Dent

Put a Dent in the Universe

Process

Elon Musk Doesn’t Read This Stuff

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Several years back I read through an answer to a question on Quora from Elon Musk’s ex-wife Justine. The question was “How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson?”

Today, years after reading the answers, what stands out in my memory is the part where she basically said: Elon doesn’t spend time reading stuff like this on the internet. He’s just out doing things.

I struggled with this one for a while, because I think there’s a lot of truth to it: it’s the difference between energy and motion, between light and heat. It’s one thing to dream, it’s another to quit your job and jump in.

But I am a total junkie for this kind of writing. A good portion of the posts on Farnam Street Blog are right up my alley. I loved High Output Management, and I will devour anything from books to academic papers authored by Ron Heifetz.

So how do I reconcile this?

As I’ve worked and sweat and struggled at my own startup, where we create and support a community of entrepreneurs, innovators, and creatives who are out to put a dent in the universe, I’ve found a lot of this kind of reading invaluable even as I’m out “doing shit.” It’s true that nothing teaches like experience, but there’s no question that the experiences of others are critical in guiding my journey.

I happen to be a reader. I have read more than 20 books this year, all of which have influenced my thinking and decisionmaking in some way. Others take their guidance in other forms. Conversations, videos of talks or interviews, even classrooms. But every successful entrepreneur, even Elon Musk, faces their struggles and takes their guidance from somewhere.

Elon may not be scrolling through Quora questions about his own life, but he is reportedly a voracious reader, and a famously quick learner of everything from UX design to actual rocket science.

Ultimately I think his ex-wife’s answer is misleading. Some of the stuff you can spend time reading will help you only a little — narratives constructed after the fact, voyeuristic peeks into other people’s “setups.” But a lot of what’s out there can be very useful as you tackle the challenges you will inevitably face. The trick is to know which content is which.

In fact, Justine Musk agrees with me on this. She later left a second, clarifying answer:

I said that a) extremely successful people tend not to waste time surfing the ‘Net and b) they are more likely to read books. They read more than the average person and they read deeper than the average person.

There’s a difference between gawking and learning; Elon does the latter. So should we all.

Adaptive leadership reveals the hidden cost of being politically correct

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img545.jpg.w560h202Adaptive leadership is a framework for practicing leadership developed by Harvard Professor Ronald Heifetz through his teaching in the early 1990s. Critical to the theory is the distinction between authority and leadership: that being in a position of authority (CEO, President, Manager) does not by definition make someone a leader.

And, in fact, leadership is a practice that can be exercised by anyone, whether they have any formal authority or not. Leadership, then, becomes defined as “the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.”1

The term “adaptive” is borrowed from nature, and is meant to refer to the way nature uses conflict to cause evolution through natural selection. As conditions change, organisms are forced to adapt or perish. This makes a decent analogy to us humans facing changes in our environment, whether that environment is social, legal, or more based in nature.

Leadership is in the process of guiding and motivating the work required to adapt to a new condition which cannot be changed or wished away.

When news stories like this one about Bowdoin pop up, where a college administration is in the midst of punishing some of its students for, essentially, having a Mexican themed party, many of us shake our heads. We know instinctively that this isn’t the right way to react. But why?

The problem with being too politically correct is that avoiding conflict is actually avoiding really important adaptive work.

If you subscribe to the concepts behind adaptive leadership (which I do), then you realize that the real work of progress (and leadership) happens in the minds of the constituency, and it happens when we are forced to confront just the right amount of conflict.

“Political Correctness” does damage in two ways: it is itself work avoidance, it pulls our attention away from the realities we should be reconciling with our values, and it reduces our overall capacity as a group, organization, or society to handle the psychological load of future work that will cause psychological stress.

In many cases, like what’s going on at Bowdoin College at the moment, the work that needs doing is the work of cultural integration. Most colleges go to a lot of effort to bring students to their campus from all over the US and the world, and put them together in a relatively closed environment.

This is a wonderful opportunity for leadership and learning: the college system can be a “holding environment,” a zone of protected conversation, for the students, supporting them as they use conflict to change their own understanding and opinions about other cultures, and preparing them to live in a country they must share with others. But that conflict is critical to the process. If there is only one cultural narrative, or rather, if only one system of values is allowed to be expressed, then there are no stressors on the system to create motion and force people to do adaptive work. The administration mistakenly believes that their job is to avoid conflict, when in fact they must enable and manage it.

