“If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not quickly forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead, we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes. As we progress, we start to question some of the assumptions and conventions we have learned along the way. Soon, we begin to experiment and become increasingly active. At all points in the various moments leading to mastery, we attack with intensity. Every moment, every experience contains deep lessons for us. We are continuously awake, never merely going through the motions.” –Robert Greene, Mastery
INSIGHT
If you don’t have time to fail, you don’t have time to succeed
Don Watkins and Robert Hendershott
Henry Ford famously started two failed auto companies before his third company revolutionized transportation. But if you think the moral of his story is simply “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” you’re missing the deeper, and far more interesting lesson.
Recounting Ford’s rise, Robert Greene notes that “Ford himself seemed blithely unconcerned” after his first two failures.
He told everyone that these were all invaluable lessons to him—he had paid attention to every glitch along the way, and like a watch or an engine, he had taken apart these failures in his mind and had identified the root cause: [his investors weren’t] giving him enough time to work out the bugs.
Ford didn’t just try, try again: he learned from his failures. And the lesson he learned? He needed more time to fail.
In traditional education, learning means assimilating already discovered knowledge. Failure is seen as a negative: it’s your inability to regurgitate a known answer. But how do we discover knowledge? This typically requires failure.
In iterative learning, you have a clear-cut goal and a limited universe of solutions. You want to create a reusable rocket or an autonomous vehicle. You test out different approaches. Nothing works immediately, but each failure teaches you something about which approaches are promising. You focus on the most promising approach, tweaking elements over time as you get closer and closer to your goal. Greene puts it this way:
When a machine malfunctions, you do not take it personally or grow despondent. It is in fact a blessing in disguise. Such malfunctions generally show you inherent flaws and means of improvement. You simply keep tinkering until you get it right. The same should apply to an entrepreneurial venture. Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education.
In exploratory learning, your goal is more open-ended, and you face a virtually unlimited universe of potential solutions (and potential obstacles). To create an autonomous transportation company involves far more than the engineering challenge of getting a car from point A to point B. You have to conceive of a business model that will excite customers, that will yield a profit, that will be enduringly superior to competitors.
In exploratory learning, the ability to learn from failure is daunting, because the factors keeping you from success are not always obvious. Did you pick the wrong team members? The wrong suppliers? The wrong business model? The wrong marketing plan? Did you launch your product too early or too late? Was your price point too high or too low?
But even here, failure is a learning mechanism—particularly at the level of the system. When everyone is free to test out his or her ideas, the good ideas are allowed to succeed, the bad ideas are allowed to fail, and we all learn important lessons about what works. The good ideas can be mimicked, built upon, and become models for further exploration. In a connected free world, we can learn from and be inspired by everyone’s failures and successes. Walmart can copy and maybe even improve upon Amazon.
This doesn’t happen when people lack the freedom to try good ideas or when inferior ideas are not allowed to fail. In societies that inhibit exploration and discovery, humanity bears the opportunity cost of ingenuity thwarted.
If we want progress, we want systems—at the individual, organizational, and cultural levels—where exploration, failure, and learning are embraced. That’s how we maximize human well-being.
QUICK TAKES
If the shoe fits
We’ve been talking about how typical metrics for measuring progress, like GDP per capita, capture the prices we pay for things, not their value. Here’s a cute illustration.
Aetrex Worldwide, Inc. (“Aetrex”) . . . today announced Albert 3DFit, a sleek and modern 3D foot scanner created to revolutionize the retail industry by making 3D fit technology available to stores of all sizes. Offering the most innovative technologies at a fraction of the cost of competitors, this scanner can calculate customers’ 3D foot measurements in less than 10 seconds with accuracy up to 1 millimeter. It features Aetrex’s FitGenius™ AI platform, which matches customers’ unique foot profiles with their ideal footwear styles and sizes to provide personalized footwear recommendations that can be accessed across a retailer’s digital shopping platforms after leaving the store.
You’re going to pay for shoes one way or another. But the ability to pick shoes that fit perfectly represents a huge benefit not captured by the price.
Competition is anti-competitive
For years, Big Tech crushed the competition with relative impunity, squeezing every dollar from would-be rivals to reach unprecedented valuations. And while their anti-competitive practices may well continue, there are now five draft bills circulating in the House of Representatives that represent the biggest threat ever to their standard method of doing business.
That’s from the Big Technology newsletter, which goes on to profile the potentially devastating antitrust bills floating around Congress.
They take direct aim at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft’s self-dealing, outline new speed bumps for anti-competitive mergers, and empower feeble federal regulators to bulk up and throw some punches.
I’ve long thought that antitrust makes people dumber. In what universe is the U.S. government, which literally has the power to break up companies at will, “feeble”? In what universe is competing for market share and profits “anti-competitive”? How can anyone say with a straight face that five different companies “monopolize” tech (while leaving out, say, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, Clubhouse, Twitter, HP, and Dell—to say nothing of non-tech competitors like Walmart and Samsung)?
And the biggest question of all: why do we hear nothing about the risks of imposing antitrust on the most dynamic sector of our economy?
I’m not sleeping, I’m reading
Silicon Valley startup Mojo Vision has created the world's first smart contact lens, and it promises to be transformative.
The first major use case is to help people with visual impairment.
“If you think of the eye as a camera [for the visually impaired], the sensors are not working properly,” explains Dr. Ashley Tuan, Vice President of Medical Devices at Mojo Vision and fellow of the American Academy of Optometry. “For this population, our lens can process the image so the contrast can be enhanced, we can make the image larger, magnify it so that low-vision people can see it or we can make it smaller so they can check their environment.” . . .
