As you may have noticed the blog has been relatively quiet the month of September, but my life has been anything but. I have a lot I’d like share and look forward to writing some more comprehensive life updates and keeping in touch with everyone who has been in and out of my life. But respites are few and far between the next few weeks.
Here’s a quick rundown.
Throughout the month of August all my friends from high school packed up suitcases and hopped in cars and planes, scattering around the country. Then it was my twin sister’s turn to take a 1 way to Boston and begin her adventure at Tufts University. I’m very excited for her and I know she’s having an amazing time, but it marked the closing of a large chapter in our lives and was a sad day for the Marmer Family, indeed.
As August closed and September 2009 was born I was up in Black Rock City having an amazing first time at Burning Man. What a transformative experience. Understanding cannot be shared vicariously, though I might be able to offer a few tastes in a upcoming post.
The day I returned from Burning Man I turned 19. Reflection of the last year ensued and I couldn’t believe how much had changed. It was the best of year of my life by far. But I’m confident this year will top it. The stage is set for a wonderful gap year and for the first time in my life I am in control of my most precious resource: my time. Hopefully I’m setting a trend for the rest of my life where things keep getting better all the time. Yes, you can sing it.
Many of my entrepreneurial friends who are veteran Burners described the following weeks as the most productive of the year. I must agree. I returned high on life with all cylinders firing. I clocked 14 hour days for 7 days straight without feeling a hint of lethargy and sailed straight into Tech Crunch 50, in what turned out to be the most productive conference I’ve ever attended. I did the conference the way you’re supposed to. Skipping the most of the content, because it can be had later from the comforts of my desk and instead seizing the opportunity to talk with the plethora of people in attendance I’d been wanting (needing perhaps?) to meet with.
My company took a major leap forward due to large volume of connections made, partnerships forged and targeted feedback I gathered. And after another busy day following the conference, I crashed. I woke up with a fever and was out for over a week, spending most of the time in bed, managing to get an email off every now and then. It hurt. It was a knife straight through the surplus of progress acheived in the preceeding overtime workweek. When you’re scratching and clawing for everything you can muster, being stuck on the sidelines is just agonizing.
But as the cloud over my head was lifted and the mental haze melted away the sun came careening through. As I eased back into work after a week of fitful slumber I received the news that I had received one of the 30 residencies for the Palomar 5 camp. A huge smile swept across my face punctuated by 3 forceful first pumps. The theme of the camp —the future of work— could not be a better fit because it’s so well aligned with all that I’ve been thinking about and working on. What an opportunity. So I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything done in the few remaining days I have on the west coast before I leave for Berlin for 6 weeks on October 9th.
Most people when they take a gap year decide to travel. I decided I had bigger fish to fry than to chase perspective. I wanted to create. I still planned to travel some, but was unsure how I was going to fit it in. But now I have the perfect opportunity to combine work and travel. While most of my time will be spent exploring my home base city of Berlin I hope to get in a few weekend trips traversing other magical cities nearby in Europe. London and Amsterdam top the list right now.
I welcome any suggestions or reccomendations of things to do, places to see or people to meet while I”m situated in Berlin until late November. Let me know.
Most of this blog has been about broad intellectual topics, but if you’ll forgive some self-indulgence, I’m going to begin to share some more personal anecdotes. I just finished a post on passion and what I advocate for how to find it, and now I’m going to give you a small glimpse into some of the life choices that led me here today. Though there’s a good chance that a fair amount of this is just connecting the dots looking backward as Steve Jobs likes to say, I have no way of knowing.
For most of my life, athletics were my core passion, but athletics began to fade after series of misdiagnosed back injuries, that first occurred in 7th grade, and began to develop into chronic injuries that I was unable to overcome throughout high school despite many hours of physical therapy and disciplined training.
