Back to The US! | #199

October 1st, 2022: Greetings from the US! We had an amazing month in Lisbon. For me, it was the most restful and contemplative month of the year which was a nice “pause” after a busier than normal 2022 (because of the book and increased consulting work).

I read quite a bit, didn’t push too hard on any work, and wandered around Lisbon, which might be one of the best wandering cities in the world. I feel rested and am excited to re-engage with several projects.

One lesson I need to keep re-learning: this kind of path doesn’t come with clear and obvious next steps no matter how much I want them to appear. This may seem obvious but I sense I, like most people, have the desire for the answers to be easy. No matter how long I spend on this path, it seems that picking from 100 non-obvious next steps is always the way forward,

I’ll likely be taking next week off and will see you in a couple weeks with episode #200

Some further experiments in prompt engineering

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#1 Doctors (And Everyone?) As Employees

Nikhil Krishnan, who runs the “Out of Pocket,” newsletter talked about the trend of doctors becoming employees or part of larger corporate practices. He shared some data on the percentage of physicians who now work for a hospital or corporate entity.

I imagine many of these people didn’t picture that they’d be working as part of a large hospital system or organization when they decided to be doctors or nurses.

This made me curious to see if a similar trend is happening in the broader economy. At least in the US, an increasing number of people are working for organizations with more than 1,000 people. In the last twenty years, the number of people working for large organizations has steadily grown and the number working for small companies has shrunk.

You can see more clearly when looking at the people working for companies with over 250 people:

I do wonder what kind of effect this has on our culture. While the 1950s are seen as the time of the “organization man,” today’s labor market might actually be more aligned with that idea. Most people you know probably work in some sort of knowledge work job getting a regular paycheck for a big company.

Nikhil thinks regulation and technology might tip the scales back in the opposite direction in medicine. Time will tell! At a minimum, technology is making it easier than ever to be self-employed and/or start a company. But if everyone around you is making a paycheck it feels a bit scarier to wander down those roads.

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#2 Return To (Work) Office

I cracked up this week when I read a headline from GM saying that they were giving people until 2023 to “return to work.” It seems their “return to office” plans didn’t really work so they are giving people more time. It’s pretty wild that some companies like GM have dedicated years to endless false “restarts.”

I’ve been following some interesting data from Kastle systems which tracks building occupancy. As you can see things seem to have plateaued at about 47.3% occupancy in most cities (compared to 100% pre-pandemic) and this is probably overstating it a bit because most people are not working every day. What this means is on any given day, for every 10 people in the office in 2019, there are only about 5 now.

Here are some charts:

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#3 Control The Networks

It seems more companies are cracking down on discussing politics at work.

Here is Facebook:

The company will also be more specific about which parts of Workplace can be used to discuss social and political issues. This change will be so that employees do not have to confront social issues during their day-to-day work.

…and Google:

As a result, the company is expanding a content moderation pilot it started in 2019 to span more than 75 discussion groups on various platforms, documents show. It will require most owners of discussion groups to serve as active moderators, to complete mandatory moderation training, and to create a “charter to define their group’s purpose” as well as make sure conversations stay “inclusive” and in line with their charters.

I imagine this is about more than politics. Executives aren’t stupid. Just as people can organize against political issues, people can use these tools to organize micro-coups against company leaders.

It also made me think back to an essay from Byrne Hobart last year on Big Tech:

Each of the largest tech companies has a very America-in-the-90s feel. They’ve conquered the big problems. They still have problems, but they’re relatively small-scale; the risk is a bad quarter, not bankruptcy. And yet, most of the well-paid tech workers I know feel deeply dissatisfied. When they look at how much revenue their work generates, and how valuable and profitable their employers are, they feel underpaid. When they consider the effort required to keep getting promotions, though, they feel overpaid. Life at a large tech company is, in Plato’s model, satisfying reason and desire, and ignoring thymos entirely.

Is there an escape? Of course. Some people quit completely, and retreat to monasticism, or perhaps podcasting. Others quit and form startups. That’s a serious problem for Big Tech, though: in The Republic, when Plato divides his ideal society into classes based on this model of the soul, the thymoeides are the ones tasked with defending the city from outsiders. If everyone at Facebook who could give their all to a company decides to quit and give their all to some other company instead, it’s ultimately defenseless.

