I don’t know about you, but as activity on social media sites has surged the last year, I’ve found a lot more noise in my feeds and as result of my projects getting more serious I’ve had less time to sift. I know I’m missing a lot of interesting things people have to say and always find aggregation and curation helpful.

At my friend Tyler Willis‘ urging I signed up for the daily venture hacks email digest and they’ve been doing a terrific job of synthesizing important articles being written within the startup community.

In that spirit, here is an aggregation of my enduring tweets from the last few weeks:

• The more you know the more you realize you dont know. But the more you know the more you can do. The goal is ability not absolute knowledge
• Two consec 20 hr weeks != one 40 hour week of productivity. Off/on ramps to a project are long. Sustained focus super important. Batch.
• The hedonic treadmill is so real. It’s great for accomplishment and progress but lame for happiness. Reflection of your path charted is key.
• The right plan is critical. It’s not sufficient because the hard work is in the execution but executing well on the wrong thing is worthless
• Time expectations: 3-5 hours are minimal if you’re coming from an empty schedule but fitting it in is a huge challenge if already maxed out
• Good plans have agility & unpredictability built in. Bad plans steer you away from possibility of making bigger realizations.
• A lot of smart is continuously eliminating false beliefs & building a repertoire of building blocks that construct increasing truthfulness
• Authors of Made to Stick argue that mental simulation of the past is more effective then simulating the future. Counterintuitive. Pg 211-213
• The music genome project aimed to “Capture the essence of music at the fundamental level”. The human genome captures humanity at a fund lvl?
• Finished the checklist manifesto, excited by its potential. Its simplicity appears vapid but the way it interacts w cognition is profound
• Noticed at the airport people are much happier at arrivals than departures. True with most things in life? Ppl seek comfort not uncertainty.
• “Narcissists don’t care how you feel, whether you like them or not, they just want you to be in their movie. Apathy is your only weapon.”
• “At times stories are ink-blot tests of what’s going on in the life of the reader.” – Steve Blank
• “Many designers don’t measure real world impact. Many design orgs & schools give out awards for designing products that never get built” – Eric Ries
• Great learning tool: ability to chat live w people reading the same blog post/article. Or easily see friends who have read the post. Exist?
• One of my big irritations is when people make a mistake and I fix it, but they are unwilling to learn what went wrong so it doesn’t reoccur.
• Customer Discovery provides a good way to inch into a startup idea partime before quitting your job and going full throttle.
• Sean Ellis & Steve Blank measure PMF dif bc theyre talking about B2C vs B2B (& respectively Gratification vs. ROI are the important metrics)
• The all things D interview with Steve Jobs makes me think a lot of the portrayals of Jobs as a dictator has some truth but is mostly wrong.
• We all have tons of assumptions in our mental model of the world. Surrounding urself with smart ppl makes you more likely to adopt good ones

Buckminster Fuller, 1970:

“We must 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.”

This blog post is part 2 of the Sandbox Network ‘Palomar 5′ series: a six week innovation camp in Berlin from 9 October – 24 November 2009. To follow the progress of the conference, you can view the official Palomar 5 blog. Alternatively, if you are on twitter, follow hashtag #p5 for real-time updates. You can also check out one of our camp member’s daily video blog on Youtube. (Part 1 is here)

Two thirds of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp has already passed. Four weeks down, two to go until the 2 day Summit, when we will have the opportunity to present the fruits of our labour to an eminent group of thought leaders, politicians, scientists and investors.

Before we dive deep into the Palomar5 experience let me give you a quick overview of the last month:

Our first two weeks, focused on understanding the thought landscape we’re operating in, generating hundreds of ideas for projects mixed in with some intense bonding experiences. Two weeks of intensive prototyping ensued, and now we’re transitioning into storytelling mode for the summit.

The last 4 weeks have been amazing but I was hoping to get more done. But that’s probably just my restlessness to change the world talking. But it is strange how fast a month has flown by.

We had our second “reality check” yesterday, where we all presented what we’ve been working on to many highly respected professionals and received their feedback. Someone asked me how long ago the first reality check was, it felt like ages, a month at least, but in reality it was only two and half weeks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to describe a prolonged experience and it feels like time has passed incredibly quickly but when you reflect on things you did in the beginning and it feels like it happened a long time ago, it probably means you are doing something right.

