Jacob Robinson's Blog, page 27
June 1, 2020
The Secret to Success
Over the past few years I’ve delved into researching what makes successful people so successful in the first place. The trouble with this is that there’s no universal answer; most successful people may do something, but not all of them. And yet, I think I’ve finally found the one thing that I see all successful people doing.
They all constantly step out of their comfort zone.
I’ll use the example of Donald Trump, since he tends to be the killer of most other success factors. Trump doesn’t meditate, he doesn’t exercise, and he certainly doesn’t read. But what he does do is step out of his comfort zone. I mean, think of it; there is a big stepping stone between running a real estate company and being the President of the United States. You can certainly debate his reasons for going into the presidency, but you’d have to concede that someone would really need to step outside their zone of comfort in order to go through the election process. After all, when you’re running a private company you don’t have to worry about constantly being in the public eye or campaigning for votes. You could say the same thing with him writing his books, or his many television appearances.
Successful people are constantly expanding, constantly trying new things, and constantly going over obstacles. People who aren’t successful don’t try this, but rather focus on staying in their own corner. I think, therefore, that in order to be successful one has to always be willing to go beyond who they are right now.
This, of course, is much harder than it seems. I’ve talked about mindset a lot on this blog, and this is where the mindset problem comes back into play. It’s easy to say “I’ll try new things!” and then never do it. Here is where the divide occurs; if everyone found it easy to step out of their zone, then everyone would be successful!
There are, of course, a few problems with this, primarily due to selection bias. There could be an example of a person who did try new things throughout their life and never made success, and that would debunk this theory. But the more I think of examples, the more I realize that practically everyone who’s made a name for themselves did it by going out into the world, whether they truly meant to or not.
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May 25, 2020
The Third Moat
When people think of business moats, they traditionally think of either technological moats or financial moats. However, I think there’s a third moat that is not only viable, but can be used across mediums and is ideal for small businesses.
That moat is the strategic moat.
To understand why the strategic moat is viable, let’s quickly review the other two. A financial moat is helpful solely because it’s hard to get the capital to break into the space in the first place. A technological moat is a technical innovation that allows your product or business to go much faster or more efficiently than the others. Now, the key thing to point out about both of these moats is that they are not guarantees. They can stave off competition for a limited time, but they won’t give your business a free ride. The strategic moat, like the financial and technological moats, is also not a guarantee; but it’s intangibility provides it some special benefits.
A strategic moat can be defined as a business moat based on leadership, management, and goal setting. A strong goal, a good culture, and a sufficient means of execution can, like the other moats, put you into a much more relaxed position in comparison to your competitors. Now, the tradeoff here is that you need to have the talent in play to exercise these goals in the first place. The benefit is that, unlike the previous two moats, the advantage isn’t ethereal. Certainly leaders might be switched out, but the plan and building blocks they made stay — the difficulty of maintaining the moat isn’t in constantly innovating, or constantly gaining new funding, but rather simply making sure the plan stays in place and hiring people who can continue where another person left off. Harder than it seems? Certainly. But it does put you in a much less dire position than an uncertain tech lead or a short runway.
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May 18, 2020
With Smart People
Whenever I’m in a job interview, I always tell people that my career mission statement is “to work on complex and meaningful problems with smart people”. Now, I agree with all of this statement, and most of it makes perfectly good sense. However, I’m surprised by the fact that no one has ever asked me a vital question here: “Who are ‘smart people’?”
In a way that is perhaps quite unintuitive, my personal definition of “smart” has absolutely nothing to do with how most people define “smart”. When most people read the word smart, they think of someone who is intelligent. When they think of someone who is intelligent, they think of someone who has a big brain and reads a lot of books. But it’s quite easy to have a big brain and read a lot of books! What isn’t as easy is to be someone who is hard working, collaborative, brings up morale in hard times, and adapts to the situation. It just so happens that these four key factors is how I determine whether someone is smart.
Of course, saying that my career goal is to “work on complex and meaningful problems with people who are hard working, collaborative, etc. etc.” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well. However, I don’t think I’m out to trick people by replacing all of those separate factors with the simple word “smart”. I say this because that’s how I define smart in every case! So, people who know me well know what I mean in that mission statement.
