There’s this entire genre of interesting content along the lines of “so strange/wild/weird how this successful person/company didn’t care about X”. Here are some examples:
- @rkestava: “The fact that you have to use your personal Facebook account to manage a business ad account is unbelievable idiotic. How is this a $900b market cap company?”
- @jongold: “so wild that Windows is almost 40 years old and has been installed on billions of devices and they still haven’t finished implementing basic typography”
- @bengbutler: “linkedin was acquired for 26 (twenty six) billion dollars” – screenshot says “you both worked at Self-Employed”
- @Kazanjy: “Atlassian is a $50b market cap company and you can’t input rich text into a ticket creation window.”
- @hankgreen: “Tiktok is so terrible at threading comments that the people have developed systems. Red to red, orange to orange, yellow to yellow.” (to help people navigate mis-ordered comments)
- @samuel_spitz: “DocuSign is a $16B company with a seed stage product”
A thing my ex-boss Dinesh got me to meditate on (not literally, but I think about it a lot) is that product-market fit heals and forgives almost everything. The highest order bit is almost the only thing that matters by a long shot, to a dramatic and unintuitive degree.
You can insert your own examples. “It’s ridiculous how [[successful business]] fails at [[surprisingly basic thing]]”
The useful question my Dinesh would ask me: is it actually ridiculous? Or is it only ridiculous within your model of reality, which expects things to be a certain way?
Approached from a slightly different angle, reality *seems* unrealistic all the time because it deviates from our model of reality. But what is real is already so!
Circling back to the examples: the critical life lesson here is that you can be “unbelievably idiotic” and still win big. Do you realize this? Do you feel it in your bones? Because lots of people don’t realize this. Lots of people think “I will be successful if I become less stupid, less incompetent, less fail, less embarrassing…” This is almost entirely back-asswards, an illusion caused by media bias, narrative bias, selection bias, halo effects.
I am trying to help people see that they can be much more successful than they realize, imagine or expect, because it’s their expectations, imagination and models of reality that are miscalibrated. There is a silly naïveté to this endeavour (of trying to help people see something they’re not seeing), but it’s also very rewarding when you help someone see it.
Dinesh and I talk about this practically every time we meet even now, because it’s so alien & deviant from mainstream understanding. It’s like breathing water instead of air. But with each breath you take, you become more powerful, because you’re operating with a more accurate model of world. (Accurate model → knowledge → power)
My understanding of this at the heart of what allows me to basically tweet for a living. It’s a pretty mediocre living (for now!) but it’s freedom. Freedom that a lot of smart angry dudes wish they had but don’t, because they’re too busy being right about everything else except this.
You can be smart about a thousand things that don’t matter, or you can be smart about like the 5 things that do. Some will ask “why not be smart about 1005 things?” The thing is that 6th thing is a distraction from the first thing. It’s endlessly more complicated than what I’m saying, of course.
In a way it’s a lil hubristic to tweet about this, but all communication is a lil hubristic because it’s intrinsically lossy. Dinesh and I have been talking about this for almost a decade (damn) and we are both still learning how strange and counterintuitive this is. The shape of one of our theories – which we argue about – is that it’s unintuitive because it runs against human moral instincts. We want to treat everyone fairly, everyone matters, etc. And in a sense yes of course they do. But value isn’t distributed that way.
Probably like 10 of my tweets out of 151,000 are responsible for 60% of the value of the @visakanv account. I can’t actually point you to them with confidence because the truth of it makes me uncomfortable. The truth is always uncomfortable. This is blowing my own mind as I write this, this is how unintuitive this truth is- every time I meditate on it it delivers me value. My success in life is almost directly a function of the degree to which I am willing to face the discomfort of the truths I don’t like.
Here’s a truth that I’ve obviously been avoiding: hardly anybody gives a fuck about my 2nd ebook. Going by preorders in relation to marketing, people are interested in Unlearning Coercion than in Introspect. Introspect is like the album the artist loves that the audience doesn’t.
I do personally believe there is an intangible beautiful value in caring about things that don’t have market value, I’m very sentimental and romantic like that. I will tilt at this windmill forever. But also I don’t want to be a total sucker.
Indulgence from a position of strength is aesthetic, beautiful, etc. Indulgence from a position of weakness is pathetic. Many “trad” accounts on Twitter are aware of this in letter but almost none of them embody its spirit, which is a painful hypocrisy I wouldn’t wish on my enemies.
Heh. it’s actually really stupid of me to give a fuck about like, whether people think I’m narcissistic or shameless or anything of that sort – it actually, quite literally, Does Not Matter. it’s me acting out some trauma from my teenage days. I didn’t expect this to hit me here. But you see what meditating on the nature of reality does for you? It doesn’t spare your feelings! What is true is already so. You go in trying to understand Facebook and you end up getting personally attacked and having your ass kicked by your own truth-seeking mind.
✱
See also: solve for distribution