The example he gave of GDP metrics going up when banks underpay interest on savings was wild. “Wow, these customers are effectively paying billions to the banks by accepting low interest rates, they must be receiving so much value in return!!”
More charitably, someone who is older and exceptional has probably had a chance to find equilibrium with the market, i.e. they know exactly how much they are worth and as a little startup you're less likely to end up landing them.
Thanks for writing this. As an IC, I read this more from a perspective of "how can I be better at my job and derive more satisfaction from work".
Personally, I think my biggest gaps are around "hunger" and "agency"... I have these things at times, sporadically, but I have difficulty sustaining them long enough to become a really high performer at most jobs. Eventually I get kind of burnt out and stop really giving my all, then transition to something else within a year or so.
I have a high-pedigree CV, so people generally want to hire me, but I often don't live up to their expectations because of this.
So hard to say in abstract without knowing more. I always wonder if this is something you can fix through process and habits, or if this is something you just need to feel intensely first, and only then will the right behaviors will emerge.
For example, if you're feeling comfortable and handsomely compensated at your current job, and you have the sense of security that you'll keep being hired forever, why would you burn the midnight oil and go the extra mile? Is your lifestyle going to change at all if you get to that next level? You might work longer hours, experience more anxiety and stress, and get barely any upside in return.
My hunch is that the human brain is efficient. It won't make you work any harder than you need to if you have obtained the thing you already want.
Maybe the real question here is whether you truly desire to be this aspirational high-performer, or if that's an idea you're romanticizing, something you feel you should aspire to, but you don't genuinely crave it. You end up fighting between the idealized you and the practical you. Which may explain why you're burning out and losing steam eventually, you can only force yourself to do something you don't feel like doing for so long before the body rebels.
Interesting framing, and definitely cutting close to some uncomfortable psychological questions. I don’t think I care much about being a high-performer for its own sake, but it definitely sucks to disappoint people. And I have the sense that there are people out there who experience a lot more joy and engagement with work, which is certainly something I want.
It’s possible that I just have the wrong personality to be a high-performer, and I should embrace being a somewhat overpaid flâneur. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right environment.
For now, I’ll keep following Derek Sivers’s advice [0] to relentlessly steer towards the things which give me that spark of excitement and motivation.
“In his journal [Crowhurst] would diligently make a list of projects that needed to be done, do a few of them half-heartedly, and then lose interest. Since he never got around to organizing his stowage, he had to ransack everywhere to find things.”
This hits close to home… I don’t think I should be a sailor.
I like this poster thing. Anything that gives people a little connection to those around them.
I sometimes sit on my front step and play guitar. 9/10 people ignore me but usually I'll have one or two nice conversations with a neighbor, and have made a couple friends this way. It helps that I live in a dense walkable place with lots of people who are similar to me.
I've done sidewalk art with my kid. Between Spring and Fall last year, I'd make a new drawing every time it rained. Rarely was there a day without chalk on my sidewalk.
I did it to play with my kid (and learn a little Japanese by writing the title in kanji), but another outcome was talking to neighbors. I keep to myself and have been told I'm difficult to approach, but people often come up and compliment the drawings. One lady said that, when walking with her granddaughter, she makes sure to see what's new on my sidewalk. It's been a very "low risk" way to put myself out there. I draw without anyone looking, and chatty people come to me while I'm in the yard.
I'm not optimistic about scalable strategies to identify "motivated" employees, but I'm not certain. I am pretty certain these strategies are bad. They're what everybody did in the mid-2000s.
One of the problems is the idea that "motivated" or even "capable" is some sort of intrinsic property of a person. Those things ebb and flow based on tons of variables, from stuff going on at home to decisions made by management.
To complete the circle, now that we have winnowed the space down to these options, we would normalize them and end up with 0.16 / (0.16 + 0.16) = 0.5 = 50% in both cases.
The reason I'm not putting % signs on there is that, until we normalize, those are measures and not probabilities. What that means is that an events which has a 16% chance of happening in the entire universe of possibility has a "area" or "volume" (the strictly correct term being measure) of 0.16. Once we zoom in to a smaller subset of events, it no longer has a probability of 16% but the measure remains unchanged.
In this previous comment I gave a longer explanation of the intuition behind measure theory and linked to some resources on YouTube.
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