Look Where Others Are Not Looking
Or, “Because Bezos said it” should never be a reason to accept an idea
👋 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.
People have a pathological habit of placing “experts” and others they look up to on a pedestal. Their ideas are treated as gold, and all of their words are accepted as worldly wisdom (even if they are absurd).
When your friend Peter tells you something, you tend to ignore it, but if the same idea comes from a guy called Peter Thiel, you might treat it as a revelation.
We tend to give experts infallible statuses. We take their ideas at face value without ever challenging them. On the other hand, we dismiss ideas from non-experts without enough consideration. This is wrong!
Ideas shouldn’t be taken at face value. It doesn’t matter whether they’re coming from experts or non-experts. Unless you have a strong reason — your own reason — to believe in something, it shouldn’t matter even if it’s the best idea in the world.
For example, startups copy ideas every day, but they can get only so much simply by copying. They may get access to the end result, but they don’t get access to the thought process around it: why this solution, why not other solutions, what are the tradeoffs and future prospects, etc. Ideas, unless internalised, don’t have a lot of value in them. They may have some use for a while, but in the long run, they are useless.
By that logic, “Because Bezos said it” should never be a reason to accept an idea. Yes, the people who have earned expertise in a field are more likely to produce thoughts and ideas that are worth consuming but, as I mentioned, blindly accepting them at face value takes us down the wrong path.
Another problem is when we give too much attention to experts, we miss out on the ideas of those around us. Surprisingly, people around us often have just as strong ideas. Often they aren’t very polished or well articulated, but they are just as good in terms of quality and strength. These are gems hidden in plain sight. Be on the lookout for them.
You see, everyone has access to the ideas of celebrities via podcasts, articles, and videos. But if you are consuming what everyone else is consuming, you are thinking what everyone else is thinking. So don’t be surprised if you are getting the results as everybody else is getting.
To have an unfair advantage, you have to look where others are not looking: the countless ideas and perspectives that are spread around you, but aren’t getting any attention. Find ways to stumble upon them serendipitously over meetups and discussions.
Look for the Elons who didn’t become Musk, or the Jeffs who are the future Bezos. Some of them may write thoughtful essays or books read by few. Others may create interesting videos or podcasts that are consumed by a minuscule. These are the people who see things differently — the uncut diamonds, the square pegs in the round holes. Seek them out, learn from them, and internalise their ideas. They are the hidden gems.
Middle-Class Creators
Li Jin talks about how incomes are heavily skewed towards the top 1% (or less) creators in the passion economy. “On Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage of $1,160 per month in 2017. On Spotify, artists need 3.5 million streams per year to achieve the annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker of $15,080.”
She suggests a couple of measures platforms can take to bridge the gap and create a middle-class of creators who get paid just enough to keep on creating. She has good intentions, but there’s nothing you and I can take away from this.
The only advice that’s relevant to us is to create multiple sources of income via multiple SKUs such as newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc., so that if one source fails, another can kick in.
Until the platforms take notice of the other 9 suggestions, I guess you and I are on our own.
— The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class
Choosing Side Projects
If you are building a side project choose one that solves a specific, limited problem.
“Build the best time tracking app ever” is neither limited nor specific, nor is it really a problem you’re solving. “I want to keep track of how much time I spend actually working on homework vs. procrastinating” is better, but still not quite problem-driven.
A good problem statement is: “I want to prevent myself from visiting Facebook and other specific websites while I’m working on homework.” Now you have a clear sense of what software you are building.
But, how do you choose a side project if you don’t have any specific problems in mind? The key is to still have constraints and limits so that your project is small, achievable and has a clear goal.
The key is having constraints and a clear goal. Software is just a tool, there is no inherent value in producing more. Value is produced by solving problems. A half-solved problem or a half-finished game are valueless, so you want your initial goal to be small and constrained so that it’s achievable.
— How to Choose a Side Project
Making Tough Decisions
In this essay, Barack Obama lays down his principles of making good decisions in tough situations. If you imagine Obama reading it out loud in his unique style, it’ll be doubly interesting. Here are my notes.
Lean on a process. Rather than getting paralysed in the quest for a perfect solution, or succumbing to the temptation of going with your gut, create a decision-making process instead. One where you listen to others, follow the facts, consider your goals, and weigh all of that against your own principles. Then, no matter how things turn out, you know you’ve done your level best with the available information.
When you have a tough, almost unsolvable decision to make, you don’t just want people to tell you what you want to hear. When you solicit views from a large group of people, it can lead to groupthink. Therefore, having one contrarian (or a devil’s advocate) in the room can push all to think harder.
Take breaks. You cannot predict how it might clarify your thinking. “The decisions I had to make were so weighty and consequential, the pace so unyielding, that it was easy to feel almost removed from myself. But the time I spent away from my desk, especially with my wife and kids — whether coaching Sasha’s basketball team or date night with Michelle—was a crucial, daily reminder of who I fundamentally was as a person. This was so important because we bring our whole selves to the decisions we make. And those decisions, in turn, both reflect and determine who we are.”
While you cannot guarantee an outcome, you can be confident in making a decision. Find a framework that helps you consider your choices—knowing that there may not be one perfect answer. That way you rest a little easier knowing, come what may, you did the best you could in the given circumstances. There are no black and white solutions. The world is complicated, and that’s what makes it interesting.
— How I Approach the Toughest Decisions
Before You Go…
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