In Progress No. 20
Misplaced Productivity | Reality is Malleable: Advice From Steve Jobs | Purists + Tourists
Knowledge
Misplaced Productivity
Think back more than 50 years ago. It’s amazing how anything got accomplished. We only had access to telephones and typewriters. Most things were done in pen and paper - no search or email. Co-working was a laborious task.
@balajis writes:
If you're doing information work, relative to your ancestors who worked with papyrus, paper, or typewriter, you are a golden god surfing on a sea of electrons. You can make things happen in seconds that would have taken them weeks, if they could do them at all.
If this is the case, where are the game-changing innovations? Why have we not eclipsed the imaginations of science-fiction creators?
Balaji lays out 5 possible vectors of stagnation:
The Great Distraction. The productivity surplus has been tunnelled into social media, video games, and other modern forms of leisure.
The Great Dissipation. The productivity has been dissipated on things like forms, compliance, process, etc.
The Great Divergence. The productivity is here, it's just only harnessed by the indistractable few: it’s held by the top 0.1%.
The Great Dilemma. The productivity has been burned in bizarre ways that require line-by-line "profiling" of everything.
The Great Dumbness. The productivity is here. We've just made dumb decisions in the West while others have harnessed it. See, for example, China building a train station in nine hours vs taking 100-1000X that long to upgrade a Caltrain stop.
Wisdom
Reality is Malleable: Advice From Steve Jobs
Everything that we call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you.
The world is more deceptive than it is reflective. Everything we interact with is a productized version of someone’s imagination. There are no barriers to entry for ideas that transcend today’s markets.
Building something new is making reality malleable. We may not realize it at the moment, but one action can span an infinite number of reactions. We all have the power to shape the future world in tiny and large ways.
It is up to us to shake off the notion that life is there and we must only live in it.
Adopt an attitude of embracing the world as it is and improving upon it as you wish.
Insight
Purists + Tourists
Virgil Abloh, Off-White CEO and artistic director for Louis Vuitton menswear describes the idea of Purists + Tourists as his main template for understanding how insider and outsider cultures interact.
Purists find value in meaning based on an existing premise. Tourists find value in what’s new and different. This dichotomy is always present when dealing with what’s new.
The Purist sees through the lens of a critic — erudite and aloof, observing a subject in the context of other subjects. The Tourist sees through the lens of a child — curious and engaged, experiencing a subject without judgement. Yet, the Purist creates while the Tourist consumes.
We should all strike a balance as Purists and Tourists — specialists and generalists who can both analyze and enjoy new things.