The Final Stretch

I have spent a lot of time the last few years learning about frameworks that have supported me in developing visions for a better future, but it has taken time for my entrepreneurial skills to catch up to the size of what I’ve set out to accomplish. The last half a year I’ve become increasingly anxious about pontificating while building takes a back seat. With only two weeks left of the camp part of me wishes more had been accomplished while here. But I have to realize that while we’ve been here a month, real work only started two weeks ago and our last two weeks of focus have been incredibly productive. The end goal of the Palomar5 camp is not to create fully functional products for the summit. Of greater importance to Palomar5 is conveying the underlying vision behind our projects and validation of the experiment of bringing 30 diversely talented young people from around the world and forcing them to live and work together for 6 weeks. Fully functional projects that make an impact are definitely vital for the success of Palomar5, but we don’t want to be another idea factory producing theories and patents; we want our projects to make a mark on the world, but the purpose of the 6 week camp is just to create the gravitational core for these projects to continue to flourish once the camp is over.

The summit should play a huge role in jumpstarting this process, but it all depends on the quality of our storytelling and how well we convey the enveloping experience of Palomar5: the lifestyle, the passion, the big projects and all the little creative projects the flit in and out serving as creative fuel for our bigger initiatives. If we do this well, TED-esque as we all like to say, (it being our common inspiration and the height of sexy intellectualism), we’ll create a buzz around the camp that will accelerate the development of our projects.

The Malzfabrik and Beyond

While we’ve spent most of our days in our stylish cubes dreaming up the next big thing followed by nightly recharges in our sleeping boxes, the weeks have not been without some atypical extracurricular activity.

After an intense first three weeks the Palomar5 team announced a mysterious weekend trip with few details except that we were supposed to bring our passport and pack warm. We speculated about trips to Poland or Holland.

On Halloween morning we piled on our bus unsure of our intended destination. A few hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of 8 kilometer canoeing expedition down a river somewhere in northeast Germany. We exited our canoes 3 hours later to find ourselves on the outskirts of a sparsely populated town with a nearby castle awaiting our presence. In the evening our creativity was out in full bloom as we showed off our elaborate characters including killer Mario, the bloody nurse and cross-dressing men.

Our favorite part of the weekend getaway at the castle was the sauna buried in the basement with plenty of half naked sandboxers to go around. We now request saunas wherever we go.

Other highlights included a Sunday afternoon project constructing an 8 meter mask out of branches and twigs, which was burned in it the evening. And I enjoyed my longest period of silence in a while during a solitary forest walk.

Atmosphere

Earlier this week we attended the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On our walk back we noticed how this experience felt like the beginning of a new school. We’ve been living together for a month now and it feels like this is just the beginning of a new phase of our lives, which it is, but at the same time our concentrated camp experience is heading into the final stretch. The flight home will be very strange. The following weeks we’ll experience withdrawals as we return to reality, basically from the future. While we’ve been working on inventing the future of work, we’ve also been living it. This experience has seamlessly combined, friendship, fun, adventure and the birth of some really ambitious projects.

One thing I might change if I knew this could last beyond 6 weeks is not working as many hours during the day, I feel like life is cyclical, times where intense focus is required and other times where experimentalism is a better frame of mind. Making the most of my time here has been a higher priority for me. Trying to change the world takes sacrifice; again my restlessness talking.

How we maintain the community after the camp is an issue that looms large in all our heads, both for the continued success of our projects and the friendships we’ve built.

No matter what happens I think we can all say that the camp has inextricably altered our lives. And we’ll look back on our lives in a few years time categorizing our experiences with two denominations: BP and AP. Before Palomar5 and After Palomar5.

The pace of learning at this camp has been so high. I’ve often thought about what kind of person I’d become if every night I could go to bed completely mentally exhausted from the pushing my 3 pounds of grey matter continually past its limits. Palomar5 has given me four weeks of that dream. Everyday we discuss wide-ranging ideas, on many topics like learning, innovation, and culture.

One night Valentin and I were up late debating whether culture or technology was the stronger force driving society forward. While interesting, these conversations rarely lead to anything tangible, but Palomar5 begs to differ. The following day we were discussing how the iPhone achieved widespread cultural adoption so fast with technology so far ahead of what was previously available (normally a sticking point for products ahead of their time) and how our projects could succeed by similarly speeding up cultural adoption. The conversation immediately jumped to a new level as we drew on last night’s debate. Something in both our minds then clicked, “Wow that’s a first! Last night’s debate was enjoyable, but I never thought it would actually be productive.”

What We’ve Been Building At Palomar5

The theme of the camp of was the future of work, but that was just a starting point to sell the project. We’ve been given very little structure, and that’s the way like it. Lack of direction does not mean chaos, at least over the long term, our projects have naturally converged around big themes: Social consciousness, data and entrepreneurship.

These are incredibly important areas where a lot of growth will be made, and it’s even more notable that we were not told to pick 3 these topics, but our internal compasses driven by creative destruction, cycling through hundreds of projects over the last 4 weeks, led us here.

