Three Things #9: Mar. 13, 2022
On writing, Dune, and time management
I had some trouble writing this past week, probably because my mind has been elsewhere with everything that’s going on in the world. But my strategy is to write about the first thing I feel like writing about, and that seems to work even when writing feels tough. This week’s things are a bit scattered.
Thing #1: The Meta Thing
This is the ninth edition of Three Things (I guess that’s 27 things in total so far). Since it’s an experiment, I want to take the opportunity to briefly check in and evaluate how it’s going.
I’m quite proud of having published nine of these already. The topics have run the gamut, from pandemic to political economy to crypto to ETHDenver to current events: a real random sampling of my mind. Surprisingly, the format is working reasonably well. I’ve had limited time to write recently, but I’ve managed to research, write, and edit for a few minutes each day, and it’s allowed me to go deeper than I could on Twitter. That’s one of my goals here: to explore interesting, important, timely ideas in more depth than I can in tweet format. Those are the good parts.
The bad part is that the list of things I want to write about more deeply is growing. As one example, I keep seeing more and more hostile design patterns in software, and I can’t find any good articles describing this idea with concrete examples. I want to write one, but I’m afraid it would be quite a long piece. As another example, I want to write more about software architecture and how it can be better, how Urbit fits in, and how Urbit can be better. But that’s also something that won’t fit into tens or probably even hundreds of words.
The thing I most want to write about is figuring out what to work on—both a concrete list of ideas, and a process for deciding. I started a list at the beginning of the year aiming for 10 items, and it’s grown to 25+. I have no idea how to make such a list fit into Three Things. If I write about three of the ideas each week, which would be pretty cool, it would totally monopolize the channel for 2-3 months, and by then the list would definitely have grown and evolved. I could try to bucket the list, or approach it in some other way (“three ways to choose what to work on”?) but that feels generic and relatively uninteresting.
So here we are, and here we remain. As they say, the medium is the message. Every medium has strengths and weaknesses: messages that it’s well-suited to, and those to which it’s not because they don’t fit neatly inside the frame. As we go, I’m learning the limits of this medium, which is good. It’s kind of like moving into a new home. No two homes are alike, but you can be comfortable in just about any home once you get used to it (and install the right furniture). It’s also a bit like learning a new language. Any sufficiently mature language can be used to express any idea, but you have to change how you express the idea to suit the language.
As for the things I feel called to address that don’t suit this medium, I’m confident that it will work itself out. Maybe the medium will evolve. Maybe I’ll work on them in parallel and publish them elsewhere. Maybe I’ll change my mind about the topics. Or maybe I’ll find a way to make it work here, in this format. Regardless, we’ll all get through this together. Onward and upward, fellow travelers.
For more: Try writing, or producing any art really, in different formats and using different mediums. Explore the limitations of each.
Thing #2: Dune
As I’ve gotten older I’ve gained more understanding of the way early influences shaped me into the person I am today. Two of my biggest early influences were gaming and books. I think I was drawn to games and books—i.e., stories—of high-tech and adventure because I grew up quite isolated on a farm in a rural community and the Internet was my only portal to the wider world.
Dune has no shortage of high tech or adventure! One of the main themes of the overarching story arc is technology, and our relationship to it as a society and a species. I read Dune (the first book) for the first time in high school. I remember really struggling with it at the time. It was unlike anything I’d ever read before. I started reading, got stuck in the first 50 pages, put it down, and then started it again a few weeks later—at least twice 😂. The concepts and themes of the book—ecology and nature, statecraft and power, religion and tradition, fear and control, the power of language—were completely new and foreign to me. Eventually, when I finally made it past the first few chapters, I was hooked and never looked back. I’ve been a die-hard fan ever since and I’ve nearly finished reading all of the books: not just the first book, not just the six books Frank Herbert wrote, but the entire franchise, all 22 novels plus some of the extras. Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and even Harry Potter have failed to hold my attention and interest the same way over the years.
Dune is arguably the most epic story ever told in terms of the span of time and distance covered. I think a large part of my deep, long-lasting fascination with technology, not as an object in and of itself but as a means to achieving certain social ends, and all of the pitfalls that entails, was inspired by Dune (and, to a lesser extent, by other stories I consumed around the same time such as Final Fantasy VII). By the same token, my love of travel and my fascination with faraway places and foreign cultures is probably a product of the same early influences.
