Bible – @habits

Excerpts from an amazing essay about what makes startups unique (Godel Incompleteness for Startups)

It’s definitely an oldie (2013) but still very much a goodie

Full link: https://skibinsky.com/godel-incompleteness-for-startups/

Excerpts:

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As soon as a startup starts operating in the real world, the vast majority of factors will be outside of a startup direct control or even influence, while having absolutely dominating impact on that startup eventual outcome

Any … formal system capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, … formal system that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in theory

Infinity will always be far too rich, far too dense, far too big to be chained by anything countable – formal systems, software, and finite proofs. Better systems, better software can grab bigger chunks from infinity. Yet by expanding themselves they are no closer to fully capturing the potential variety hidden in continuum infinity. They just moved the boundary between “knowledge” and “unknown” further out.

The most brilliant minds already know pretty well about deficiency of any given formal system. The legendary Charlie Munger stresses the discipline of developing multiple overlapping mental models when developing his own formal system for investment. He understands no single system no matter how complex will give him the full truth

As an important side note, lets consider if time travelers move deeper into the past, to pitch Henry Ford or Nikola Tesla. However in this case the whole syntax of his proposition makes no sense. Computers do not exist, web and internet does not exist, everything he is saying is meaningless on a syntactical level. His statements belong to total unknowns for inventors of past centuries. Yet for Bill Gates, it represents a true yet un-provable statement.

Unfortunately neither old systems nor newly expanded ones like the one Larry helped create has knowledge about building social graphs or maintaining friend connections. There are a few companies out there – Friendster and Myspace, their whole capitalization is less then Google’s sushi budget

Discovery: The product or service the team builds is released to the real world. Real world complexity is continuum infinity, it’s not bound by any formal systems. What market “wisdom”, startup mentors, university professors, and plain old “common sense” knows is irrelevant – that’s formalization of reality, not the reality itself

Unfortunately there are absolutely no solid predictions we can do about this stage. At the end of the day the startup just has to be lucky enough to start close enough and navigate optimally enough to hit its first discovery before company disintegrates from lack of funding or team morale. The process can be as fast as few months or as long as a decade.

The process of formalization can take decades. As long as a startup has growth, especially non-linear growth driven by new products, the formalization is never finished. Yet sooner or later the process of formalization of any big discovery must end. Facebook will add the last unsigned user and will be permanently bound by birth rate. Everybody will own some version of the iPhone. Amazon’s catalog will carry every single item manufactured on the planet. The new expanded system that includes newly discovered true model might be big, yet it’s still a formal system, it’s still finite

Tech companies rarely die unless extremely badly mismanaged, they just move deeper and deeper into legacy part of the stack, as new formal systems keep being added to the outer shell.

Zombie startups represent small Gödel-statements. They are the small dots in the 3-area chart we used above. Gödel’s theorem only proves they exist – it doesn’t prove anything about their size or distribution. There will be Gödel statement for $100 opportunities just like there would be a few for $1B ones.

It’s inspiring to know at any moment in time there is an infinite number of true statements for new startups to discover and further expand our collective system. Gödel’s theorem is not really about our limits: it’s about possibilities always waiting to be discovered. The process is certainly hard and alien to us.

Excerpts from Slack founder’s essay “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here” (adding to Personal Bible)

He wrote the essay to align and hype Slack employees pre-launch. Nuggets on user behavior, business strategy, and startup life.

Source: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

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The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.

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Or, they could sell horseback riding. Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles. It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing and promotion opportunities (e.g., sponsoring school programs to promote riding to kids, working on land conservation or trail maps). It lets them think big and potentially be big.

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My favorite recent example is Lululemon: when they started, there was not a large market for yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories. They sold yoga like crazy: helping people find yoga studios near their homes, hosting free classes, sponsorships and scholarships, local ambassadors and training, etc. And as a result, they sold just under $1.4 billion worth of yoga-specific athletic wear and accessories in their most recent fiscal year.