Recruiters and interviewers don’t know me well, however, and I imagine they think I’m referring to people who have a big brain and read a lot of books. Now, if I was them, this would draw some big red flags… so you only care about working with people with big brains? I would then prompt a question asking for a definition to smart. Surprisingly, not one interviewer has ever asked me this question! Perhaps they could infer what I mean, or they just really like people with big brains, who knows. But I’ve always thought it was a pretty important thing to understand.
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May 11, 2020
Vicious Cycles
There are many positive cycles within our society, but there as just as many negative ones as well. I’ve hinted at these so called vicious cycles before, but I’ve never discussed them in depth on the site. In this post I want to go over what I feel are some of the most dangerous cycles our culture is up against, and what are some things that can be done to potentially dissolve them.
The first big one, and the big one I’ve mentioned the most, is institutionalization; particularly educational institutionalization, since it breeds other types of institutionalization such as economic and criminal. Poor schools have poor policy, poor policy means poor opportunity development, poor opportunity development means poor opportunities, which in sum means that the poor stay poor. This, I believe, is fundamentally what drags down the lower class the most, regardless of race or ethnicity. Most kids who go to the Ivy League due so because their parents were wealthy enough to place them into good schools that lead to good opportunities, which leads to admissions officers at Harvard or some such paying more attention. That’s not to say that the Harvard admissions officer isn’t paying attention to kids from the poor districts; it’s just saying that they’re blind to the fact that the kid with a million extracurriculars and his own business probably doesn’t have an entire family they need to feed.
Now, one way to reduce this cycle is to reduce this blindness. Another way to kill the cycle is to find low cost methods of providing potential resources to poor schools; resources that help provide students with vital growth and entrepreneurial mindsets. Now, if you hit it down to its key components, helping out those in the poor education bloc isn’t as hard.
Another cycle that’s unrelated (but in my opinion, just as big) is the depression cycle. People who are depressed stay depressed because they don’t have the energy or motivation to do the things that won’t make them depressed, such as exercise, meditation, socialization, or otherwise seeking help (important note here: when I refer to this cycle, I am referring to general depression, which all individuals experience, and not major depressive disorder, which is caused by imbalanced neurochemicals and is only truly treatable by SSRIs and other such drugs).
This sort of goes in line with my now infamous conundrum with mindset changes; how do you get a depressed person to do what they don’t want to do, but is good for them? You can’t force a person to do anything… so what’s the answer? I think the best method here is the minimum viable effort approach; nudge them to do something that is so simple that they’d feel stupid for not at least trying it. This could mean sitting still for 5 minutes every day for a week, or doing five pushups. You could still make the argument that a depressed person could give up more easily, but at least we’re making progress here; it has gone down from a certainty to a probability.
Now, I’m not claiming to be an expert on either of these subjects. There are obviously people who know a lot more about both of these. Still, I think these are both important dilemmas in the wider world, and both important things to discuss going towards the future.
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May 4, 2020
Convenience + Efficiency
I talk a lot on this blog about both the convenience factor and the efficiency factor. But the two are tied together much more than one might initially think.
First, let’s do a bit of a review on both of these factors. The convenience factor, better described by the “The world moves towards convenience” tagline on this blog, is meant to showcase that the best ideas always exhibit the idea of convenience; they make things easier or otherwise simpler. The efficiency factor is described by “Make things 1% better every day”, which is meant to be targeted towards individuals but can easily work for companies as well.
Some of you might already be catching on to the connecting tissue of these two ideas. A product that is easier to use is more productive (duh), and thus has a higher efficiency. In this way, everything begins with convenience.
This makes a lot more sense when you start to think about what kinds of tasks make things 1% better. Simple automations, task delegation, dailies… all of these strategies focus on making something more convenient, and yet they’re tied to better efficiency and productivity.
And while I think it’s nicer to have the two separate, understanding of the fact that you might want to describe one without describing the other, I think it’s still very important to recognize the interconnectivity of these two concepts. It makes looking at the world a whole lot easier.
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April 27, 2020
Is AR/VR too “weird”?