Our vision for redesigning society for digital age and generation is now more palpable with these themes guiding us. What’s notable is that while many of dreamed of redesigning society this kind of re-envisioning around our idyllic yearnings hasn’t always been possible. The industrial era required sacrificing creativity in the name of scalable efficiency, which was necessary to create the infrastructure to raise the quality of life to what is today. But while this era is long past its expiration date, it continues to live on like an infectious bacteria, contaminating our work and lives. So many of us realize it’s time to reinvent society and its organizations from the ground up, we now just need to commit to making it happen. Count Palomar5 in.

Magnifying Glass — Palomar5 Project Sneak Peak

Here’s a sneak peak into the vision of the project I’ve been most intensely involved in:

We’re postulating the future of work is going to have a lot more startups, because that’s where all the innovation is coming from.

The startup accelerator model is a big part of the future innovation landscape, think YCombinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and now there are accelerators for more than web startups, using basically the same model like Palomar5 and the Unreasonable Institute. We think we’ll see a lot more of these.

The rise of accelerators means that there are now two big emerging markets: Pre and post accelerators.

We’re trying to build many of the tools needed to support startups post-accelerator: expert feedback systems, social network amplification in order to get connected to the right people, just in time learning to acquire skills to overcome new challenges, and repositories of best practices and eventually developing some kind of recommendation engine to streamline and automate the whole ecosystem.

Also, while startups are more innovative because they have freedom, flexibility and autonomy corporations still possess advantages of scale and greater resources.

Startups need to achieve advantages of scale as well, but they will be able to do this modularly and collaboratively. Currently large organizations are organized like big towers, even Google operates like this. But startups will be able to achieve scale and preserve their autonomy by acting like lego pieces. Currently, startups don’t have lego functionality, they’re just rectangular blocks that don’t interface well with each other but we’re providing the knobs and the holes to assemble large towers for particular projects that can easily dissemble at the conclusion of the project and build a new tower.

The prototype for our skill acquisition platform for entrepreneurs has recently been launched. Currently we’re only offering it to alumni of startup accelerators. http://forceforthefuture.com/founders-first/

Conclusion

There’s a lot of uncertainty in many of our lives now, but I love it. Many of us have nothing to go back to, no work to return to, just the opportunity to take the projects and relationships built over the 6 weeks as springboard for the next few years of our lives. It’s easy to get scared by the uncertainty, I still fall victim to it from time to time, but I know it’s really just a sign I’m taking good risks. While it’s comforting to know what life has in store, the predictability is antithetical to impact and growth.

A few nights ago Eddie (Harran) was hopping around in the cube with typical exuberance saying, “I wish could just work with you guys for the rest of my life” “What’s stopping you?” “Well, nothing!”

The “why” and “how” questions are much more interesting and elevated. But as a basic rule of thumb if someone only asks ‘what’ questions that’s probably the only kind of questions they can answer without reflecting for the first time.

Why are you focusing on what you are lately? You went surfing yesterday? How did you learn to surf? How did you finance your trip to Europe? Why are you studying physics? Reframing your go-to questions in conversation from “what’s” to “why’s” and “how’s” will make the conversation more insightful. I’m not sure if it will make you more likable, though. It will for the people who actually reflect on their actions and will be happy they finally have a chance to share.  But it probably doesn’t do any damage to ask someone who doesn’t reflect on their choices and actions, because they will either take it as a challenge and engage, or they will shrug their shoulders and the conversation will effortlessly move back to “what” like nothing happened. So in some sense it will be a selection mechanism for meeting other interesting people.

“What” also seems to be a question that is subconsciously egotistical. After the questioner receives an answer he has the feeling that he knows you and what you’re up to and can share it with other people. That person who was previously masked in uncertainty can now be put into a box and the lid can be sealed.

Personal Anecdote

When people at my high school asked where I was going to school and I told them I was taking a gap year, they immediately asked, “Oh where are you going?” While I will be traveling some during my year off it is not my focus. My focus is on number of entrepreneurial pursuits and learning from “Real World University”.

The path I’m taking is unconventional and the unexpectedness sometimes seemed to spark people out of rut that the only viable path the future held was AT LEAST 4 more years of boring school work before doing anything interesting. My response injected a tinge of uncertainty into their worldview, which slightly intrigued them, but only because it was a box they needed to fill. I felt most of the time these inquiries from my peers were insincere. They didn’t want to know how or why I’m doing what I’m doing, they just wanted to resolve their uncertainty. Most of the time I indulged and gave a watered down mundane answer, “startup stuff”. I saw the wheels turning in their head, “Oh technology, okay, I wouldn’t want to do that anyway *remain on course, nothing to see here*. And we both went on with our day.