I think Dune has given me two other valuable things. The first is a respect for the power of stories. Dune’s vast story arc covers many themes and messages, but at the bottom level it’s a story about stories: human stories, the stories we tell, and how those stories compete with one another and persist over great distances and over many generations. Some stories succeed more for organic reasons, on their own merit, while others succeed more because of the intent behind them. Dune talks about both types. In this respect Dune was my first introduction to the idea of memetics.
The second thing is the power of long-term thinking. It can be very, very hard to zoom out and see how we, and our day to day realities, fit into a broader human tapestry that spans unimaginable time and distance. Most of us think and act primarily in the present, on a day to day basis (if not even an hour to hour basis!). In the Bene Gesserit, who redefine long-termism, Dune posits that there’s a long arc of humanity, of human civilization, and that that arc can be stewarded or bent, over time, in a certain direction. There’s a clear spiritual component to this way of thinking about life, and humanity, and where each of us fits in. I read something almost Buddhist into it: we are all connected as part of Indra’s net. I find this idea essentially reassuring and it gives me faith.
There’s a great deal more I could say about Dune and the role it’s played in my life, but probably not much more I can say without resorting to spoilers or turning into a drooling fanboy.
For more: Read Dune. All of the books! Go lose yourself in the story, and watch the recent film, if you haven’t already. It’s not terrible. Then tell me what you think.
Thing #3: Work Work Balance
What is the optimal number of projects to work on at any given time? This is a question I struggle with quite a bit. For most people, most of the time, the answer is probably “one.” But I don’t think this is universal.
For one thing, not everyone has the same personality type. Some people prefer to go super deep and focus on one thing for months or even years. They may become focused domain experts such as a “master engineer.” Other people—like me, the “chase shiny things” ADHD type—have trouble doing the same thing for even a few hours and work better with a portfolio of projects so they can shift from one to another when focus fades and attention wanders.
For another thing, it depends to some extent on experience and seniority. Early in your career it usually makes sense to do one thing for a while, because it takes a while to learn a trade or a skill. Also, early on it takes a while to have an impact on a project. Later in your career, once you’ve gained skills, experience, and confidence, and built a network, you can realistically have a larger impact in a shorter period of time. Sometimes, even a simple advisory phone call or making a single connection can create a lot of value.
Then there’s also the question of time and space. Sometimes, in a more mature field and/or in a market downturn, it really makes sense to batten down the hatches and focus on one thing for a while. But in a novel field, during a bull market, it can be very hard to do this because there are a lot of things worth working on, a lot of places to add value, and not enough hands on deck. This is sort of what crypto has felt like for the past year or two. As the opportunity set and capital inflows have grown dramatically, while the influx of talent hasn’t kept pace, there’s been a surfeit of opportunity for well-connected, experienced insiders. As a result most folks I know that have been in the space for a while are working on multiple things.
I struggle with this question. On the one hand, I sort of know that you can only really do one thing well at a time. Maybe two if you’re talented and good at managing your time, but no one can seriously work productively or efficiently on more than one or two things. On the other hand, there are legitimately a lot of interesting, important projects to contribute to in our space today, and there simply aren’t enough people to work on them all, so many of us feel called to do double duty (or triple, or quadruple…).
Another way of looking at it is that it’s becoming more common and more acceptable to take a “diversified portfolio approach” to work (as in investing). Rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket, it can make sense to contribute to different projects, in different areas, in different capacities. Over time, you can prune your “garden” to home in on the opportunities that are greatest and where you can have the most impact, while letting the others wither. (It’s very hard to know ahead of time which these will be!)
I really want to move to a world where employment contracts are not exclusive—and where non-competes are no longer a thing—so that everyone is free to follow their hearts and contribute to the project or projects they’re most interested in and best able to add value to at any given point in time. At the same time, though, job security is important, and even in such a neo-artisan, gig work economy, workers should have secure access to benefits such as health care, paid leave, and retirement accounts. We have a lot of infrastructure to build to make sure that this is accessible to as many people as possible regardless of where and how they create value for themselves, their families, and society. I don’t know what this brave new world will look like, but I know that it will not resemble the current system where employment and benefits are all or nothing, zero sum, and tied to a single company.
For more: Read up on future of work. Join a DAO. Help us figure this out together.