My passion for sports began at a very young age and I’d have to consult my family for more accuracy. But I know I put myself out there when I was very little. I was more athletic than most of my 3 year old peers and was pushing myself pre-kindergarten. At my Pre-K (a year between preschool and kindergarten) I was unsatisfied spending my recesses on the little kid’s yard, so I lobbied to cross over the chain link fence where the big kids (first and second graders, big right?) were playing soccer. I don’t think this was an easy sell, no one to my knowledge had done it before, but I proved I could more than hold my own. You could say I was the Jackie Robinson of pre-kindergarten sports. After I made the trek over to the big kid’s side of the yard many of friends began joining in. Soon we formed a soccer team that played in a league outside of school. We called ourselves the Big Green (after the amazing movie, of course) and went on to become a micro soccer dynasty, losing just twice in our 5 year history and racking up a shelf full of trophies. Micro soccer was just 4 on 4 on a small field that allowed youngsters like us to develop our foot skills and teamwork more easily. I have found memories of regularly zipping through my opponents racking up consecutive goals just minutes apart.
As I got older many of my afternoons were spent practicing, many weekends were spent competing and many summers were spent at sports camps. In my downtime at home I played many video games, usually sports games. Though if I wasn’t playing sports games, I was probably playing long RPG (Role Playing Games) like the Final Fantasy series. These RPG’s were great because they weaved long complicated story lines together, frequently culminating in a big world changing idea, like a corporation that controlled the world, or a mysterious phenomenon that sent people back in time and showed how their lives we’re all interconnected. I’m sure these early influences had an effect on my current inclinations towards big picture thinking and weaving disparate theories together.
Two of my strongest passions now are for big ideas and making them happen through entrepreneurship. The life of the mind began to take root around the age of my Bar Mitzvah (in case you were wondering I now consider myself an atheist though culturally jewish), which was also 7th grade, probably coincidentally, maybe luckily timed with my injuries. Because at some point late senior year I called it quits indefinitely on my athletic career (it’s still on hold 8 months later, granted I’m still a push up and sit up enthusiast and exercise bike aficionado) for one because the frustration of not being able to play even close to my potential was becoming unbearable. I was in purgatory. I could play, just not well. I was never big, so my whole game was based on speed and quickness. At one point in middle school my teammates nicknamed me “the flash” after a string of breakaway goals in consecutive games. But post-injury my bursts of quickness could be sustained no longer than flashes in a pan. The second reason for calling it quits was that my life of the mind had been growing steadily the last few years and was now bursting at the seams, salivating for more of my time and energy.
The next 6 months were anything but fun, but I knew I was making the right decision. I knew delaying gratification was part of the deal for a better future. I was at the beginning of my startup career, I had a really big idea but no idea how to make it happen. I jumped in the deep end and tried to swim, and I did, but I got slapped around…a lot. I was putting in a lot of energy and not getting a lot of return. I would meet big fish like Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis and Saul Griffith (though the relationship with Saul was longer standing from when I reached out to him about digital fabrication), impress them in the moment, receive verbal commitments of help and be on cloud nine the rest of the night, but then be blown off the following day.
Aside: I don’t hold any resentments against any of these people, it was very much a matter of circumstance. I welcomed any positive interaction I had with them as an undeserved reward for a young kid thinking big, but coasting on potential. Any help I did get from them thereafter was greatly appreciated, but that’s not to say I wasn’t heavily disappointed when I couldn’t get my emails returned. I also must admit at the times I did get help I wasn’t always ready to take maximum advantage of it. But it’s all part of the process of growing into my own. And the interactions I did have with these people were highlights that definitely served as fuel to keep going. My thought process after rejection went something like, “I may only get a glimmer of their attention now, but if I keep going we’ll be collaborating in no time.”
