Everything is Trust

Trust is probably the central tenet of just about everything that goes on in the human world.

Why?

Because everything that we come into contact with, as people, comes to us from the unknown. The more that people fear, just about anything, the more that they will gravitate to things that they trust. The more that they distrust some things, the more that they will distrust others.

Trust is the thing that defines whether using something feels like a leap of faith/shitting your pants, or whether it feels like a wondrous discovery, that’s freeing, exciting and no stress.

Trust is the thing that allows us to make things close to us. We tend to place a high value that which is close to us, and a low value on that which is not close to us. By extension, we tend to place a high value on things that we trust, and a low value on things that we do not trust.

Given uncertainty, trust is the thing that cracks through the noise.

It’s the safe harbour, the resting place, the peace of mind, the sure thing, the safe bet, the thing that helps you sleep at night, the thing you can count on, the thing you can build upon.

By contrast, that which we distrust, we avoid. We will believe anything said about those that we distrust. That they are evil, that they are scheming, that they are ultimately self-interested, that they are stupid, that they are fallible, the whole lot.

Why is this?

Because whether we like to admit it or not, 95% of the time, fear governs out reasoning. Or emotions govern our reasoning. Little thought goes into countering the direction of our emotional sway. In fact, biases tend to justify and amplify our emotions. The why, how, what. First trust, then sell.

We like to think that reasoning governs our decisions. But in fact, emotions govern our reasoning. And then reasoning governs our decisions.

Why do CVs look good with big companies on them?

Because we trust those companies. And associating yourself with these companies carries trust by extension. When the person trusts someone, they tend to rationalise their arguments.

So an effective investment strategy might be to ask, what new companies live and breathe trust in their branding, and their way of doing business?

Trust allows us to immerse ourselves in something. Immersing ourselves in something is the fastest way to learn. So trusting something allows us to learn it quickly.

When we trust something enough, it becomes embedded in the fabric of our world. We live and breathe it. It is everywhere around us. If we distrust it, it becomes some obscurity, that we might briefly discuss, before moving on to something that we do trust.

It is often said that those who trust are generally very successful.

It appears as if the art of negotiating is all about building trust.

So perhaps the quickest way of learning something is to gain exposure to lots of things, and find ways to trust them, quickly. Find ways to feel secure, or to feel like you can let this thing open up your world.

Follow your heart with visions and actions

It’s tempting just to be passionate about things, and to believe that it’s just about doing that thing, and enjoying doing it. But passions are seeds for a better world. Passions are not just a feel good thing, they are the start of a great adventure, that may be manifested with visions and actions.

Some dude on TED said that Timing was important in the growth/economic success of startups

Timing was top

Then team

Then idea

Then business model

Then funding

Seizing the moment. Not sure where he got his figures from for his research, apart from just a score. But it’s something to think about.

Difference between understanding recipes, and understanding cooking

If you understand a recipe, and do a recipe, this is incredibly efficient. But if you’re trying to do something that’s not in the recipe, you’re stuck.

On the other hand, if you understand cooking, and the relationships between different things within cooking, you can make new recipes at the drop of a hat.

There are so many different stacks, for microbiology, physics, mathematics, linguistics, social science, coding, etc, etc. A lot of the time, people just integrate stacks in different combinations. But in order to integrate the right stack elements, in the right combinations, to the right use cases, in the right way, requires a much more intimate understanding of each of the various elements within it, or perhaps a much deeper understanding of the use case.

But, if you constantly unpack everything for deeper understanding, you’ll never get anything done.

And if you don’t unpack understanding when you need to, you’ll do the wrong thing.

So there’s this dilemna.

But suppose you’re building a computer. And you build a computer.

And then you want to make it 10% faster.

You could increase the size of some of the hardware , make it four instructions wide instead of three etc, and with each of these, you’re making each piece incrementally more complicated.

And then at some point you hit this limit. Like where adding another feature or buffer doesn’t seem to make it any faster.

And then people will say “that’s because it’s the fundamental limit”.

And then somebody else will come in and say “actually, the way you divided the problem up, and the way that the features are interacting, is limiting you, and has to be rethought, rewritten”.

So then you refactor it and rewrite it, and what people commonly find is that the rewrite is not only faster, but half as complicated.

[from scratch?]

Yes.

There is a need to do this every 3–5 years.

If you want to make a lot of progress in [computer] architecture, every 3–5 years you should do one from scratch.

Is this not what happens every industrial revolution? Or specifically, is this not what is happening with the current, third industrial revolution?

He sees that it is necessary to rewrite much more often.

He believes he is an outlier in this case?

[isn’t it scary?]

Yeah of course. Well scary to who?

[to everybody involved? Because like you said, repeating the recipe is efficient, companies wanna make money, well no, individual engineers wanna succeed, so you wanna incrementally improve, increase the buffer from three to four]

Yes well this is where you get into diminishing return curves. I think Steve Jobs said this, where, you have a project, and then it [productivity/impact/effectiveness] goes up and then you have diminishing return .

And to get to the next level, you have to do a new one. And the initial starting point will be lower than the old optimisation point, but it’ll get higher.

So now you have two kinds of fear, short term disaster, and long term disaster.

So people with a quarter-by-quarter business objective, are terrified about changing everything.

And people who are trying to run a business or a computer for a long-term objective, know that the short-term limitations, block them from the long-term success.

So if you look at leaders of companies that had really good long-term success, everytime that they saw that they had to redo something, they did.

[And so somebody has to speak up]

Or you do multiple projects in parallel. Like you optimise the old one while you build the new one.

But the marketing guys are always like, “promise me that the new computer is faster” on every single thing. And the computer architect says, “the new computer will be faster on the average, but there’s a distribution in results on performance, and so you’ll have some outliers that are slower”.

And that’s very hard because you have one customer who cares about that one.

~~~~~

BUT THIS IS EXACTLY THE THING WHICH IS CROPPING UP WITH THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

At the moment, everybody around me is thinking about the short-term win. Getting an internship with a company, and trying to move up the scales. But these companies are dinosaurs. At this minute, most of them are working slowly to try and rewrite the script, at which point they might close, or radically adapt their value prop, business model, and functioning, ditto their workforce contingent, with large layoffs. Now what do you do? You have to adapt to the new system to find a new job, with its new skills.

We are in a phase where many skills are becoming obsolete, irrelevant and more scarcely used. And where different skills are coming to take the place of the old ones, as the tasks change, as a result of the direction changing, and the game changing.