And you might not like the output, but you probably can’t change the system by yourself. What you might be able to do is, back to your second thing, you’re not sitting in traffic. You are traffic. When you participate in a system, you’re either going to make that system more successful and get a prize, or you could try to fight that system, but you’re going to need a lot of kindling to do so because being in the system actually changes the system one way or the other.
—-
The circle of now goes back to time. A toddler has a circle of now that lasts seven seconds. If they don’t get what they want within seven seconds, they have a tantrum. Somebody at the peak of their maturity might have a circle of now that lasts a decade. I’m going to go through medical school and pay out money and have no fun for six or eight years because after that I will be able to achieve my dreams. That’s a very big circle of now. When you pick your partners, when you pick your investors, when you pick your customers, it would really help if you would pick people whose circle of now is similar to your circle of now.
—
I’m a freelancer, I have no employees. You’re looking at my whole team. I’ve been an entrepreneur, it’s a different job. Entrepreneurs build something bigger than themselves to get paid when they sleep. They use outside resources to build something they could sell. Whereas freelancers do a craft. And the only way to move up as a freelancer is to get better clients. You can’t work more hours, and hiring junior versions of you is not sustainable because if a junior version of you is better than you, they’re not going to take the gig. And if they’re worse than you, your clients are going to be unhappy. Getting better clients is the defining step, the goal if you’re going to be a successful freelancer.
—
The money always matters because money is nothing but a story. It is not a pile of green things or Bitcoin. It is a story.
—
Management and leadership, Ray Kroc and Henry Ford were pioneers of management. Frederick Taylor had a stopwatch and we got the phrase “human resources” from the idea of treating people like a machine. And if you’ve ever heard the phrase, “Being jerked around,” or calling someone a jerk, it comes from the Henry Ford Model T plant, because you would the workers and they would be dancing around like marionettes because there was someone like a stopwatch on every single motion. This is management. And management is super effective at a fast food restaurant or any process that you need people to act like a machine. If you don’t do it, no one’s going to show up for their shift and your productivity may go down. Leadership says, “I don’t know the right way, but I might be able to build a community of people in a place where they find the right way.”
—
And now with AI doing most of the jobs where we can write down specifically what we need done, management is going to get less and less important, and leadership becomes more and more important, which is why strategy matters so much. Because you want to tell people the strategy and let them find tactics.
—
Enshittification is what happens after a business that uses the network effect gets locked in and decides to aggressively make things worse for its users to make more money. Capitalism has built into it this doom loop that is getting faster and faster that says the race to the bottom pushes companies to mistreat the people they’ve locked in to make more money because that’s what they get rewarded for.
—
And so the challenge is take a deep breath and say, “What can I build that the me of five years from now is going to say thanks?”
- Thanks for walking away from those sunk costs.
- Thanks for ignoring those false proxies.
- Thanks for asking uncomfortable questions in service of making things better
Because that person five years from now, they’re going to be here soon. And it’s really great to pay the price and put in the work to become that person. And today is a good day to start.