On the importance of the right questions:

The trouble with trying to solve questions posed by communities is that all the good ones are gone, especially if they can be answered. Why then do not we see the scientists around us spend their nights hunting for questions? Instead, it seems that having a clear question is a scientist’s natural state of mind; after all, the storyline of almost every scientific paper starts with a clearly defined question and then proceeds directly to the answer. In reality, the way scientists retell their discoveries may reflect much more how humans communicate knowledge than how those discoveries were actually made.

[…]

[If] a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown—the hallmark of night science.

[…]

Why, then, does it not seem this way? Why do questions appear secondary to answers? It may be because a new question is so powerful that it transforms our reality. A new question tends to erase its own origin; it is hard to imagine that there ever was a time when the question was not there.

We are living in a world where answers seem ever easier to come by. But answers are only half the question.

Following up from our brief discussion of yoyu, an excerpt from George Saunders’ 2013 convocation speech at Syracuse, presented without unnecessary commentary:

When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .

And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

There is perhaps no career/life advice given more often in recent years than to say no to things. To be sure, the Power of No is important. We are finite creatures with limited time. We simply cannot do it all, and no one will respect our time for us. (And to be fair, people also often advise new careerlings to say yes to everything in order to build a reputation and discover what you like).

But I also believe there is a pendulum component to people‘s attitude about work that is a perhaps overly profound sense of scarcity. That we win by doing the bare minimum. That we cannot give of ourselves without being taken advantage of. While I agree that the institution doesn’t love you back, I nonetheless think this is a depressing way to approach a massive fraction of your life.

There is a Japanese concept that Craig Mod refers to in his book Things Become Other Things called yoyu, which he describes as the extra space in your heart for other people. I think there is a missing sense of abundance in many people, a deep conviction that there is simply not enough of “you” to give of yourself. That our love and attention and focus and work are too limited a precious resource to be shared.

Time is a zero-sum game, and we all only have 24 hours a day to deploy, but at the same time, those hours are not equally effective or meaningful if we are willing to share ourselves generously. Adam Grant describes in Give and Take that “givers” are overrepresented at both the top and bottom of the corporate ladder. Giving in self-destructive ways to selfish, bad people is an easy path to resentment and burnout, but giving generously is also a way to increase the number of possible paths to fulfillment.

Appreciation is a fantastic currency.

From Adam Butler’s “The Strip-Mining of Trust“:

The economists call trust “social capital,” but the name obscures the crucial asymmetry. Trust is not like money. It is more like topsoil—built up over generations through countless small depositions, easily washed away in a single season of careless extraction, and once gone, recoverable only on timescales that mock human planning. The farmer who strip-mines his soil for a decade of bumper harvests will leave his children a desert. The society that strip-mines its trust for a generation of efficiency gains will leave its children something worse: institutions that still stand in their accustomed places but have been hollowed out from within, and a friction industry selling services to navigate the rubble.

There is a story about a nurse in part three that is so compelling that I will not deprive you or Mr. Butler of some of the essay’s potency by trying to blockquote a reasonable portion of it. Just go read it.

This is not a failure of implementation but a structural limitation: to manage at scale what it cannot see, the system must convert discretionary judgment into measurable proxies. And here Goodhart’s Law begins its corrosive work. Once the proxy becomes the target, it ceases to measure what it was designed to capture. What gets measured gets managed; what gets managed gets gamed; what gets gamed gets hollowed out.

From Michael E. Porter’s classic Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors:

Overcoming fragmentation can be a very significant strategic opportunity. The payoff to consolidating a fragmented industry can be high because the costs of entry into it are by definition low, and there tend to be small and relatively weak competitors who offer little threat of retaliation… If [any] fundamental block to consolidation can be somehow overcome, this often triggers a process by which the entire structure of the industry changes.

One of the great travesties of the modern US economy has been the pursuit of profitable mediocrity through consolidation. We have fewer companies with bigger market caps to be sure, the biggest in the whole world, but I’m not convinced that’s where American greatness resides or how we will ensure its continued success.

Porter’s formulation is correct, of course, and yet this conception disregards the distinction between generating simple profit and creating shared value. Healthcare is an easy example where this trend has been disastrous.

Greg McKeown (most famous for Essentialism), on the Tim Ferriss podcast:

What I have learned is this strange law of inverse prioritization: The most important thing in our lives at any given time is the least likely thing to get done. Because it’s so important, the risk of failing at it is much higher than anything else in your life, so it adds to this procrastination feeling.

Procrastination as ego protection, shielding us from the emotional weight of identity-defining tasks.

McKeown argued:

1. Explore and Eliminate: Determine what is truly essential and eliminate everything else.
2. Make Execution Effortless: Design systems to make doing the right things easier, even on bad days. Additionally, pre-define what done means.
3. Intentionality: Decide consciously, don’t just react. As in, don’t succumb to the tyranny of the urgent over the important.

This brief post, and many others, is a perfect example of the law in action through productive procrastination.