Thoughts on the Ministry for the Future

How will governments and society respond to a global climate disaster? Kim Stanley Robinson paints a vivid picture of what’s possible in a brilliant work of fiction that straddles science, economics, and politics. In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson takes the reader to a near future and lays out in impressive detail the impact of climate change at a global and personal level.

Though the book is a work of fiction, it’s grounded in sufficient reality to bring key issues close to home. Take the geopolitical challenges of climate change as an example. We are familiar with how difficult international relations can be in times of crisis. But with climate change, the dynamics will be incredibly harder. Here’s one area in the book where we see tensions flare up, with an Indian government official expressing anger at what’s happened to her country:

“What you need to know now is that we are scared here, and angry too. It was Europe and America and China who caused this heat wave, not us. I know we have burned a lot of coal in the last few decades, but it’s nothing compared to the West. And yet we signed the Agreement to do our part. Which we have done. But no one else is fulfilling commitments, no one is paying the developing nations, and now we have this heat wave.”

Another area of realism was the frantic attempts at geo-engineering. Messing with climate in this fashion could backfire in all sorts of ways. However, it’s realistic to imagine that it may be necessary if we don’t cut emissions and have no other choice but to try anything with a non-zero chance of success. With such bleak prospects the characters in the book can’t help but occasionally turn to humour. One passing thought near the end of the book exemplifies this well:

“Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly. Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.”

I can’t share more from the book without spoiling the story but I can leave you with the last thought I had after reading it. And that thought is this: The fossil fuel-driven economic growth of the last century may end up being the greatest and most harmful speculative bubble of all time. Which is to say, we’re enjoying an inflated sense of progress today that’s inconsistent with the unimaginable costs that could be due in the future. However, if the quasi-fictional planet in Robinson’s book is anything to go by, taking drastic measures today gives us a chance. But delayed action dooms us to failure.

Ends and Means Friendships

“The best, most complete friendships are those in which friends love and wish each other well as ends in themselves, and not solely, or even primarily, as means to further ends—social advancement, amusement, the promotion of some cause, or even mutual edification or improvement.

In such friendships, the friends value each other’s separateness—the fact that each has, and gives importance to, her own life and perspective, no matter how similar this life and perspective to the other’s; and take pleasure in being together primarily because of the persons they are. The other’s usefulness in bringing about a desired end may, of course, be the initial spark of the friendship, and most friendships are useful in many ways. Indeed, if friends were not useful in times of need, they would not be friends.

But in the best friendships, the central feature of the friendship is simply that the friends love, and wish each other well, as ends in themselves, whereas in lesser friendships, the central feature is the instrumental or means value of each to the other. The friends value each other’s life and perspective only to the extent that it is useful to do so; and each takes pleasure in the other primarily as a means to a further end.”

Excerpt from “Friends as Ends in Themselves” by Neera Kapur Badhwar, 1987.

Why Success Formulas Fail

This is a sample of a monthly book recommendation newsletter I send to almost 200 readers each month. You can sign up for it here.

formula

In February I spent time thinking about “hits”. Only a tiny fraction of films, out of hundreds released each year, generate blockbuster returns. Only a fraction of books, out of hundreds of thousands published each year, turn into bestsellers. And in the world of venture capital, where I spend most of my time, a very small percentage of startups generate returns in excess of 5 to 10 times the invested capital.

Creating “hits” is elusive and no matter what you read or hear, there will never be a guaranteed formula for success. Why? A passage from a book I read earlier this year hints at the answer:

“Formulas are useful when the underlying variables don’t change. For instance, the chemical formula for salt is a one-to-one ratio of sodium and chloride ions, whose elemental properties are fixed. But let’s say that you believe—as I do—that the fundamental variables of hits include familiarity, surprise, emotional resonance, and distribution strategy. These are not fixed variables. The property of familiarity, for example, changes every year. The sound of guitar-led rock ’n’ roll in the United States was considered weird in 1950, mainstream by 1960, and old-fashioned by 1970. In our desperate search for simplicity, people want success to work like a garage door opener, where a four-number code springs the lock. But culture is not a keypad, and people are not doors. Our codes are ever-changing in reaction to our environment. If you can imagine a keypad that gets bored of the overuse of certain numbers—or a garage that changes its code subtly to mimic the numbers from neighboring households—then you are beginning to think like the hit makers I spoke to in this book. I can’t offer a universal formula in these pages. But I can offer subtler and truer lessons about why we like what we like, and how culture works to give people a better chance at making something that moves others.” – Derek Thompson (Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular)