I was the drunk hook up. I was the new kid on the block. I still am, but I can feel the tide turning. I can’t prove it to you now but you’ll see, the proof will be in the pudding the next few months. Now I receive comments like, “You know you’re going to rule the world, Max”, “Max, you just know everybody don’t you?” I’m flattered. But things certainly aren’t downhill from here. But miraculously they feel like it. I’ve done enough conscious mind hacking to align the dopamine reward centers in mind with working hard and making a difference. I put value out into the world and it comes back to me. I’m addicted, what can I say. But I’m not on career milestone blitz either. My goal is to live a healthy, long sustainable life, full of impact, fun and love. My first foray into adult intellectual communities was with the futurist community who deliberated on ideas of Accelerating Change and the Singularity. I interned with the Institute for the Future last summer and nearly with Singularity University this summer, and while I have scaled back my involvement in futurist communities some (to be explained in a future post), my long term orientation has not left me, and I hope it never does. And what that means is that although there’s still a big disparity for me between effort and reward I know I’m in it for the long haul, and the last few years have been a time of building a foundation and paying my dues. At some point that equation actually flips polarity and you begin to get rewarded when you barely put in any effort. I’m far from there, but things are beginning to speed up for me nonlinearly. All the hours I put in the last two years to develop myself, expand my connections and mind set the stage for the gap year I’m now taking.
But I was telling you how the last semester of high school was full of sacrifice. I skipped dances for conferences, I skipped picnics for lunch meetings, I skipped parties for the chance to finally have a few concentrated hours to iterate the next version of my executive summary. I also kept up with a very challenging and time consuming course load. I knew I couldn’t drop my studies then, as much as I knew from an opportunity cost’s perspective they were wasting my time. I also needed to do well if I still wanted my parents support and the freedom they had given me to pursue these entrepreneurial activities. And there was pressure to finish school with a good academic record after I had maintained one all four years and not drop the ball at the finish line, in large part for college admission’s sake. So I was sleep deprived and felt like I was working two jobs and not having much fun.
But I had something very few of my peers did: Passion and purpose. And the farther I began to venture into this entrepreneurial world the more disconnected and out of place I felt in the school environment. My social life was never spectacular in high school but that semester I really turned the power off and it rusted and rotted. In many ways this was a conscious decision. I was never that connected with my peers, I always felt different, (though along the way I adopted a belief that I should be able to have fun with anybody in the moment no matter our differences, but I didn’t have the skill to pull that off at the time) and I knew we’d all be scattered around the country in 6 months anyway. So I set out at first to create a new network of people I knew and later a new network of friends.
One of the great things about finding your passion and purpose before finding your true friends is that it becomes much easier to find friends you are truly compatible with on many levels. Especially, if you learn how to seek people out and social network very well like I did. Finding friends you respect at a deep level is so important because you become who you surround yourself with, and now I get to choose who I surround myself with. Most of my friends now are in the 22-27 range. I just turned 19. I stole the “I’m the youngest person in the room” card from one of my precocious 22 year old friends, who is pushing 23, and there’s usually an age vacuum between us — no competition. But my conversations with my new circle of friends are at a higher level than I ever had before (my conversations with one friend in high school excepted, who was an awesome intellectual peer and we had amazing conversations at a theoretical level for a straight year and half, but we began to diverge when our world views as entrepreneur and musician began to disagree). My new circle of peers push me every time we interact. We can hit high lofty theoretical crescendos and then bring it back down to reality, creating actionable next steps each of can take to achieve our goals. And that feeling is simply amazing. It’s soul filling.
Long awaited, I finally have the video after wrangling with file format difficulties, technical workarounds and trips that left my time in front of the computer fragmented.
This is only my 2nd or 3rd public speech I’ve given, excluding participation on panels, but I hope to do more in the future. Unfortunately due to time constraints and the density of the content I wanted to cover, this speech required written prompts. Expect future talks I give to be presented more dynamically from the heart.
