17th October, 2021
Week 42/52
Photo by Boba Jaglicic on Unsplash
⬇️ Reduce
There is a famous quote, often attributed to Einstein, about simplicity:
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
This is a very old idea. We might say: timeless.
But, interestingly, those are not the exact words that Einstein used.1
This is what he actually said:2
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Of course he did: he was a theoretical physicist! It’s the same basic idea, just using more complicated words.
It was only later that somebody else found a more elegant and succinct way to make the same point, on his behalf.
Which is a perfect example of the idea itself in practice, I suppose.
🐝 Busy
Here is a little thought experiment…
Imagine somebody who fills their house to overflowing with stuff, shuffling clutter from one room to another just in time as each space is needed during the day, leaving no spare room to take in anything new?
How do we judge them?
Then, imagine somebody who manages their finances right on the edge, spending every last cent of their credit card limit, transferring money from one bank account to another just in time to cover repayments, never quite sure if their next purchase will tip them into the red?
Neither of those sound ideal, right?
Now, imagine somebody who manages their time like this – i.e. fills their days with work, constantly juggles their to-do list as urgent tasks come and go, and leaves no spare time to do any one thing well?
That’s also not ideal. But it might sound familiar!
One thing nearly all of us have in common is: we’re busy.
The really curious thing about this is how we romanticise it:
Them: How have you been?
Us (said with pride): Oh, you know, busy busy!
We boast about it! Why?
Maybe we've just normalised it. Perhaps this is now what we expect each other to say. Like the exhausted and knowing nods exchanged between two parents of newborns, safe in the knowledge that neither is getting enough sleep, perhaps we take comfort from connecting with others in the same tough situation.
Maybe it’s just easier for us to measure inputs, than to look for evidence of outputs? It's easy to count the number of hours we spend at work, the number of meetings in our calendar or the number of emails in our inbox. It’s easy to assume that if we are busy then lots of things must be getting completed. It is, in other words, easy to confuse activity for progress.
Or maybe we're just reluctant to be honest. As an experiment I tried to consciously swap out the words I used when I was asked how I was - rather than flattering myself with negatives (busy, stretched, slammed, etc) I looked for positive alternatives (full - as in "days full of interesting and awesome things", focussed, engaged). But I was only really kidding myself. It did at least force me to reflect on how excited I was to be "busy".
In 1930 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by now we'd all be working 15 hour weeks.3 I think he was actually correct, but not in the way he expected. Most of us struggle to do three hours of productive work per day. How else would we find the time for social media otherwise?
The more interesting question is why we fill so many hours with non-productive work.
Doing a great job nearly always means focus, and focus means saying no, doing less.
We can be busy or remarkable, but not both.
What do we choose?
🏏 Score
I’ve said before, the intersection of sport and technology is my happy place.
The Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup starts this week in Oman and the United Arab Emirates.4 This gives me the flimsiest of excuses to link to one of my favourite data visualisation projects, from a few years back:
Visualising Cricket by Michael Lascarides
This is an attempt to show the details of a one-day cricket match in a single chart. The innovation is that it includes a representation of both the runs scored in each over and the dot balls (balls from which no run was scored). It’s basically a cross between the traditional way of scoring a game using paper and pen and the “Manhatten” graphs popularised by TV coverage.
For example, the semi-final from the Men’s 2015 World Cup between NZ & South Africa:
Or the quarter-final between NZ & West Indies, featuring the blistering 237 from Martin Guptill (including a couple of balls up on the roof of the then Westpac Stadium in Wellington):
It’s squeezing a lot of information into a single chart, if you look closely, but also works at a glance from a distance. I love it.
Michael is originally from North America, now living in Dunedin. Most people who love cricket have at least one fun story about trying to describe the quirks of cricket to somebody from overseas who doesn’t know the game. It’s not an easy job! I think it’s no excuse that this elegant visualisation was created by somebody who didn’t grow up immersed in cricket and cricket scoring. Sometimes you have to be outside of the fishbowl to appreciate the water!
I played cricket all through school and for a few years after that. As an opening batsman who never lasted very long at the crease, I got lots of practice keeping score. Looking back, I think possibly the only reason I kept being selected was because of the stats I would prepare for the team, tracking results over the season (it certainly wasn’t because of my elusive leg-spin).
In the early 1990s my first computer was a Commodore-16, and naturally the first thing I tried to program was a cricket scoring application. My dream was to create a new and improved “worm” chart to track the progress of the game. Despite spending hours sketching the code out on refill pad, and even more hours meticulously typing it up, it would always crash at the change of innings (with the benefit of hindsight and a Computer Science degree, it was wildly ambitious to think my inefficient code would work with such a restricted amount of RAM ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
I’m delighted Michael actually got his version to work. Maybe I can convince him to revive this over the next few weeks - I think the format would work even better with the T20 format.
