutritional Framework
(2-minute read from Peter Attia)
Since the collapse of the nutrition pyramid, it feels like we’ve been over-run with dietary barbarian tribes. While the carnivore tribe espouses the health benefits of an all-meat diet, the vegan tribe decries the immorality of ingesting animal products. Even though few know the difference between the beliefs of the Keto, Paleo, and Whole30 tribes, that doesn’t make their social media spats any less aggressive.
In contrast, Dr. Peter Attia’s framework for nutrition is a breath of fresh air:
It comes down to three forms of restriction. Whether it’s what you eat or don’t eat (i.e., dietary restriction or DR), how much you eat (i.e., caloric restriction or CR), or when you eat and don’t eat (i.e., time restriction or TR), virtually all of the dietary schemes you can think of can be distilled into these three elements in some combination.
Isn’t that better?
🏡 The Case for Buying a House With Friends
(16-minute read from Julie Beck)
Lately, I’ve been coming around to the idea that most people aren’t meant to live in isolation from their tribes. But practically, how can a tribe stay together as each member makes individual choices about family, work, and lifestyle?
I believe younger generations are going to be more willing to trade their lifestyle preferences in exchange for the greater rewards that come from belonging. As the title suggests, Julie Beck’s article details the story of two couples who decide to buy a house together. Over the coming years, I think we’ll start to see many more stories like this.
If you look at human history, what we’re doing is far more normal than the standard American understanding that you get married, buy a house, and live in suburban isolation with your children. Humans, throughout history, often lived in much larger, extended families. In a lot of parts of the world, this is still true.
I think that life is richer and we flourish more fully in a community. Looking around our culture, I think a lot of people are starting to experience the limits of individualism. That can really leave people feeling isolated, alone, and misunderstood.
💔 The Skewed and the Screwed: When Mating Meets Politics
(19-minute read by Jacob Falkovich)
A few months ago, a male friend shared his account of a first date that devolved into a political argument and ended with his companion storming out of the bar. The conversation left me wondering to what extent politics is deranging male-female courtship. What I hadn’t considered until I read this post was the extent to which dating practices might be creating the political divide we’re now witnessing.
One major issue comes from the skewed gender makeup of the two sides of the political spectrum. Liberals, who comprise 34% of the population, are 55% female, while conservatives who make up 25% of the country are 57% male. In general, skewed sex ratios tend to breed resentment toward the minority sex and increased competition between members of the majority sex. This creates a vicious cycle that looks like this:
Skewed sex ratios lead to…
The minority-sex having more power, and taking advantage of it, leading to…
The majority-sex building resentment and complaining about the minority-sex, which leads to…
The minority-sex leaving the mating market for places where their sex is more welcome, which leads to…
An ever more skewed mating market.
Those who are committed to finding a mate can deal with this by relaxing their standards around political alignment, which can help them pair off and exit the dating market. But what about those who refuse to compromise?
That leaves the politically obstinate, who are faced with a shrinking mating market mired in virtue signaling and a sex ratio that gets more skewed by the year. They become even more convinced that the opposite sex is using its power to oppress them, and their personal experience confirms it.
These lonely partisans are a minority of the population, but they are active in politics and media. I’m convinced that a lot of discourse about the “gender wars” and polarization of men against women is driven by those at the edges of the horseshoe, especially as they leave their twenties behind. In the exhausted moderate majority, men and women seem to be getting along just fine.
As someone who’s experienced the joys of both politics and relationships, I can say, without a doubt, that it’s worth giving up the former for the latter.
Community
Shoutouts
Brady Moore is still crushing it every week with the Quartermaster
Ina Herlihy shared the five best products she discovered last year.
Kera DeMars warned of the dangers of high startup valuations
Lance Martin kicked off his newsletter by sharing his thoughts on The Power Broker
Liz Fosslien shared some great advice about selective vulnerability on TED’s The Way We Work series
Mikael Bernstein’s company, Verbling was recently acquired
Rachel Carlson reflected on how she raised Guild’s Series D the day before she delivered a set of twins
Scott Hanford publicized his 2020 Goals and wrote about scaling organizations
*Header image credit: Jean Jullien