But one time in English class I saw just how much tension is created when one of these boxes is left ajar. We were in breakout discussion groups and the conversation wondered to where we were all going to college and then it was my turn to share. And I thought these were people whose perspective I actually wanted to hear, but I knew I’d be interrupted due to time limitations of class and if I started telling them what I’m doing but didn’t finish, the box would be as good as closed and they wouldn’t ask me about it later. So I told them if they really wanted to know what I’m going to be doing, they could ask me about it outside of class. But they wanted me to tell them NOW. “Just tell us! Max, C’mon why are you being so difficult! It’s really not that hard.” They were laughing not yelling but in a very annoyed kind of way. Eventually they got so loud that the teacher asked what was going on and almost in unison said, “Max won’t tell us what he’s doing with his year off.” After they wouldn’t accept my offer to talk about it after class I had been speaking in abstract provocative platitudes to mess with them. “I’m leapfrogging 6 years of life” “I’m proving competency not signaling it” etc etc.

The uncertainty was pulling at their heart strings. I kept offerring to tell them more outside of class but they didn’t actually want to know, they just wanted to close the box.

Another barrier to raise a new level of happiness is the “hedonic treadmill” which causes you to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. As you accumulate more material possessions and accomplishments, your expectations rise. The deeds and things you worked so hard for no longer make you happy; you need to get something even better to boost your level of happiness into the upper reaches of its set range. But once you get the next possession or achievement, you adapt to it as well, and so on. There is, unfortunately, a good deal of evidence for such a treadmill.

For me this passage provokes more questions than answers.One of my biggest takeaways is that expectations shouldn’t rise faster than accomplishments, but I wonder if too much happiness leads to complacency? If we were in bliss after taking out the trash wouldn’t that be a societal liability? While the existence of this treadmill is unfortunate from an emotional perspective, from a societal-value perspective it might not be. Doesn’t the fact that we are never satisfied, always looking for the next achievement to make us happy, drive economic value to society? Perhaps this is further evidence that happiness and innovation are at odds. If you’re seeking to maximize contribution where is the optimal level of happiness? Clearly morbidly depressed people don’t get much done, but what about borderline depressed people who are determined to find fulfillment through achievement but to no avail? How can we be happy and continue to elevate our ability to contribute and achieve?

I’ll let these thoughts linger…but I assure you Seligman does have some good solutions.

I quickly put a page up of the pressfit die and some other things I’ve made the past few years.

http://maxmarmer.com/making-physical-things/

“Just look into the scanner right here and you’ll be good to go,” The clerk on the screen flashed a forced smile.

“Believable enough,” Isaac thought to himself. These automated personalities had been in circulation for just a few months, although the prototype was created a few years ago in the lab. Currently they are expensive and fairly uncommon but it is fitting that a research lab like this one would be using one.

“Your identity has been confirmed,” the clerk croaked in a robotic voice.

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to say that like a normal human being now.”

“Yes, you didn’t find that funny? I guess my understanding of irony is lacking. I could have spoken with inflection but honestly can you really say ‘identity confirmed’ and not sound like a robotic tool. HAhah—“

Isaac not amused stood staring blankly back at the screen.

“…Ok,” the clerk mumbled, “I guess humor isn’t as easy as it looks. I’ve been told it is the last thing I will acquire, as it is the pinnacle of the human condition.”

“…So what’s next?” Isaac asked, hoping not to engage in a philosophical conversation about the nature of humor.

“Well your LiveRecord™ is downloading from the cloud and is about 60% complete. The initial conditions for your SimulTest™ should be ready soon.”

Isaac knew that much of his life had been captured and stored but he’d never been aware that anything could be done with it other than to replay moments of his life. “Can you explain to me again what exactly what you are going to do with all my information?”

“Well as you know, you were selected to participate in our experiment because you LiveRecord™ database ranked in the top 1,000 of sheer volume of data. You must have been born into a wealthy family because your network also had a large amount of data lifelogged as well. This is especially important for our alpha tests in order create the massive redundancy necessary to accurately access the probabilistic certainty of existential events and their non-existent counterparts. Our records indicate you parents began your LiveRecord™ 25 years ago… that would make you four years old.

A huge amount of data was stored but we lacked the knowledge do to anything but replay particular information streams. Essentially this was merely augmented memory. Now we think we’ve developed the technique to synthesize huge collections of diverse arrays of information systems in order to simulate in real time scenes of the past. By running the simulation at a particular point in time, many times, we may be able to access the probability of particular outcomes.

You, no doubt, have experienced immersive virtual environments before, but this one should be quite different from anything experienced before as you will be like a video game character in your own life reliving a moment from the past. “

“Sounds awesome but I don’t see why that would be useful. All I will realize is how much my life sucks. Why would I want to relive all my mistakes, maybe this would be cool for something who is good at life, but not me.”

A door just above the vidscreen slid open. A mallet broke through the opening and smacked Isaac in the head.

“PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER.” After a momentary outburst the Clerk returned to his calm soothing tone, “Failure is fine as long as you learn something.”

“Yea yea yea you sound like my dad.”

“Based on my index score your dad is a very smart man. Anyway, you asked why this was useful? This simulation tool has enormous potential as a training and research tool unlike anything ever used before. The ability to recreate situations with incredible accuracy provides a highly leveraged and low risk way of learning never possible before. It allows you to practice and learn directly from your successes and mistakes so that the existential reality can be improved immensely.”

Isaac nods.

“Ok, let me spell out for you how this works and how it applies to your life.”

Isaac nods again, finding the whole experience a little bit overwhelming and a little bit overhyped.

“There is an interplay here between predictability and unpredictability. Between order and chaos. The little events that make up an individual’s life are completely unpredictable – there is no way to determine what these events are going to be. There is no determinism; every moment of life is extremely improbable when compared with the entirety of all possible moments. But there is an ultrastructure that imposes some stability and predictability on the system. And this semi-guiding force is your personality because on any small interval of time the way a person will react to outside stimuli is remarkably similar. I say a small interval of time because a person may react to something very differently if they were to have an identical experience five years later, but a day later the probability is very high that the reaction would be mostly the same.”

“So what accounts for the change over larger periods of time?”

“Most of the changed reaction can be attributed to natural progressive development of personality. Would you be surprised if a child who was excellent at solving puzzles was then at the top of his algebra class in middle school?”

“No.”

“Would you be surprised if your friend Larry who was very logical and argumentative turned out to be a high powered lawyer?”

“No. Wait how do you know Larry…. oh, right.”

“But many of the things that will be most important in his life were highly unlikely and very unpredictable. What do you think the certainty of all these things happening were?“

”Well…I”

“Don’t answer that, it was a rhetorical question. So many random things affected What College he went to? Who his friends were? How he met his wife? How he ended up at that law firm? How he ended up serendipitously sitting next to his future boss at the bar, where they connected after finding out they had the same alma matter. They hit it off so well, they met again for lunch and soon he had a job at the company.“

“I don’t think I’ve ever had something come from meeting someone at a bar. He’s so lucky.”

“You’re right. That connection could have just as easily not happened. But keep in mind it was not total luck, your friend has always been known for his hearty laugh and congenial personality. Maybe your future boss was sitting next to you at the bar, but because you didn’t talk to him, he’s now only your future boss in a nonexistent future. Don’t get the wrong idea now and think that everyone you talk to at the bar is going to open up doors to a lucrative career. The chances of something like that happening are extremely small. And this is what we call a black swan. The chance of that event happening was extremely small but the impact on Larry’s life was huge. Know that there is no reason that things should turn out one way. If there is one thing you take from this study, understand the idiocy of the ubiquitously used phrases of ”It wasn’t meant to be“ or ”Everything happens for a reason“ or ”Everything will turn out for the best.“ Things could always be better or worse. Any particular moment is inherently random and there is nothing special, predestined or divine about it. You chose how much of a role you want chance to play in your life. And it can have just as much a negative role as a positive. There are events of small probability with huge positive and negative payoffs.”

“Some people naturally expose themselves to these kinds of positive randomness. One way of doing that is by moving to cities. People throughout history have moved to cities for a chance at a better life. Of course, you do take on additional risk. But if you look at the potential payoff for exposing yourself to randomness and serendipity, then not being risky is the ultimate risk.

“One of the most powerful things you can do is to take control of not only just exposing yourself to randomness but to improve your personality, investing in yourself and learning how you can make the most of an opportunity when it comes along. You may not notice any changes for a long time, but all the great habits you are not just theorizing but implementing will prepare you to take maximum advantage when that extremely unlikely yet enormously influential opportunity presents itself. You don’t know what that opportunity will be, and even when it comes you might not even notice it happened. “

“Hardly anything good or worth living for will ever come to you if you don’t expose yourself to the randomness necessary to have the chance to get what you are looking for. “”

“You are still rather obtuse but your wisdom is remarkable… well I’ve got a lot to think… Are you shining a light in my eyes? Is this how the simulation starts? What’s going on? AAHH that’s really bright. STOP STOP!”

Simulation complete.