Addendum
In the footer of every post this year I’ve noted that this is all a work-in-progress. Here are some more notes for the second drafts…
Muppets
On 29th August, in my post about start-up theatre, I referenced a Nightingale & Code paper called Muppets and Gazelles.
I was reminded that different people hear very different things when I call somebody a “muppet”.
To me it was intended to be derogatory (i.e. a little gormless, unable to think for themselves).
To others it is something else entirely (i.e. cute, uber-friendly, anxious to teach you things … like counting and co-operation).
Is it just a kiwi thing? Or, are there other places in the world that disrespect the Muppets like this too?
Either way, be warned. If you intend to offend pick your words carefully!
Fourth
On 25th July, in my post about the upcoming Tokyo Olympics I noted that in 2016 in Rio we finished 4th (just out of the medals) nine times. Applying our preferred sort order that meant we finished 4th more that any other country on a per capita basis.
So, you may be wondering how we did in Tokyo 2020 (actually 2021)? Of course you are…
This time around we had only three fourth place finishes:
Paul Snow-Hansen and Dan Willcox in the Men’s 470 Sailing;
Lisa Carrington and team in the Woman’s Kayak 4x500m; and
Men’s Team Pursuit in Cycling (by far the most difficult to watch of the three, after their crash while leading in the bronze medal race)
Punching above their weight on the Leather Medal Table this time around were Hungary, with 14 fourth places to go with their 20 medals.
New Zealanders also won 20 medals. Fellow kiwi Craig Nevill-Manning (also one of the very early employees at Google) maintains MedalsPerCapita.com. Hilariously, we finished fourth overall on their weighted per capita basis medal table, behind San Marino, Bermuda and Bahamas.
Speaking of world class… I was sent this definition from the Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense:
"World class is a phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment events, as well as a wide variety of insecure individuals, to assert that they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are."
Indeed.
On a much more positive note, yesterday 2.6% of the population of NZ received a Covid vaccination shot. That’s a rate of vaccination that exceeds the peaks in nearly every other country in the world. Genuinely World Class!
Why-Luck
Last week (on 10th October) I wrote about how we can break luck down into different components: Who, What, Where and When. I missed an obvious* addition to this list, perhaps the most important one: Why-Luck.
(* note: only obvious, as is often the case, with the benefit of hindsight)
As Sam Wong from Blackbird reminded me:
You forgot the why-luck! The more ambitious and meaningful your mission, the more likely you are to attract the people who will come and do their life’s work for you, and this in turn increases your who-luck, and in some cases mitigates any bad where-luck.
So true. If we can articulate our values well then it makes everything else easier.
See also: the post I wrote on 22nd August about some techniques that can help when we are trying to document shared values.
Dave Grohl
On 16th May I quoted Dave Grohl in my post about how reality television thinking has infiltrated start-ups:
When I think about kids watching a TV show like American Idol or The Voice, then they think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s how you become a musician, you stand in line for eight fucking hours with 800 people at a convention center and then you sing your heart out for someone and then they tell you it’s not fucking good enough.’ Can you imagine? It’s destroying the next generation of musicians!
Read the post for the whole quote.
I noted that the source of that was an article in Delta Sky Mag (i.e. an American airline seat-back magazine) I had read many years ago, and that I couldn’t find any reference to it online anymore.
So, my thanks to Tim Kong, who found it in the Wayback Machine. 😀
He also shared this excellent and related Grohl quote, where he is imagining how Bob Dylan might go if he entered The Voice:
I believe that imperfection creates beautiful things and it actually gives way to progress so that people should be less concerned with being perfect and more concerned with being themselves.
Pitch Decks
On 8th August I wrote a whole post about pitching and completely failed to incorporate this excellent advice from Ryan at Timely:
Specifically:
Never write a pitch deck. Write a strategy deck that focuses more on our weaknesses than our strengths... and how we'll overcome them post-investment. Our new investor wants to know how their money makes our business better.
And:
Never write a pitch deck (cont). Write the announcement to our customers and the team. If we can't articulate why raising money is good for them, we shouldn't be doing it.
Please read the whole thread!
Somebody To Love
On 18th April I linked to the George Michael version of Somebody To Love.
Here is another live version, by the original artists this time.
Look out for the perfectly positioned roadie when Freddie sits back down at the piano at the end. If only we could all find somebody like that…
I’m grateful for everybody who has contacted me with feedback so far this year. Please keep it coming. If anything I’ve written has made you think or caused you to disagree, let me know:
Top Three is a weekly collection of things I notice in 2021. I’m writing it for myself, and will include a lot of half-formed work-in-progress, but please feel free to follow along and share it if it’s interesting to you.
This is a recurring pattern.
Source: ‘Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren’
The T20 World Cup is an annual event. Future historians may struggle to unpick this: the 2021 World Cup, originally scheduled for India, is now being played in Dubai, while the 2020 World Cup, originally scheduled for Australia, will be played in 2022. 🤪