For a while now I’ve been trying to piece together my thinking on this, reflecting on how we can tilt outcomes to our favour in dynamic and complicated systems. Thompson’s book is a great place to start, especially if you’ve ever wondered how things become popular. That said, the book is also a fantastic reminder of a blunt fact: the pursuit of a universal formula for outsized success (especially in a probabilistic world) is a wild-goose chase. As Thompson rightly points out:

“There is no complete and perfect formula for building a popular product. If there were, everybody would know and follow it, and the world would be awash in similarly successful cultural products, which technically means nothing would be very successful.”

I highly recommend Thompson’s book and hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

The Most Potent Lesson of 2016

Here’s a message I sent to my private mailing list today. I haven’t blogged in a while so I thought I’d share something. If you like it, you can join over 100 other people (or 144 to be exact) who receive an email from me once a month. The sign up link is here. Enjoy.

Happy 2017 folks!

Hope your new year celebrations go well. It’s only 6pm in the UK so we have another six hours to go, and I figured I could squeeze in one more email before the year ends.

This year, I’ve read so many interesting books (37 in total but I was aiming for 50), and it’s hard to recommend one must-read, but out of the all the books, I think the most relevant — given what happened politically in 2016 — has to be “Lessons from the Top: the Three Universal Stories that all Successful Leaders Tell.” In a nutshell, the book’s key message is this (emphasis mine):

“…every leader begins with a personal story, a way of answering the question ‘Who am I?’ Lady Gaga tells us repeatedly that she was the weird kid at school, though she also turned out to be highly driven and creative. She describes herself as ‘a freak, a maverick, a lost soul looking for peers’. Secondly, every leader’s story involves a group narrative, a way of explaining ‘Who are we?’ In Lady Gaga’s case ‘we’ are the outsiders. She calls her fans ‘my little monsters’, and in her leadership story she is ‘Mama Monster’ who keeps in touch with her offspring on Facebook and Twitter. Thirdly, all leaders offer a collective mission, the answer to the question ‘Where are we going?’ or ‘What is our common purpose?’ Lady Gaga tells her followers that together they can change the world. She promotes a positive message about gay rights. This ‘leadership projection’ is what most of us would call storytelling.”

Notice how Lady Gaga can be replaced with any influential leader, regardless of whether they are deemed ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

For example, Trump’s leadership projection was this:

Who I’m I? A pragmatic and successful business man. I’m a winner. In fact I’m so good at winning that despite several bankruptcies I made a comeback. (Notice Hillary’s team lost her “who I’m I” narrative to scandalous and oftentimes unfounded accusations.)
Who are we? Patriotic Americans. And you know what, “I’m with you!” (Notice Hillary’s message was “I’m with her”, making it more about her and not the people.)
Where are we going? We will return America to its former glory. (Notice Hillary’s destination narrative was unclear.)

We saw something similar with Brexit and history has more examples yet it’s easy to forget a potent lesson: you can’t win with facts alone. We’re moved by a compelling narrative. We’re moved by stories. We’re moved by emotion. Credibility or facts come last.

Masters of persuasion know how to weild powerful stories to advance their agenda. My signoff message for 2016 (and my biggest lesson for the year) is that you should watch out for these tactics in the coming year. There will be important facts and issues that lose ground due to ineffective storytelling. And likewise, there will be trivial and oftentimes straight-out lies that pick up momentum thanks to powerful storytelling. Don’t get caught out if you’re a follower. And if you’re a leader, remember the tool you have at your disposal. Use it wisely.