As companies continue to hoist around their AR/VR strategy, it’s made me stumble upon a question: could AR/VR ever be truly popular or is it just too… weird?
I mean, think about it. The entire concept of AR/VR revolves around the idea of a guy (or girl) roaming around with a big set of goggles and gesturing to what is essentially nothing. Even in the comfort of one’s own home, our inner “social acceptability” alarm tends to go off when things like this happen.
But, the more I thought, the more I realized that this is a pretty common result of early tech adoption. Back when personal computers, or laptops, or cell phones were originally introduced, you would have gotten a lot of weird glances if you had them around. And I think, though AR/VR is certainly strange, if it gathers enough widespread adoption that inner social acceptability will automatically go away.
Of course, that also implies we’re still at a very early stage for adoption. Between this and the outrageous prices on most of the practical headsets, we still have a long way to go. And this can be reasonably agitating to some people; however, I think it also shows the path for AR/VR to grow in future decades and finally become the household product it deserves to be.
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April 20, 2020
What Matters in the End
As our lifespans get longer, a key question arises: how do you extend a human being? Is it just about making them live longer, or is there something deeper to it?
Note from present me: This was written far before COVID, or Shanah, but I find its message to be poignant still even with all things considered.
I (alongside many others) believe that what matters in the end really has nothing to do with age longevity. Rather, it depends on something called healthspan. Why live as a husk of your former self? You might be alive, but that doesn’t matter if you have a series of physical and mental issues that need to be fixed. In reality, there’s nothing “longevity” about this.
Instead, we should be prioritizing someone’s health over their lifespan. This seems counterintuitive at first; besides, no one wants to say “oh, this option will make you die sooner!”. However, think of it this way: you have a choice of being healthy yet living a shorter life, or living with a multitude of problems but living much longer. It seems like that latter causes the disadvantage and advantage to cross out, making it null. What seems like the better option now?
There’s many ways we can work to improve healthspan. Firstly, we can utilize the care of elder housing and hospice. These two systems can be seen as “defeating” — and, to be fair, they aren’t all perfect — but they do a good job of providing affordable care to those nearest to the end of life. Secondly, we can start early and build good habits such as sleep, exercise, and meditation in order to improve our health early on. This allows us not just greater lifespan, but greater healthspan as well.
The healthspan movement is fortunately gaining rapid speed. At the same time, it is important for us all to know what can be done to help increase the amount of time we are on this Earth and are healthy, not just the former.
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April 13, 2020
But Who’s Right?
Politics has created a massive, rippling divide across nations everywhere. All sides seem to be fighting over subjectivities… but there has to be an objectivity lying in the midst somewhere. Right?
Of course, most complex political topics are just that; complex. The truth is that we really don’t know how an economy should be run, or how welfare should be distributed, or how education and healthcare should be optimally set up. Rather, we have theories for how this ought to be; and these theories tend to fit neatly in line with one political party or another.
There are, however, also political arguments wrapped up in external factors. Religion is a big one; most Christian conservative policies don’t really have any sort of objective basis, and most could be disproved by specific fact. The problem with this, however, is that now we’re diving into the philosophy of objectivism. If a person fundamentally believes that abortion is wrong, or that homosexuality should be outlawed, then that would be a truth within that person’s universe. Being able to convince them of it doesn’t mean showing them the facts, it means totally upending their viewpoint of the universe. And that stuff can get really messy.
Of course, then we get into a question that is a layer deeper: what is right, and what is wrong? When we look at it this way, we realize the answer isn’t quite as cut and dry as we thought it was. So the reality is that as long as two different sides have two different fervorous viewpoints, then there is no right. “Well, that’s silly,” one might say. “If we know about the universe, than one view point must be the right one!” But now we’re getting into the difference between an external universe, which might say this way is X, and an internal universe, in which a person fundamentally believes it to be Y. The big issue here is a cemented philosophical concept: if a whole bunch of people believe its Y, then there’s no use if it’s really X. We humans don’t know all that much. Running a government is one of the things we don’t know a lot about. So while there might be an external universe, we’ll never know what it is as long as there’s debate between the internal universes.
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