This blog post started as a comment on Ben Casnocha’s post on passion and voice. Most of my blog posts recently have come as a result of something provocative coming into my environment, a conversation, an idea, a quote, and unplanned, I end up writing. I’m not allocating much time to write these days, but when the thoughts come I try to capture them. I have plenty of ideas captured. I’m going to try to start allocating time to finish them off and shipping as Seth Godin would say. Enough hoopla, let the post commence:
While passion is undeniably important for your career I think it is the wrong thing to focus on is because it is an epiphenomenon. And epiphenomenon are by definition elusive if pursued directly.
For finding passions here’s what I’m advocating now:
- Try as many things as possible with as low a commitment as possible: School does a terrible job at this, you get to try a maximum of 6 things a semester, and you’re locked in (after the first two weeks). And outside of school most people don’t try many things on their own. So therein lies a big part of the problem of passion and why most people haven’t found it. They simply have tried enough things and pursued in enough depth to find it. I could go into more depth about why school destroys passion, but here, I won’t.. Many people think that their only options for passions are what school presents them with. So they don’t even try to look outside of school. And they think they don’t have passions, so they give up.
- Ratchet up your commitment one level – Ways to do this: Read more in depth about one of the things you tested out and enjoyed doing, or practice it for an hour, talk with other people who like this thing too, talk with professionals who have done it for years. Then assess whether you want to go further. Passion doesn’t come until you’ve put in enough hours to become hooked. Passion doesn’t really come until you become good at something, or at the very least, you feel good at and no one has told you that you aren’t yet.
- Begin devoting more and more energy to this thing you enjoy, testing whether it can become one of your passions. This is where you try the passion on as a noun. Do I want to be a ___ (artist, dancer, marketer, entrepreneur). Before you were just trying it on as verbs and adjectives (gerunds are verbs for all intents and purposes here): I’m being artistic, I’m dancing, I’m writing copy, I’m being entrepreneurial. Now you can pick up the plethora of advice on literature about how to build your life around following your passion. You can read all the success literature and a lot of it will stick. The hard part was finding your passion in the first place.
And now a personal anecdote of passion seeking and passion finding:
My interest in computers and technology started when I began playing around with the first computer my family positioned in an accessible place. My dad occasionally bought macworld magazines. I read them and began learning more about computers and working through tutorials in the magazines. I began playing with the system and experimenting on my own. I browsed the internet and bought books. I was hungry to learn more. I worked through books on html and built a website for my mom. I listened to podcasts online and on my iPod. I found my way through an interview on a tech podcast to the ITConversations site. Where I then began listening to talks on accelerating change. I loved those and listened to more whenever I could. I bought books based on the talks and talked with people about the ideas. When the rest of my family was shopping for in Barcelona, I parked myself on a bench and listened to awe-inspiring lectures.
I went to the conference and began meeting the people involved. I kept showing up. I eventually got a job out of my connections. These big ideas I heard filled in the blank for how I was going to make a difference in the world. At first I thought it was big business, but then later I discovered the idea of entrepreneurship. I reached out to entrepreneurs. I read about entrepreneurship. I went to events when I was underaged and knew nobody. I began to get connected. I helped organize events. I figured out how to turn some of my previous projects into a startup. I started asking for introductions and setting up meetings with people who had done startups before. I met with anyone I could just trying to expand the breadth of people I knew and get new perspectives. I decided this was a path I loved and I decided to take a gap year and give myself the time to focus hard and fully commit. Now I’m fully committed to this passion of mine and I’m learning faster than ever before, meeting incredible people, and opening up new possibilities faster than I could have ever imagined when I began playing with my computer and reading macworld magazine.
Everyone I meet now knows I have “the itch,” as they say. But it grew in proportion to my effort. That’s how you know you’ve found one of your passions, when the more time you put into it, your desire to do more increases. Many times you’ll find things that feel like passions in the beginning but you realize you don’t like that much after putting more energy into it. That’s fine. It’s part of the process. Just pick up something new that interests you and run with it. If it feels wrong consider dropping it. But if it feels right keep going. And going.
Spend 80% of your time on your passions, improving your core skills. There are plenty of things you can find that simply meet the “interesting” criteria.