Best wishes,
Michael

Transformation Goals vs Acquisition Goals

“But the problem is that most things look trivial if we look at them the wrong (or perhaps right) way, and everything is ephemeral. It’s vanity, for instance, to think that having a best-selling book or winning a literary prize is not ephemeral. Given the fickleness of taste and the caprice of fashion and literary critics, it would also be wrong to take any such success as a reliable indicator of importance. If we think worthwhile goals have to be both important and enduring, then it’s time to despair. So here’s another suggestion. The best goals are ones that focus on doing and being, not on having done. Whenever a goal is to have done something, whether it’s to have won a Grand Slam or eaten more baked beans in one minute than any other human in recorded history, then the problem is that achieving the goal leaves you with nothing left to do, unless you adopt yet another goal, and keep the cycle going until you tire of life or it tires of you. If, however, your goal is to be a good cook, for example, to do good cooking, then achieving that goal means you have succeeded in living a form of life that has more meaning and satisfaction to you, a life that is filled with more of what you value. It’s important to notice that adopting this kind of goal sometimes involves focusing on having done certain things too. If you try to be the best tennis player you can, for instance, then you will hope to have won some tournaments by the time you retire. If you want to be a writer, then you will certainly want to have finished writing something eventually. The critical point is that each of these goals has its value because pursuing it requires you to do and be what you want to do and be. That is what gives it deep worth, not simply the fact that you have done them and so added to your list of achievements.”

Excerpt from The Shrink and the Sage by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro

P.s This is an idea I came to appreciate more of in 2015

Year in Review (2015): What I Learnt from Reading 53 Books

In 2015 I took on the challenge of reading 53 books (roughly one title a week). After completing the marathon, I came to appreciate a few points about the process:

Each book is a catalyst for growth: you can learn something new, challenge old beliefs, and perhaps even, dare I say it, become a better person.
Books are cheap to buy but expensive to read: a book is cheaper than a cinema ticket but a 300-page script will cost you around 5 hours of reading time (depending on how fast you read).
One idea is a good enough return on investment: given how much time goes into reading, aim to walk away with at least one useful idea in order to make your time-investment worthwhile.

In light of the above, I compiled over 50,000 words of ‘lessons notes’ from the reading adventure. Since this ‘book of books’ is too cumbersome to share, I thought I’d highlight a few nuggets from the escapade. Below are some of my favourite passages. I hope you’ll find them a refreshing read as we embark on a new year full of hope and aspiration.

On Life

Having a philosophy of life is better than meandering aimlessly.

How Will You Measure Your Life: by Clayton Christensen

“The type of person you want to become—what the purpose of your life is—is too important to leave to chance. It needs to be deliberately conceived, chosen, and managed.” – Clayton Christensen

Hegarty on Creativity: by John Hegarty

“Ultimately, if you don’t have a guiding philosophy underpinning your thinking and work, then what you produce won’t touch people. It can’t. And that’s the most important task of any piece of creativity.” – John Hegarty

Status is illusive.

What Should I Do with My Life?: by Po Bronson

“…the strongest of all human drives is the desire to belong to an Inner Ring, an imaginary circle of the important. He warned the students, though, that this ring is an illusion. No sooner do you crack one ring than you are soon obsessed with joining the even-more-exclusive ring inside that one. Status is like an onion, comprised of endless layers, and no matter how many rings you cracked, you were still on the outside. “If you follow that desire, you will reach no inside that is worth reaching,” he insisted. It took conscious and continuous effort not to be an “inner ringer,” someone distracted by this game.” – Po Bronson
On People

Build relationships before you need them.

Never Eat Alone: by Keith Ferrazzi

“…don’t wait until you’re out of a job, or on your own, to begin reaching out to others. You’ve got to create a community of colleagues and friends before you need it. Others around you are far more likely to help you if they already know and like you. Start gardening now. You won’t believe the treasures to be found within your own backyard.” – Keith Ferrazzi

Left untamed, social media is toxic.

F*ck! I’m in My Twenties: by Emma Koenig

from the book, F*ck! I’m in My Twenties

On Business

To find business ideas, look for problems to solve.

