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1/ I love Derek Siver’s question: “What are you optimizing your life for?”
2/ For the last few years, my answer has been “interesting.”
3/ I always felt sort of dumb for saying that, but then I read a paper called Driven By Compression Progress
4/ It looks at humans as information processing machines that are compressing information.
5/ Compression is the ability to explain take a large set of data and compress it in a simple, more beautiful way.
6/ E=mc2 is an incredible compression.
7/ It explains a huge amount of our world in a very simple and beautiful way.
8/ If you can imagine forking humanity where one fork knew e=mc2 and another didn’t, you can imagine how impactful that compression was.
9/ In a way, this sort of happened. E=mc2 and a lot of the other compression progress around it lead to the U.S. developing the atomic bomb
10/ Had the Axis powers had the same compression and developed the bomb first, our world would look very different.
11/ That's the power of compression.
12/ This happens on an individual level. Good investors have done huge amounts of compression
13/ They can look at a huge market with huge amounts of data and compress it down to make an intelligent investment decision.
14/ Likewise good leaders and look at their industry, team, personal abilities and compress it down to say
15/ “Given all this data, we should be focusing on X.”
16/ In information processing terms, they are able to take in more data and structure it in a useful way.
17/ When I look at a chart with twenty different metrics for a stock, it means very little to me.
18/ I haven't done much compression for trading public companies.
19/ Warren Buffett can look at those same charts and see a lot. He's done a huge amount of compressing in that area.
20/ How do you get good at compressing? You optimize for interesting.
21/ Interesting was an emotion we evolved to point thw way towards where we have the potential to make “compression progress.”
22/ A book that you find interesting is usually one which lets you compress a large set of data in a succinct and efficient way.
23/ Interesting is an emotion that evolved to help humans optimize in an environment where external indicators were hard to measure.
24/ This is still true today. You can work on a project for a year before releasing it and getting any feedback
25/ How do you know what to focus on then? You optimize for interesting.
26/ Much of what we do that improves our information processing capacity (and thus fitness in Darwinian terms) is difficult to measure.
27/ There is no easily measurable metric which Einstein could have optimized for that would have lead him to e=mc2.
28/ He just thought it was interesting. This is true of every major discovery or innovation in history I can think of.
29/ It’s equally true of the investor or CEO. You can’t make high level decisions on data alone, there has to be a large element of gut
30/ .
31/ If you take the data and A/B testing methodology to it’s logical extreme, every biz becomes a brothel and every website as a porn...
32/ ...site.
33/ In Christenson’s terms, sustaining innovation is driven by optimizing for metrics, disruptive innovation by optimizing for...
34/ ...interesting.
35/ So the emotion “interesting” is actually the most effective compass for deciding what to optimize for in an uncertain world.
36/ How do you do this?
37/ 1. “Be dilettante in your inputs but focused in your output.” 80% of what I read and consume is purely because I find it...
38/ ...interesting.
39/ It has no direct benefit. However, over time, I find ways in my output to use inputs that seemed dilettante.
40/ 70% of the sources I cited in my book The End of Jobs I had read out of general interest in the preceding 3 years.
41/ As Steve Jobs said, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
42/ 2. Tinker Time - Google used to be famous for their “20% time” where they let employees work on whatever they wanted for 20% of...
43/ ...their time. Gmail and Adsense, Two of Google’s most successful products, came out of this.
44/ I try to do the same by allocating one day a week (usually Saturdays) to “tinker” with whatever I think is interesting.
45/ This was when I wrote the many of the essays that made it into my book.
46/ In @cdixon's words "What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."
47/ Link to Driven by Compression Progress Paper: arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360
48/ Chris Dixon’s Blog Post: cdixon.org/.../what-the-s…
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