What to do
Earlier this year PG had this amazing post on “what to do“. Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about what this is all about and what to do about it. This post is my WIP answer.
Some Philosophy
I have my own life philosophy that I layer onto this that mostly centers around statistics and science. I posted about it here yesterday, but the tl;dr is that we need to make sure humanity survives and grows into the next generation of our history, because most (or pretty much all) things that will ever happen are in our future and not our past. Big mission, but what do you do about it?
One part I didn’t include in that post is that you need to accept that you aren’t a main character, but play a bit of a supporting role. It’s like we’re playing a game, God is the coach, and we’re all players on one big humanity dream team.
That said, that doesn’t mean your part of history isn’t important. Very likely most of us will be more significant with the record of the internet than some of the most famous people in history. Turns out for a very long time we didn’t record a lot, and now we do, so that make everything we all say and do all that more important. By virtue of being at the beginning we all have outsized impact that’s hard to understand. For the most part, you want to create the most value for the world possible to help humanity keep growing faster. If you have the power, your responsibility is to help prevent fragile downstream effects and existential risk.
What to do
One insight I’ve had recently is that, at least for me, there’s an extension of PG’s ideas on what to do that has helped me in both companies and life. The question of what to do is a devlishly tricky one because of how important it is, it’s the equivalent of asking, “how should I spend my life?“
Different people have different answers, but PG sums it up one of his key ideas pretty well:
So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new things.
I can't prove that one should do this, any more than I can prove that one should help people or take care of the world. We're talking about first principles here. But I can explain why this principle makes sense. The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things.
Mine is very similar, but to extend PG’s post I like to add a couple of things:
Build a foundation: things like health, life organization that support the rest
Make good new things
Make win-win or win-neutral relationships
Be absurdly ambitious (note: this is an addition - need to add the body)
Health
There are much better people in the world to talk about health than me, but I listen to them and think it’s key. Unhealthy people hurt people, make bad decisions, and can’t show up for others - don’t be one.
Making Good New things
The first point is kind of obvious, you’re not going to do anything good for the world if you’re dying or sick, but 2 & 3rd points are interesting. Paul’s entire post is about #2, and he says it better than me. You should read it, but in my eyes creating good new things is one of the most impactful things you can do in the world. You don’t solve other people’s problems. Other people solve their own problems with things you created whether it’s goods or service. Like any product than can do good it needs to be used to do that good in the world. And it’s much much better to be a creator of solutions than problems.
Win-Win Relationships and Deals
The third took me a lot of trial and error (and pain frankly) to learn but a lot of value is destroyed in lose-lose and or win-lose deals and relationships. The reason that I did a lot of this is that I didn’t think about relationships in the right away. For math / game theory people like me, any relationship is a multi-turn game. Each game is a deal, you play over years or decades (or longer). Every. Single. One. And they can either be positive-sum, neutral, or negative-sum. You might ask “isn’t it bad to think of relationships as games?“. Yes, totally, it’s just how it fits best in my head but really if you were to talk about this in normal-human language you’d talk about balance and how everything is a give and take. It’s just the nerds have weird language for things.
The only way you lose is if you cut a deal both parties take and one party ends up somehow surprised, so really managing relationships and making good deals is just making sure everything is on the table. People don’t take deals they fully understand and don’t like. That’s most often a crime.
One of the tricks to this is that it’s everything, including the money. I say including because oftentimes the non-money part of deals, especially big ones, are the biggest. You need to spend at least as much or more time agreeing to who spends time where, who puts their name on the line, and who takes the fall if things go wrong. These are hard things to talk about because we don’t put them in writing, but if we don’t talk about them, especially in things like key stakeholders, we’re bound to fail. I’ve historically been bad at this, mostly because I haven’t recognized it as an issue. My most common failures are biasing past experience with the future. Every game is a new turn of the crank, and sometimes both parties get lazy and end up destroying value for everyone.
I wrote a whole post on this here.
Conclusion
This post is very WIP - there’s a lot more here than I’ve gotten in the last 28 years, but these are the key abstractions that have stuck and help me day to day. It’s a bit of a for-loop, just stay healthy and do good things for the world. It’s simple but so so hard at the same time because there isn’t a one-size fits all answer. Ultimately helping humanity win is a team sport, and we’re all in this together.