Rework: by Jason Fried & David Hansson

“The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know—and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good…”

Inventor James Dyson scratched his own itch. While vacuuming his home, he realized his bag vacuum cleaner was constantly losing suction power—dust kept clogging the pores in the bag and blocking the airflow. It wasn’t someone else’s imaginary problem; it was a real one that he experienced firsthand. So he decided to solve the problem and came up with the world’s first cyclonic, bagless vacuum cleaner.” – Jason Fried & David Hansson

If you try to please everyone you’ll please no one.

Growth Hacker Marketing: by Ryan Holiday

“The old mindset says go out and get everyone you conceivably can. This pressure comes from our clients, and many marketers have internalized these self-destructively ambitious goals. I know the feeling: I want to be everywhere. I want millions of video views. I want to become a trending Twitter topic. They try to go everywhere and end up going nowhere. What’s the point? Most of those people never become your customers. Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible.” – Ryan Holiday

Long-term planning is unproductive in new businesses.

The Lean Startup: by Eric Ries

“The first problem is the allure of a good plan, a solid strategy, and thorough market research. In earlier eras, these things were indicators of likely success. The overwhelming temptation is to apply them to startups too, but this doesn’t work, because startups operate with too much uncertainty…Startups do not yet know who their customer is or what their product should be…Planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.” – Eric Ries

On Careers

A fulfilling career comes from without, not within.

The Road to Character: by David Brooks

“Today, commencement speakers tell graduates to follow their passion, to trust their feelings, to reflect and find their purpose in life. The assumption behind these cliches is that when you are figuring out how to lead your life, the most important answers are found deep inside yourself…

…But Frances Perkins found her purpose in life using a different method, one that was more common in past eras. In this method, you don’t ask, what do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?

In this scheme of things we don’t create our lives; we are summoned by life. The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded. This perspective begins with an awareness that the world existed long before you and will last long after you, and that in the brief span of your life you have been thrown by fate, by history, by chance, by evolution, or by God into a specific place with specific problems and needs.

Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed? As the novelist Frederick Buchner put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” – David Brooks

On Goals

Achievement requires indoctrination.

What to Say When You Talk to Yourself: by Shad Helmstetter

“Nothing you read once is permanent; none of the self-help programs continue to work by themselves or without constant reinforcement…without constant attention and effort, even the most exciting success breakthroughs run their course and eventually end up on our list of ‘good ideas’ and ‘good intentions.’” – Shad Helmstetter

Transformation goals are better than acquisition objectives.

Anything You Want: by Derek Sivers

“To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.” – Derek Sivers

You grow through courage not mediocrity.

The Art of Learning: Josh Waitzkin

“In my experience, successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory. In the long run, painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins—those who are armed with a healthy attitude and are able to draw wisdom from every experience, “good” or “bad,” are the ones who make it down the road. They are also the ones who are happier along the way. Of course the real challenge is to stay in range of this long-term perspective when you are under fire and hurting in the middle of the war. This, maybe our biggest hurdle, is at the core of the art of learning.” – Josh Waitzkin

Overnight success is an illusion.

Self Belief: by Jamal Edwards

“It took me a few months to set up SB.TV, but years to get it to where it is today….People act like I was some kind of overnight success but that’s not true – I’ve been doing SB.TV for seven years! It just looks like it happened really quickly and smoothly because when things blow up, it looks like it’s come from nowhere, when actually a lot of hard work has gone in to making it happen.” – Jamal Edwards

Struggle precedes success.

Not that Kind of Girl: by Lena Dunham

“I was unemployed. And while I had a roof over my head (my parents’) and food to eat (also technically theirs), my days were shapeless, and the disappointment of the people who loved me (my parents) was palpable. I slept until noon, became defensive when asked about my plans for the future, and gained weight like it was a viable profession. I was becoming the kind of adult parents worry about producing.” – Lena Dunham

Note: Lena Dunham is now the lead actor and director of the hit HBO show, GIRLS.

Extraordinary struggle precedes extraordinary success.