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A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.

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It is very difficult to approach Slack with beginner’s mind. But we have to, all of us, and we have to do it every day, over and over and polish every rough edge off until this product is as smooth as lacquered mahogany.

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That’s it, thanks for reading.

Excerpts from “Acceleration of Addictiveness” by Paul Graham (adding to Personal Bible)

Going into my bible.

Source here: https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

All below are copied verbatim:

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Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work

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Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook

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Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

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As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings

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We’ll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it

Excerpts from “Why Everything is Becoming a Game”: “We humans are harder to manipulate than pigeons, but we can be manipulated in many more ways, because we have a wider spectrum of needs”

Going into my bible.

Source here: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-everything-is-becoming-a-game

All below are copied verbatim:

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Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior. From Frequent Flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonalds Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.

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We humans are harder to manipulate than pigeons, but we can be manipulated in many more ways, because we have a wider spectrum of needs. Pigeons don’t care much about respect, but for us it’s a primary reinforcer, to such an extent that we can be made to desire arbitrary sounds that become associated with it, like praise and applause.

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Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose. The brain evolved to solve problems, but the problems it had evolved for were now largely solved by technology. Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn’t make us happy, only aimless. And to stave off this aimlessness, we had to continually set ourselves goals purely to have goals to pursue, which Kaczynski called “surrogate activities”. These included sports, hobbies, and chasing the latest product that ads promised would make us happy.

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Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they merely served to keep us busy enough not to notice our dissatisfaction. Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full.

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We’re easily motivated by points and scores because they’re easy to track and enjoyable to accrue. As such, scorekeeping is, for many, becoming the new foundation of their lives. “Looksmaxxing” is a new trend of gamified beauty, where people assign scores to physical appearance and then use any means necessary to maximize their score. And in the online wellness space, there is now a “Rejuvenation Olympics” complete with a leaderboard that ranks people by their “age reversal”. Even sleep has become a game; many people now use apps like Pokemon Sleep that reward them for achieving high “sleep scores”, and some even compete to get the highest “sleep ranking”.

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On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: makeup, filters, fillers, surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off.

On TikTok and YouTube, there is another self-propagating system where pranksters compete to outdo each other in outrageousness to avoid being buried by the algorithm. Such extreme brinkmanship frequently leads to arrest or injury, and has even led to the deaths of, among others, Timothy Wilks and Pedro Ruiz.

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First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones

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Second: choose hard games over easy ones

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Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones

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Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a rewar

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Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can’t be quantified.

Start With Creation — excerpts: “The Muse arrives to us most readily during creation, not before”

If you have 5 minutes just go read the dang thing; I’m sharing half of it here as excerpts because it’s such a perfect internet essay: short, wise, memorable, re-readable.

Going into my bible as well.

EXCERPTS copied verbatim:

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The Muse arrives to us most readily during creation, not before. Homer and Hesiod invoke the Muses not while wondering what to compose, but as they begin to sing. If we are going to call upon inspiration to guide us through, we have to first begin the work.

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It is in approaching the edges of our abilities that we are really learning, and often simple projects feel more like delaying things, including delaying mastery. A chance of failure ensures your hands are firmly touching reality, and not endlessly flipping through the textbook, or forever flirting only with ideas.

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Someone once mentioned to me that “Write what you know” is not particularly interesting advice, and “Write what you’re learning” is much better

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On the other hand it is inspiring to help someone who has begun. There’s a bit of a silly demonstration of this in those viral videos that show a person starting to dig a hole or making a sandcastle at the beach, and a number of people come along to help. The principle is not at all silly: Enthusiasm is contagious.

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I said some time ago on Twitter offhandedly, “If you have a ten year plan, what’s stopping you from doing it in two?” This is what I mean. One can too easily sleepwalk into years of “I wish I could…” Or you can start with creation. Pick something hard. You will shape something and it will shape you.