Dr. Tuan is one of the few people who has actually worn the Mojo lens. “I put the contact lens on my eye. It was very comfortable like any contact lenses I've worn before,” she describes. “The vision is super clear and then when I put on the accessories, suddenly I see Yoda in front of me and I see my vital signs. And then I have my colleague that prepared a beautiful poem that I loved when I was young [and] I was reading the poem with my eyes closed.”
Looking forward, much more is possible—particularly in the field of medicine. Mojo Vision is hoping to improve the ability of medical staff to find patients’ veins, and to help surgeons with challenging surgeries. And beyond medicine, the possibilities “include live translation of sign language for deaf people; helping those with autism to read emotions; and improving doctors' bedside manner by allowing them to fully engage with patients without relying on a computer.”
They promised us three-dimensional chess, instead we got two-dimensional electrolytes
One of the unsung heroes of technological progress is innovative materials. We had the age of steel. Then the age of plastics. Now we can look forward to the age of intelligent materials.
Intelligent materials, the latest revolution in the field of materials science, can adapt their properties depending on changes in their surroundings. They can be used in everything from self-healing mobile phone screens, to shape-shifting airplane wings, and targeted drug delivery. Delivering drugs to a specific target inside the body using intelligent materials is particularly important for diseases like cancer, as the smart material only releases the drug payload when it detects the presence of a cancer cell, leaving the healthy cells unharmed.
The latest discovery? Two-dimensional electrolytes. (A two-dimensional material is a material that’s one atom thick.)
Just like traditional electrolytes, these new “2D-electrolytes” dissociate their atoms in different solvents, and become electrically charged. Furthermore, the arrangement of these materials can be controlled by external factors, such as pH and temperature, which is ideal for targeted drug delivery. The 2D-electrolytes also show promise for other applications that require a material to be responsive to environmental changes, such as artificial muscles and energy storage.
Incredible.
How YouTube scaled
We often wonder why businesses fail. But the real mystery is how they ever succeed. The sheer amount of coordination that has to happen between dozens or hundreds or thousands of people in order to get things done is hard to square with the breakneck pace of innovation we see at the fastest-growing companies.
This post, from a YouTube insider, defies summary. But it sheds light on the challenges of fast-paced innovation—and how some companies manage to rise to meet those challenges. In the early days of YouTube, the author notes, the challenges of growth
mostly led to a mess. A few symptoms we saw:
Always planning and replanning: It felt like we were always planning and replanning as the new shiny effort quickly bumped to the forefront and upset everyone’s plans.
Too top-down, too bottom-up: Teams complained that the process was either excessively top-down (and didn’t allow for creative freedom), or too bottom-up and lacked coherence / prioritization.
Meetings felt chaotic: Meetings weren’t well planned, often missing the right people or the right context. Because everything was important at once, the team struggled to make tradeoffs.
Unclear decision making paths: With such an intertwined business, it was often hard to know where to go for hard choices.
We slowly constructed a set of rituals and best practices that worked well for us. Over time the YouTube team went from being known for “controlled chaos” to being known as a well-aligned team that could simultaneously run a complex business while taking on meaningful strategic initiatives. Our culture became a highlight—something our team held on to as a reason to push through hard challenges, and an attraction to new employees.
Read the entire post to find out how they did it.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel
One of the reasons I believe making progress a central issue for our culture is vital is that it cuts across tribal lines. Being pro-progress is not a value of the left or of the right—it can be embraced by anyone who values human flourishing.
In her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel anticipates this point. The most important division, she thinks, is not “left vs. right” or “Republican vs. Democrat” but two different attitudes toward the future she labels dynamism and stasism.
How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning?
A shared commitment to stasism, she notes, explains surprising alliances between the traditional left/right camps. During the 1990s, opponents of free trade included right-wingers like Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly—as well as left-wingers like Ralph Nader and Gloria Steinem. The same was true for immigration, new technology, and culture.
Stasists themselves are an alliance, according to Postrel—an alliance of “reactionaries, whose central value is stability”—think environmentalists and traditionalists—“and technocrats, whose central value is control.” Think any would-be central planner. “Reactionaries seek to reverse change, restoring the literal or imagined past and holding it in place. . . . Technocrats, for their part, promise to manage change, centrally directing ‘progress’ according to a predictable plan.”
Dynamists, on the other hand:
share beliefs in spontaneous order, in experiments and feedback, in evolved solutions to complex problems, in the limits of centralized knowledge, and in the possibility of progress. They are excited by the textures of daily life, the ingenuity and variety found in every corner of the contemporary world. They support the open society and instinctively oppose those who would close it to new ideas—whether economic, social, cultural, or scientific. They care about protecting the processes that allow an open-ended future to unfold.
Within this general way of thinking about the future, there can be major disagreements among dynamists. Not only at the level of particular technologies—to be a dynamist is not to think that every particular technology is good—but at the level of policy. Some dynamists, for example, think government has an important role to play in education, in paternalistic rule-making (e.g., antismoking regulations), in basic research, and more. Others are principled supporters of the free market. These represent debates within a more general framework that values bottom-up exploration and learning rather than top-down control.
Postrel’s book isn’t a guide to progress. But it is an indispensable guide to understanding different attitudes toward progress, and how they shape our culture and our policies.
Until next time,
Don Watkins
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