If, instead of stepping in with a course of action, the college administration were to do nothing and wait2, they would force the students to continue to think about the party, the mini-sombreros, and the cultural statements being made by their actions. The students might ask themselves: is this party in line with my values? do I believe that cultural symbols should be fair game for parties and jokes? Is this just a reality that I need to live with, or is this a changeable norm that I would like to work on changing?

All this goes out the window when the authority takes action. The students, on both sides, become distracted by the more immediate questions about education, enrollment, and administration. The students who might have faced pressures from their peers, forcing them to examine their values and make a decision about whether or not they need to change, instead feel that there is nothing for them to do: the powers that be have taken this work for them.

In this way, the progress of society, and successful leadership, depend on a system that allows for managed conflict.

The practice of being politically correct is based on the idea that conflict is harmful. Conflict can be hurtful — it can cause pain, and change can cause loss — so for these reasons we understandably avoid it. But sometimes there is no way through but through, and when this is the case, we need leadership not political correctness.

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1 This definition is from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

2 It’s always more complicated than this. Having authority gives you the power to do things like control what people pay attention to, and the administration, if it wants to exercise leadership in confronting this issue, might have to bring attention to the party if the students themselves were not already doing so. But raising a question or an issue is a different thing than acting on it, and they often have opposite psychological effects.

Living by first principles

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In the video above, Kevin Rose elicits a great example of how reasoning from first principles led Tesla to manufacture their own batteries, and therefore capture the profit margin of other battery makers as their own savings.

Musk points out that reasoning from first principles is a physics kind of idea. And in fact, the famous physicist Richard Feynman can show us first principles as applied to ordinary life. He penned an autobiographical book called “Surely You’re Jokeing, Mr. Feynman,” and no further in than page 19, we get a wonderful example of living by first principles.

As a boy, Feynman found work repairing radios:

As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter that had different scales on it by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It wasn’t very accurate, but it was good enough to tell whether things were in the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.

In order to do this kind of thing — in order to modify a milliammeter, designed to measure electric current in milliamperes, into a device that measures volts — you need to have a functional understanding of the first principles behind the device. If you understand electricity well enough, then you understand what the device is doing to measure it, and then you can change it.

Feynman elaborates:

Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took it apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that’s a condenser, here’s a this, there’s a that; they were all labeled.And if wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell that the condenser was burned out…So it wasn’t hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going on inside, noticing that something wasn’t working right, and fixing it.

This goes for all kinds of modern things, too. If you understand the way computers work on the component level (so hard drives, processors, graphics cards, etc), it’s not such a big deal to open one up and move things around, or replace others. This is repair work.

First principles is a tricky concept today though, because things are so complex. Is knowing how to move components around inside a computer really first principles? Or is that a false understanding, because you need to also know how those components are put together?

For practical purposes therefore, I think that you can call it first principles if you fully understand things at least a layer down from what you’re trying to work on. If it’s a computer, components are good enough. If it’s a battery, material costs are good enough. If it’s a program, the programming language is good enough.

Living by first principles can help with the boring stuff as well as the important stuff. I have a Harmony remote for my TV and all the related gadgets, which mostly works, but sometimes doesn’t. If you take the effort to understand what the remote is doing (mimicking the signals from each individual remote in sequence) then it’s often not hard to know what went wrong and how to fix it. If, however, you don’t know what it’s doing, then it’s easy to get frustrated by it.

The point is that first principles applies well beyond the areas of science and invention. It often takes a little extra effort, but if you build a habit around it, you will be approaching what you do in life with a distinct advantage, from the television to the future of transportation.

Zuckerberg's Straight Talk

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Zuckerberg, like other universe denters, has a bit of a reputation for being blunt. In some (many?) cases this trait has us calling these leaders “assholes,” but regardless of how the public paints them, it’s interesting that straight talk appears to crop up with Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, and so on.

In The Facebook Effect, Kirkpatric describes the dorm environment where Facebook was born as messy and cramped:

A habit of straight talk became the norm in this suite. There weren’t a lot of secrets here. The four got along in part because they knew where each stood. Rather than getting on one another’s nerves, they got into one another’s projects.

Straight talk can be enormously helpful in the process of making management decisions and in making sure the organization doesn’t work against itself. It can be a great tool for getting the best work from the people working for you. And it’s very hard. But clearly it’s something that Zuckerberg, and those before him, have mastered.

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