Hi friends,
Sorry this one is out later than usual — hope you have a lovely evening.
The Long Read: A word to the wise is not sufficient
I’ve been reflecting a lot on the fact that when I started this newsletter I was less than a year into my time at RISC, whereas now I’m well beyond the two-year mark. That time has seen a pretty significant transformation in both how I think about the organization and how I understand myself and my work.
One special benefit of working in a start-up-y environment is that you get to think a lot about systems, culture, and your own work philosophies. In the absence of ways-to-work and discrete tasks you are given the space to be thoughtful about work in a normative and positive sense.
One thing that has been made very clear to me is that in most cases what we would conventionally call “wisdom” requires experience. For a long time I had felt that this view was silly and anti-youth and detrimental.1 You could pick up a book or talk to someone and have the wisdom transmitted — no need to live it yourself.
Now, I think that the experience-is-a-required-ingredient view is true in most cases (though that the value of wisdom can still be debated, see footnote).
So what is there to do? Is there a meaningful benefit in sharing with the less-experienced anything beyond processes, domain-specific learnings, and operational efficiencies? Is there any way to convey the “bigger” lessons you’ve learned?
I’ve come out on the side that while one cannot transmit wisdom directly to others, they can prime people to discover wisdom. Many times in life we are subjected to the same lesson over and over again, and a primary driver for this repetition is that we don’t internalize the lesson the first time. Now, not all wisdom is gained from a bad thing happening. Sometimes it just requires paying attention to what is already happening around you. But we so often either fail to see what is happening in broad daylight, or we write off an event as a fluke, or we take the wrong lesson from it. By being primed for the lessons, we can get to wisdom much quicker, and hopefully with much less trouble. So yes, sharing is caring and is still worthwhile.
But if you’re on the other side of the table — trying to deliver wisdom — it is important to be both realistic with yourself and with your interlocutor about what they reasonably can take away from the exchange.
I made this image for a talk I gave to our new hires at RISC — a situation where I felt that I could prime them to receive some wisdom during their RISC tenures. I think it captures the point well.
The Links
There will likely see La Niña this year: your winter will almost certainly be impacted.
A startling 80% of the world’s down feathers come from China. The reason? Each bird produces only a few handfuls of feathers; to keep costs reasonable you need a populace who demands the meat.
Lagniappe
Succession has been one of my favorite shows in recent memory. Give it a watch before season 3 concludes and let me know what you think.
Graph(s) of the week
[WSJ] Inflation is still here, but markets don’t expect it to stick around too long.
gn,
Harrison
To be clear, my overarching feeling about the American job market is that the conventional path wastes an incredible amount of human capital as 20-somethings are forced to build permission structures to allow them to do the work they are fully equipped to do (h/t Wes De Silvestro for conversations around this). But that’s a longer discussion.