The Dip: by Seth Godin

“…if you look at the résumé of a typical CEO, you’ll see that he endured a 25-year Dip before landing the job. For a quarter of a century, he needed to suck it up, keep his head down, and do what he was told. He needed to hit his numbers, work longer hours than everyone else, and kiss up to his boss of the moment. Day in and day out, year after year. It’s easy to be a CEO. What’s hard is getting there. There’s a huge Dip along the way. If it was easy, there’d be too many people vying for the job and the CEOs couldn’t get paid as much, could they? Scarcity, as we’ve seen, is the secret to value. If there wasn’t a Dip, there’d be no scarcity.” – Seth Godin

On Spirituality

Meaning creates hope.

Me Without You: by Kelly Rimmer

“I looked up at him, stared into the faded blue of his wrinkle-framed eyes, and asked, ‘How do you believe in God when the world is so fucked up?’ The priest smiled sadly. ‘You’ve got it backwards. It’s because the world is so fucked up that I believe in God.” – Callum Roberts

On Happiness

You can have it all and still be unhappy.

The Way to Love: by Anthony de Mello

“Do you realize that you could have the finest looks and the most charming personality and the most pleasant of surroundings and still be unhappy? And deep down you know this is true but still you waste your effort and energy trying to get what you know cannot make you happy. Another false belief: If all your desires are fulfilled you will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure and fearful. . . .The fulfilment of desire can [only], at the most, bring flashes of pleasure and excitement. Don’t mistake that for happiness.” – Anthony de Mello

The secret to a good life is purpose.

Sapiens: by Yuval Noah Harari

“…findings demonstrate that happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists of seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component to happiness. Our values make all the difference to whether we see ourselves as ‘miserable slaves to a baby dictator’ or as ‘lovingly nurturing a new life’. As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”

Ps. To get updates on what I’ll be reading in 2016 subscribe here.

Burn Your Ships: Options Distract Us from Our Main Objective

Predictably Irrational

“In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find, to their horror, that their ships were burning. They hurried to their feet to fight off their attackers, but soon discovered that it was Xiang Yu himself who had set their ships on fire, and that he had also ordered all the cooking pots crushed.

Xiang Yu explained to his troops that without the pots and the ships, they had no other choice but to fight their way to victory or perish. That did not earn Xiang Yu a place on the Chinese army’s list of favorite commanders, but it did have a tremendous focusing effect on his troops: grabbing their lances and bows, they charged ferociously against the enemy and won nine consecutive battles, completely obliterating the main-force units of the Qin dynasty.”

Excerpt from Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

Note: This reminds me of the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In the film, a young child (who would go on to become the world’s greatest sushi chef) faces a similar trial:

“I was in my first year of school. My father told me ‘You have no home to come back to. That is why you have to work hard.’ I knew that I was on my own. I did not want to have to sleep at a temple or under a bridge. So, I had to work hard just to survive.”

The ‘Nobel Prize’ Chauffeur

morgan

After receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918, Max Planck went on tour across Germany. Wherever he was invited, he delivered the same lecture on new quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur grew to know it by heart:

“It has to be boring giving the same speech each time, Professor Planck. How about I do it for you in Munich? You can sit in the front row and wear my chauffeur’s cap. That’d give us both a bit of variety.”

Plant liked the idea, so that evening the driver held a long lecture on quantum mechanics in front of a distinguished audience. Later, a physics professor stood up with a question. The driver recoiled: “Never would I have thought that someone from such an advanced city as Munich would ask such a simple question! My chauffeur will answer it.”

Excerpt from The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli.

Constant Luxury is No Luxury At All

“But just as the human body didn’t evolve to deal well with today’s easy access to abundant fat and sugars, and will crave an extra cheeseburger when it shouldn’t, the human mind, apparently, didn’t evolve to deal with excess money, and will desire more long after wealth has become a burden rather than a comfort. A vast body of psychological evidence shows that the pleasures of consumption wear off through time and depend heavily on one’s frame of reference. Most of us, for instance, occasionally spoil ourselves with outbursts of deliberate and perhaps excessive consumption: a fancy spa treatment, dinner at an expensive restaurant, a shopping spree. In the case of the very wealthy, such forms of consumption can become so commonplace as to lose all psychological benefit: constant luxury is, in a sense, no luxury at all.”

Excerpt from Secret Fears of the Super-Rich by Graeme Wood.

Why Theory is Important

“Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.”

Excerpt from How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen.