Status Games, Rich Kids, And More
5 cracking ideas from March
Hi there,
We’re back with 5 mind-expanding ideas- stuff that I learned through a variety of sources in March. If you want to work on building your learning machine, here are some essential ideas to get started:
How To Build A Learning Machine
Hello, Learning is one of the pleasures of life that is beneficial and never-ending.
Anyway. Here are my top 5 ideas from last month:
The Status Game: Anyone who says they don’t want status is either fooling you or themselves. We’re hardwired to chase status and recognition. Interestingly, the nature of the corporate world is such that the only way people feel that they’re worthy is through some vanity market of status: like designation, team size, etc (even though in reality those are total bullshit and a VP with a team of 50 may be doing more harm than good). Why does this happen? Because corporate employees have no way to tell if the work they’re doing has an impact, thanks to the fragmented nature of work and the idea of departments. Contrast that to a carpenter, whose work output is tangible (say a chair), and he faces no anxiety about moving up the hierarchy and chasing a CXO/Partner title. When you don’t know if what you produce (reports, meetings, spreadsheets) matter at all, you fall back on the only way to tell whether your work is meaningful- titles and power.
Next-Gen Entrepreneurs: There’s a trend playing out in rich families: the next generation, instead of growing the family business or doing the hard work of expanding into newer lines, is more interested in managing the family money and punting it on startups. Ergo, the rise of family offices. This may not be great, because at least in the richer circles that have the capital and downside protection to take bolder bets, retiring to their cushy offices and simply managing money seems like a lost opportunity. This may also be because building a business is hard, while punting around on “growth sectors” and “frontier technology” sounds cool, feels exciting to write about on LinkedIn, and all work happens in cozy setups over champagne. Time will tell whether this trend materializes in a big way and follows the long-term psychological cycle.
Next-gen entrepreneurs grinding it out real hard AI and Irrelevance: If AI does make all of us irrelevant, what’s the best possible defence that we can have? If you’re reading this newsletter, chances are that more than the problem of money, you’ll confront the problem of meaning (read my article on what Squid Game teaches us about this). And the only way to confront it is to develop infinite games. To find things we’re passionate about, things we can die for. Because when we give so much of a shit about something, it gives us something to work on, even if there’s no office to go to and paperwork to spend 25 hours a day on, and bosses to cajole and bitch about. So just in case such a painful day arrives, spend enough time taking the journey within and discover: what do I care about so much that I can dedicate my life to it?
Chinese Youth Struggles: A declining population may indicate that there’d be high demand for young Chinese workers but despite this, there’s a lot of youth unemployment in the country. A couple of possible reasons that emerged from conversations with youngsters: one is that the youth, being educated with those nonsensical degrees we spend 5% of our existence on, don’t want menial jobs which are widely available (an aspiration mismatch that I discussed in the Indian context here). And secondly, the high-skilled jobs in Beijing/Shanghai are so stressful and competitive that many youngsters are opting out of the race and moving to smaller cities, settling for lesser pay just so they don’t have to deal with the endless nightmare of cubicles, meetings, and 70-hour workweeks.
SME AI Adoption: An interesting piece argues that small Indian businesses and shops will adopt AI, but not simply to eliminate workers. Walk into different kinds of stores and you’ll notice that there’s so much that can be done to make the sales process better. Shop owners keep talking about the difficulty of finding reliable staff, about the constant need to keep a watch, lest they descend into 8-hour lusty reel marathons and ignore all walk-in customers. So just like the CCTV camera helped them improve their “middle management” (by ensuring that the surveillance brought in some more discipline), SME owners are likely to use AI for more efficient operations, inventory management, sales, and customer service in a setup where humans need monitoring, surveillance (sounds dark, I know), and are seriously difficult to hire.
That’s it for today, folks. If you had any interesting learnings in March or read some fascinating books, do respond to the email. And if you want to read some more stuff, here are some recent pieces that people enjoyed: