In an age of leverage, B gets paid 10,000x more than A
The classic formulation:
“Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage.” -@naval
My interpretation is there's confusion these days.
People conflate being at the extreme with being on the frontier.
Naval never does that. Here's how we puts it.
Being marginally better means getting outsized rewards (by orders of magnitude).
That means combining your skills and pushing as far to the extreme as possible.
That also implies loving what you do so much you can persevere.
Yes, small differences in judgment and capability get amplified.
But there's more, and Naval and many others know it.
Being at the frontier is different from being at the extreme in your art, but there are similarities.
The first is better vision.
"Out on the edge," as Kurt Vonnegut has said, "You see all kinds of things you can't from the center.”
You can also find your people in ways you wouldn't otherwise.
As the wonderful writer George Kennan said, “People who are a little unusual -- the bohème -- they understand me better than do the regular ones.”
You can also discover things you never thought possible.
In the words of the biologist E.O. Wilson:
Outside our sensory bubble are countless prospects... The challenge is to translate the previously unperceived into the limited audio-visual world of human consciousness."
The big advances don't come from the frontier itself, they come from standing at the frontier and looking out.
It's a process of continuous close observation.
This is why the point isn't to simply visit the frontier, it's the live there.
Ten years ago this week, Bret Victor spoke at a software engineering conference in Canada.
"I don't have any prizes to give out," he said. "I'm just going to tell you how to live your life."
Here’s a distillation of the talk that’ll change the way you think about your career:
There's a way of living most people don't talk about.
When you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion or doing something you love.
I’m going to talk about something different: finding a guiding principle for your work.
The principle that guides my work is creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. Without an immediate connection, many great inventions and theories will not emerge.
I read and synthesized 4 of the most influential books of the past decade:
-The Beginning of Infinity
-The Origins of Creativity
-The Rational Optimist
-Sapiens
Here's what they say about human progress, potential, evolution & creativity:
Progress starts with rebellion
-Rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge
-Refusal to accept the present order of things
-@DavidDeutschOxf@carlorovelli
The potential for human progress is unlimited.
The more human beings have exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be. And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process.
-@mattwridley