Is working in BigTech just like working for GE 20 years ago? It sure seems like it. It will be interesting to see what the inevitable next generation of companies turns out to be.

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#4 Training The Street @ SIG

I had the pleasure of talking to Michael Steiner on my podcast this week who was introduced by Kris Abdelmessih. He is a former trader and then trainer of the traders at one of the best market making firms in the world, Susquehanna. We had a far ranging convo including:

• Ending up at Penn and not really knowing what he was going to do

• Figuring out he enjoyed math and finance

• Getting a job at SIG

• Joining the training team

• Leaving finance to spend more time with his kids

• Becoming a high school teacher

• How he thinks about teaching & mentorship

• His 20-year journey in creating his game "Stockslam"

You can check out the podcast on spotify or other links below:

Watch on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

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#5 Continuum of Creators

This reflection from Clint on the creator economy was very good. He proposes a continuum of content and proposes a simple idea:

Some art might accidentally back into being effective content, but metrics-driven content will almost never accidentally become art.

He proposed four levels of being a "creator"":

Level 1 = Learning about Content

Level 2 = Independent Content Producer

Level 3 = Unique Content Creator

Level 4 = Artist

His argument is that the first step of becoming an artist often does not look like being an artist. Far too many people are afraid to create and experiment online because they are rightly afraid of being criticized and mocked. This is why I personally try to encourage more people to get started and try to be patient when they, like me, are creating stuff that isn’t all that impressive.

He argues, however, that too many people get stuck at “level 2” and should aim higher!

Here’s why: in the early days of the internet, we dreamed of unlocking an explosion of knowledge and art. We dreamed of a new renaissance. We did not envision, and certainly did not dream about, an army of people who write banal content online about nothing except how to write banal content online. If you're going to write, your topic should be unique in some way. You should not simply constantly teach other people how to write. You need to bring some unique idea or point of view to the table. You need to make art. And so, I guess the crux of my problem is simply that far too many people seem to just stop at Level Two. I implore would-be creators to realize that at this particular level, like a musician who has finally mastered his scales and sheet reading skills, you have only finished understanding the most basic skills needed to create art and are now, finally, ready to take your first real step of composing your own art.

It’s a solid read, you can check it out here.

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#6 Ambitious or Not?

Great reflections from Sam Sager, who I recorded a podcast with this week, on his own questioning of ambition:

For the first time, I started to question my ambition. Since I didn’t want to move up in the consulting world, maybe I wasn’t that ambitious after all. If others were more driven to succeed here, they must be more ambitious than me. Next came my identity. If I wasn’t a deeply competitive achiever, who was I? 

I found a safe solution: just externalize the problem. Instead of reflecting inward, I blamed the environment and circumstances. I wasn’t a corporate guy. Not enough risk and reward. I must be a start-up guy. That’s where I’d find my real ambition. Innovator. Builder. New exciting buzzwords to build an identity around.

Great read and our podcast ep:

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#7 Radical Self-Betterment

This essay in Every by Gena Gorlin was a great inner look into how a trained clinical psychologist thinks about helping people radically improve their lives. It’s interesting to see the parallels between how she thinks about change with how many others without a medical degree have arrived at many of the same conclusions.

This was one of my favorite prompts she uses:

Having thought through the potential path(s) to your ideal life vision, ask yourself: is there anything I could realistically be doing to get on this path, or to speed or improve my progress along this path, if my psychology worked differently than it does now?

If the answer is “yes” (or even “maybe”), then the next question is: what would need to be different? And how much time, energy, and capital would this change require?

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More Links!

Have done quite a bit of reading this month

• John Robb has a great short post on what it means to live in an age of networks

• Rob Henderson wrote a breakdown of my favorite show of all-time The Shield

• Simone Stolzoff who has a great book about working coming (got to read an early draft) wrote about his own recent step on to the pathless path, leaving his job at IDEO

• Toby Shorin has a fascinating essay on the future of community and brands. It’s informed on his observations of marketing and internet subcultures over the last ten years.

  I came to understand that in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements. That’s how a culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online…

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ICYMI - last week, my thoughts on the question, “what is your rich life?”

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