Tapestries-11 | What I learned this year
It’s been a big year. This is a reflection on what I think I’ve learned.
Photo by Pepe Reyes
It’s a been a big year, both personally and professionally. Lots of change, lots of opportunities, lots of learnings. There are no absolute truths, so the below are as much a point-in-time reflection as a statement of beliefs. We are but an expression of our recent experiences and current thinking, and I’m excited at the thought of what future years will teach me.
So, with an eye to testing, validating, challenging and affirming, here are five learnings I’ve taken from a great year. Where relevant, I reference the 2019 experiences they relate to, including any personal writings from the year that cover them in more detail. So, what did I learn?
First: People respond to incentives.
Incentives are amongst the most powerful forces we encounter day-to-day.
People are incredibly complex and are compelled to act by a wide array of variables and considerations. However, we are predictably irrational (to borrow from Dan Ariely). Incentives have a profound ability to shape behaviour and are the best signal at our disposal to predict otherwise irrational behavior. Therefore, if you want to understand somebody, understand the incentive framework they are operating within.
Incentives also dictate our own behaviour more than we may appreciate. Across our careers, we will operate within different incentive structures. It’s therefore critical to understand how accepting a certain set of incentives will force us to act. It is then our responsibility to consider whether the behaviours we are incentivized to pursue align with the vision of how we’d like to spend our time and what type of person we’d like to become.
Ignore incentives at your own peril.
Source: Working in the investment management industry, I have learned to zero-in on incentives; it is an industry that places them top-of-mind, and they are my starting point in understanding/predicting the behaviour of those I invest with/alongside. WeWork provided a good case study, and I wrote about it pre-and-post unraveling here and here.
Second: Observation is a superpower; we’re losing it.
Observing things makes you notice things. Noticing things is central to being different. Being different is critical to success.
Unfortunately, (one of) the defining hallmarks of my generation is distraction. The intervening moments between ‘doing things’ are potentially incredibly valuable; they provide the space to notice and connect. However, we now fill-in these moments — waiting for the elevator, waiting for the subway, waiting for the kettle to boil — by scrolling on our phones. We cannot be alone with our thoughts. It either terrifies us or bores us beyond belief.
As we fill our time with reading and consuming the thoughts and experiences of others, our thinking and aspirations become more homogeneous; we optimize for the same outcomes. Unfortunately, it feels like we’re losing the ability to think for ourselves.
Source: Generally looking up and around, and acknowledging the level of distraction — both mine, and those around me. In this piece, I talked about the impact of social media on our ability to work through complexity, and what the endless flow of information is doing to us.
Third: We live in the age of the brand; qualify everything.
Brand has never been more important, but has also never been more fraught.
Technology has given us the ability to create, curate and broadcast brand — personal and professional — with incredible reach. Strangely, in a world of increasing social isolation, we interact with the majority of our ‘network’ exclusively through avatars; our LinkedIn or Instagram accounts are the versions of us that 90% of people will ever know. In this paradigm, we have made our digital identities embody our ‘brand.’ However, our digital avatars can’t and don’t actually represent who we are. Brands therefore fall into the inauthenticity trap.
As we build brands (personal or otherwise), we should aspire to the values of integrity, humility and trust. However, they cannot (and should not) be signaled digitally; they are conveyed through actions and real interactions. In a complex world, the more deliberately you project what and who you are, the easier it is for others to dispute your projection when your actions inevitably contradict your carefully-curated brand. Each to their own, but in an age of endless brand curation, there’s something to be said… for not saying much at all. At a minimum, you lessen the risk of being accused of inauthenticity.
Acknowledging inauthenticity exists all around us, we should always look to qualify brand content we interact with. In New York this year, I was somewhat disheartened by the level of corporate extravagance and branding around the Pride March. It wasn’t the cause I disagreed with (progress on LGBTQI has been fantastic); I took issue with brands ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ at a point in the process whereby they weren’t actually taking on any risk to do so. I felt a lot of it was disingenuous and was about what their brand wanted to say, not the underlying issues. It is but one example.
Qualify everything, understand the nature of brand-building, and optimize for authenticity.
Source: 2019 Pride preparations in New York, and discussing Gary V (and others) with friends. I also discussed the relationship between ‘values’ and ‘authenticity’ in the context of brand in this piece.
Fourth: The gap between the old and the young feels like it’s growing.
I worry that certain, older parts of our communities, do not have a good grasp of the world we’re living in. They do not appreciate the dynamics of the change we’re living through. Central to this change is the way we interact with information.
Importantly, the gap in understanding is only going to grow over the next decade. Time moves linearly, whereas technological change advances at an accelerating rate. The young and the old will (or already do) engage with technology in such different ways that they effectively inhabit different worlds. This is especially troubling given that our leaders (business and political) fall in the older-category.
Within this construct, there exists opportunity and risk. Opportunity presents to those that are able to build a bridge between these diverging generations, and this is something I am personally spending a lot of time thinking about. However, should we fail to exercise empathy and understanding, we risk deepening the divide between either side; issues will continue to polarize and hostility will only grow.
Saying that this feels like an important moment in time downplays the fact that throughout history it’s always an ‘important moment in time’, but… it feels like an important moment in time.
Source: Seeing Greta Thunberg at the Climate Strike in NYC in September; I drew a number of lessons from this experience, which you can read about here. Importantly, I think we do a very poor job of respecting and appreciating older members of society, which I reference in a piece here.
Fifth: Certain things compound; do more of them.
Investments compound over time, and we should invest — financially and non-financially — early and often.
Investors often think about time in terms of ‘duration’: what is the timeframe within which I am able to remain invested in a particular opportunity, and what is my capacity to absorb volatility within that time period? When we are young (30 is young), we have immense duration for our financial and non-financial investments.
Let’s take a 20-year time horizon. It is impossible to predict what the world will look like in 20 years. One thing we can be certain of, is that in 20 years’ time… 20 years will have elapsed. This sounds self-evident, but the implications are profound. This is something I think about a lot, whether in relation to incrementally building a public equities portfolio or learning a new skill; if you persist, continue to invest and remain diligent, time will deliver incredible results.
At times, we romanticize success and create a barrier between us mere mortals and those we consider fabulously famous or successful. However, a common trademark of success is ‘doing,’ not ‘thinking about doing.’ The world is full of talented and intelligent people, but no amount of intellect can generate results on its own. We often strive for perfection before developing conviction to get started. This is a trap.
Action begets action. Conceptualize, actualize and set the momentum in motion. Value accrues to those that ‘do.’
Source: This year, I have been reflecting on the concept of time and how it is generally poorly understood. This is a piece that goes into more detail on the implications of misunderstanding ‘time’. In a separate piece, I talk about how we should look at our careers like investors and understand how to structure a curiosity-driven career.
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Thank you for reading, I hope it was useful. See y’all in 2020.