The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find new things that are interesting.
You need to be selective about the 20% of your time you spend entertaining new ideas that are interesting but not related to your core passions and work. Ideally you’d like everything that’s interesting but not in your core circle to have the potential to become one of your core skills.
I want to reduce what I don’t know I don’t know and it gives me a lot of conceptual ammo to formulate new ideas and frameworks about the cutting edge. And understanding the cutting edge is one of my core pursuits.
Should other people watch TEDTalks who don’t have a desire to be on the cutting edge? Yes, but they probably shouldn’t try to watch as many as I do. Their watching should be more targeted and focused on the talks closely related to their core interests.
I’ve developed very systematic approaches to information intake, capturing and digesting information and methods and tools for discerning what to spend time focusing on that I’ll be blogging more about.
On Thursday I attended Crowdsourcing for Social Good a great panel, with great attendees who I witnessed cook up some great things the mixer time surrounding the panel. Here I’ve written up one cautionary note about crowdsourcing for people who are engaged in their work, and a few notes from the evening.
I don’t think that for most high level people crowdsourced work is the highest leverage way for them to give back.
Crowdsourcing is undervaluing the importance of focus and in the importance of thinking about something for a long time to do anything innovative. Advising, consulting and mentoring I think are higher leverage uses of spare time. Productive, engaged workers shouldn’t consider spare time, spare processor cycles. Most people do mindnumbing work the whole day so it’s okay to tap their spare time for spare brain cycles. But people who are really engaged in their work need these little respites to recharge. Anyone who understands that the currency of productivity is energy will intuitively make the decision to use spare time to recharge but the majority of people ascribe to the theory that time is the currency of productivity and will underestimate the negative impact of using their spare time to crowdsource worthy projects.
Of course, I’m only warning a small minority not to spend their energy crowdsourcing and by and large I think crowdsourcing combined with social networks will do tremendously positive things for society moving forward.
So many people have spare cycles. But that’s because most people don’t have engaging work. It’s true that if productive people feel like they are really doing good it could have energizing effects by satisfying their need for meaning but finding meaning in microtasks even if it’s for good cause would be like spiritual junk food. What if we had billionaires who instead of becoming philanthropists, just decided to do some microtasks and it satisfied that desire or need to give back. A lot of philanthropy, for better not worse, is motivated by the emotional benefit of giving for the benefactor, but what if they could derive benefit much easier from microtasks, without the same positive effect on society?
A few more notes on crowdsourcing:
What kinds of things can outsourced successfully?
Work that can be systematized and isn’t mission critical and it’s simple to train someone to do.
There’s so much untapped labor potential in the developing world.
Crowdsourcing removes the friction of matching supply and demand in the labor market. Elance and Odesk make that a lot easier, they reduce friction. Lower and lower barriers and more fluidity is huge.
Crowdsourcing and the media is really exciting. Social news is the future
Game dynamics are important, so that people have a self-interest and can stroke ego and do well at the same time.
We have a billion more people coming into the labor market and due to unemployment many they turn to illegal enterprises. Train them to create their own companies, social entrepreneurship instead of relying on finite number of jobs in current job market. Plenty of good ideas worth working on.
Mechanical Turk — It has become more mainstream due to recent obsession with lean startups.
If edufire wants to test a new feature they use mechanical turk to have people to test out a page and run through features and say what works and what doesn’t. And all the permutations get tested because you have 1000 people testing it.
People love the creativity involved in critiquing edufire’s page because they get to think, and say things like, “wouldn’t it be cool if you used this tagline.”
How big is the market for crowdsourcing? There is a limit to how much knowledge can be broken into tiny bits and still be useful. Almost all innovation is dependent on synergistic design thinking. But certainly the crowdsourced market isn’t even close to being saturated.
Mechanical turk has 51,000 tasks.
ODesk has done 87 Million . 200,000 people
Elance 211 Million — 200,000 people
Crowdsourced, outsourced, opensourced often get conflated.
74% of U.S. citizens don’t volunteer.
If you have american volunteers do stuff for free because it’s embedded in social games that takes work away from refugees who could get paid to do crowdsourced work.
I started to write a comment on Cal Newport’s provocative post on whether a remarkable life requires courage or effort?…and while I tried to formulate my opinion on the matter while brushing my teeth enough thoughts broke through my conflicted un-opinionated state to warrant the comment stand-alone status:
The process that I have seen work is:
1) Realize sticking with the status quo isn’t going to get you a life you want
2) Begin learning about alternative paths
3) Start entertaining thoughts about leaving and making a path for an exit in the near future
4) Meanwhile, experimenting with what you’re going to be really great at
5) Make the leap to leave the status quo not as soon as your famous but as soon you see that investing energy in the status quo gets you next to nothing and you have something that you think you might want to be great at.
The only way to know is to give yourself permission to focus hard. You jump when the value of focusing hard on something, even if you eventually abandon it, is more valuable than stalling in the status quo. You don’t jump when you don’t even know what to focus on, though even then maybe you should, because what are you gaining sticking around in the status quo? The only value I see is a subsidized jump due to money and credibility from society’s run of the mill institutions. So you’re just waiting until you have something worth making a bet on. Even if the bet doesn’t pan out you’ll learn how to play your hand better next time.
It seems like whenever you make that big bet someone comes by and hands you a 500 check-point chip that lets you buy back in at 500 for free even if you bust. Then after the next failure you get to buy back in at 1000. And eventually through combination of luck, timing and experiential muscle you win a hand. It doesn’t even have to be a big hand. And that gets it’s own kind of pass where you get access to the VIP room where only people who have won hands are allowed. This is where you meet your partners in crime, your mentors, who carry you on to the next big thing. And it starts with the courage to make the bet but requires committing hard focus to try and play the hand successfully.
To sum up my longwinded response above, I would basically say living a remarkable life requires courage in the beginning to try, and effort to make the remarkable life a reality.
The first thing you must do is muster the courage to dare to be different and be willing to dream. Then you must match the tiny bit of courage required just to entertain possibilities in your mind, with the little bit of effort required to test the possible paths that might lead to a remarkable life. Then once you find a dabbling interest that you’d like to dive deeper into you have to muster a lot more courage to ditch your current status quo driven path by the wayside, and give yourself the opportunity to put in the massive effort required to pull off being remarkable.
We believe the larger long term direction we’re heading towards is becoming the liaison for “Real World University”, the best learning environment of all, where passion, learning and work are all fluid and intimately related. Making an impact and creating value in the workplace is increasingly dependent on leadership, initiative, and working effectively with small teams of innovative people tackling big goals. Corporate America is not doing a good job of allowing creativity and innovation to flourish in the workplace and by and large the university system is doing no better, squandering the potential, ambition and talent of many motivated young people that the world desperately needs to make it through this pivotal period in our history. The pace of change continues to increase and now we finally have the power to create the world of equal opportunity, abundant wealth, endless creativity and boundless possibility that humanity has always desired, but we also face bigger existential threats than ever before, which are also accelerating exponentially.
We need more people working on the big problems of our day instead of opting for dispassionate pay-the-bills work or the allure of fast money from financial optimization. Our school system churns out highly dependent, disengaged citizens, in search of a paycheck instead of a purpose. Failing to realize that the only form of sustainable wealth creation is when your passion becomes your work.
There are simply not enough people working on the big problems of our era and our survival depends on unleashing the talent of the next generation of young leaders.
Force For the Future aims to create the learning institution of the 21st century. We won’t just tell people that they have to find their passion we will show them how. We will connect them with all the resources and people they need to go from a mindless sleepwalk through life to a passionate undertaking of the issues they care about and everything in between. We will assess exactly where a person is on the motivational scale and provide them with the resources to just take the next step. We believe the best way to have happier more fulfilled people who impact others on a large scale is to allow them to take ideas for a better world, refine them, prototype them and scale them. Investment in startup companies represent .02% of our GDP yet they represent 17.8% of our output, and yet over 75% do not succeed. That is a major force for good in the world.
We think too many people overestimate what they need to get started. They don’t three degrees and a lengthy resume before they can began working on realizing their visions for improving the world around them; they just need initiative, a little help and a little luck.
Our model basically boils down to really well connected unschooling with abundant resources. It’s based on the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And it aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.
The path Force For the Future is advocating isn’t anything new, in fact it is a well trodden road by most of the world’s successful people. The rules of success aren’t that hard, and there’s no need to reinvent them. We don’t need new rules we just need more people to use them to create their own success stories. Impact begins with a burning desire to accomplish something, followed by 100% faith that you will achieve it no matter what, leading to definite plans of actions about how to achieve it, and continued persistence through failed plans which give you the feedback to make a better plan until you find one that works. By pursuing this process you naturally gather other necessary ingredients along the way like co-founders, mentors, and funding.
Why do only a select few discover and utilize the basic rules of achievement while it is a fruitless struggle for others?
It’s a mix of personality type, hospitable formative environments, and seizing lucky opportunities when they present themselves.
But we want to open this incredibly fulfilling path to more people and show that a career driven by passion and impact is very possible. We believe that the role of the learning institutions in the 21st century is to enable everyone to invest a majority of their energy in their passions and improve the lives of other in the process.
To create this environment Force For the Future hardly needs to build anything new. We are just going to assemble all the information, resources, and opportunities already out there and make it easier for you to navigate the ecosystem like many successful people have done before.
Most people only ask the “what” questions. What are you doing lately? What’s up? What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do this summer? What are you studying? It takes a rare breed of person to ask the “why” and “how” questions.
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.
I recently followed a link to this article on Wired profiling the first scientific discovery made by a machine with no human intervention.
This doesn’t signal the end of the role human scientists. Instead it puts increasing upward pressure on scientists developing their creative faculties. And this trend is not prevalent just in science. Everything that can be automated will be. Automation squeezes all jobs out of the marketplace except the ones that require creativity. On the flip side, these automated tools also enhance human creativity for those who choose to embrace it.
If robotic scientists made their way into other labs, their human counterparts would not be out of a job anytime soon. If anything, they may find their work more exciting.
“There may be teams of humans and machines,” says King. “Robots will be doing more and more of actual experimental work and simple cycles of hypothesis generation. Humans would migrate to more strategic and creative positions. How can we waste trained post-docs by making them pipette things in labs? It’s crazy.
The run of the mill engineering student who can solve known problems is no longer safe. It is a necessity both for the innovative progress of the world and the scientist’s ability to find work that he be able to break new ground, not just incrementally improve on existing innovations.
At a panel at Singularity University I attended in early August, Scott Hassan of Willow Garage, who worked closely with Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, told the story of how they built the first prototype of Google. He recounted how they coded every evening for about 6 weeks. Only 6 weeks. And now they have thousands of engineers just working on improving that small piece of code they churned out in 6 weeks. “What we have found is that it’s very easy to find someone who can improve something just a little bit, but it’s very rare to find someone who can create even just a prototype of something completely new.”
Recommended Reading: Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. Richard Florida’s The Rise of The Creative Class (which admittedly I haven’t read yet but it’s on my list. But I have heard Florida’s thesis expressed many times.)
It's a bad time for me to be traveling so much. I need to be putting in 12 hr days now. Meeting ppl/Heads down work best done in alt phases
about 14 hours ago from web
If startups make something people want but won't pay for are they doomed? Not selling hard enough? Not capturing the true value? Articles?
about 1 day ago from Tweetie
The way people use "socialism" conjures up images of dreary starving russians. Like how advertisers attach happiness to cars. It's branded.
about 3 days ago from Tweetie
