👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
A request: If you like this essay, could you do me a favour and hit that 🤍 heart so that it becomes a ❤️ heart? This helps me understand what kind of topics I should write more about. This also signals Substack that more people should read this essay.
Q: Why was YouTube founded in the 2000s and not in the 1990s?
In February 2005 three friends — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — created a video-sharing platform. Karim uploaded the inaugural video on the platform titled Me at the zoo on April 2005. In a little less than two years Google acquired the platform for $1.65 billion. YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries.
Fascinating story indeed, but here’s the interesting bit. Had the founders tried to execute the exact same idea ten years earlier it wouldn’t have been so successful. In fact, most likely it would have been a spectacular failure.
For starters, the vast majority of web users were on painfully slow dial-up connections in 1995. Sometimes it would take minutes to download a small image. The average two-minute-long YouTube clip would have taken as much as an hour to download on then-standard 14.4 bps modems. Nobody has that kinda patience.
Another key factor to YouTube’s success was that its video service was based on Adobe’s Flash platform which had already become the standard at that time. This meant that the founders could focus on the user experience of sharing and discussing clips, and not spend time and effort developing a whole new video standard from scratch. Interestingly, Flash itself wasn’t released until late 1996, and didn’t support video until 2002, thereby making the 2000s the ideal time for a video-sharing platform such as YouTube to come into existence. In the words of Isaac Newton, YouTube had the shoulders of giants to piggyback.
Let’s take another example. Charles Babbage, the father of modern computing created the blueprint of the Analytical Engine — the world’s first programmable computer — in the late 19th century. He toiled on it for the last 30 years of his life, but to no avail. Babbage had most of the system sketched out in his lifetime, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.
On the other hand, Babbage’s Difference Engine — a fantastically complex fifteen-ton contraption, with over 25,000 mechanical parts, designed specifically to calculate polynomial functions — debuted in 1855, and went into mass production within two decades.
Why did the Analytical Engine prove to be such a short-term dead end, given the brilliance of Babbage’s ideas, whereas his Difference Engine didn’t? Well, Babbage simply didn’t have the spare parts of such a machine back then. He was effectively sketching out a machine for the electronic age during the middle of the steam-powered mechanical revolution. In other words, Babbage didn’t have any giants’ shoulders to stand upon.
In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson explains the idea of The Adjacent Possible pioneered by scientist Stuart Kauffman to explain the set of first-order combination of spare parts that lead to innovation.
Johnson suggests that ideas are constrained by the skills and technologies that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticise breakthrough innovations, but ideas are structures that can be created only with the available parts. Real world breakthrough happens only when we take what is available with us and put them together to create a something new.
Babbage’s design for the Difference Engine was a work of genius, no doubt, but it did not transcend the adjacent possible of its day, whereas the Analytical Engine did. It was far ahead of its time — in The Remote Possible.
Similarly, YouTube would have been inconceivable in the 1980s since there was no home internet. It was impossible in the 1990s due to slow browsing speeds. It wouldn’t most likely have been possible in the 2000s had there not been video support on Flash. Video-sharing on the internet was an idea that was just waiting to happen as soon as the spare parts became available.
“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself,” Johnson writes.
By this logic, we can think of innovation as opening a door. We begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that we haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once we open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that we couldn’t have reached from our original starting point. If we keep opening new doors, we will eventually have built a palace.
Framing problems as the adjacent possible is liberating. The founder of Shopify Tobi Lütke once said: “Predicting the future is easy, but timing it is hard.” Sure we know that autonomous vehicles are coming, but we have no idea exactly when they’ll become ubiquitous.
Whenever you find yourself in a spot with your eyes on something that’s a few doors away, it’s time to reconsider your approach. However, not all doors are equal, so try to find the doors that would lead to the biggest possible expansion of the adjacent possible — be it with an invention or a startup.
Exformation
Effective communication depends on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating.
If someone is talking about cows, for example, what is said will be unintelligible unless the person listening has some idea what a cow is, what it is good for, and in what contexts one might encounter one. In using the word “cow”, the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied.
For example, Victor Hugo wrote to his publisher to ask how his most recent book, Les Miserables, was getting on. Hugo just wrote “?”, to which his publisher replied “!”, to indicate it was selling well. The exchange would have no meaning to a third party because the shared context is unique to those taking part in it. This shared context is explicitly discarded information, or in short exformation.
While, information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with, exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything at all.
Few Rules for a Better Life
Things you use for a significant portion of your life (bed, office-chair, etc.) are worth investing in.
Establish clear rules about when to throw out old junk. Once clear rules are established, junk will cease to be a problem. This is because any explicit rule would be superior to our implicit rules such as keep this broken stereo for five years in case I learn how to fix it.
Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you only rely on motivation.
You can improve your communication more effectively than you can improve your intelligence. If you’re not the smartest in the room but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly.
Make accomplishing things as easy as possible. Find the easiest way to start exercising. Find the easiest way to start writing. People make things harder than they have to be and get frustrated when they can’t succeed.
Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot.
Selfish people should listen to advice to be more selfless, selfless people should listen to advice to be more selfish. Whenever you receive advice, consider its opposite as well, otherwise you might be filtering out the advice you need most.
Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility.
Keep your identity small. “I’m not the kind of person who does things like that” is not an explanation, it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out, and men from dancing.
Think a little about why you enjoy what you enjoy. If you can explain what you love about Dune, you can now communicate not only with Dune fans, but with people who love those aspects in other books.
A norm of eating with your family without watching something will lead to better conversations. If this idea fills you with dread, consider getting a new family.
In relationships, look for somebody you can enjoy just hanging out with. Long-term relationships are mostly spent just chilling.
People can be the wrong fit for you without being bad. Being a person is complicated and hard.
If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal part in you will want to join in the fun of righteously destroying somebody. Resist this, you’ll only add ugliness to the world.
Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle scammers or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.
Don’t punish people for trying. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better.
Don’t punish people for admitting they were wrong. You make it harder for them to improve.
You don’t have to love your job. Jobs can be many things, but they’re also a way to make money. Many people live fine lives in okay jobs by spending the money they make on things they care about.
Liking and wanting things are different. There are things like junk food that you want beyond enjoyment. But you can also like things (like reading) without wanting them.
Bad things (such as a pandemic) happen dramatically. Good things happen gradually (for example, malaria deaths dropping annually), and don’t feel like news. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.
Few Tips on Writing
You have five seconds to get people’s attention. Books, blogs, emails, reports, it doesn’t matter — if you don’t sell them in five seconds you’ve exhausted most of their patience.
Whoever says the most stuff in the fewest words wins.
Most good writing is a by-product of good reading. You’ll never meet a good writer who doesn’t spend most of their time reading.
If you have an idea but think “someone has already written that” just remember there are 1,010 published biographies of Winston Churchill.
Write the kind of stuff you like to read. Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows. Writing for others is work, and it shows.
Before You Go…
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend. Also, consider subscribing. If you aren’t ready to become a paid subscriber yet, you can also consider buying me a cup of coffee.
I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