https://luca-dellanna.com People management and risk management. Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:05:48 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html https://github.com/jpmonette/feed en All rights reserved 2025 https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/derisk-exercise https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/derisk-exercise Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/culture-is-the-track-record https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/culture-is-the-track-record Sat, 23 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT Leaders who think organizational culture is a set of concepts attempt to change it using words and concepts – and inevitably fail, because organizational culture is not a set of concepts. It’s a track record. In particular, it’s the track record of which behaviors are a waste of time and which lead to good personal outcomes. For example, what happens when someone raises a hand – do they get listened to, or do they learn that raising a hand is a wasted effort? In other words, what’s the track record of what happens when someone raises a hand? That’s what determines whether raising hands is part of the team’s culture. Defining Core Values and communicating them doesn’t change cultures. It’s not a useless exercise but merely a first step. After Core Values are defined, track records must be changed. This cannot be achieved through words, only actions. Or, more precisely, words can initiate and facilitate the process, but only words backed by action count. ### Engagement is also a track record It is the track record of what happens when one cares. What happens when someone works hard? When someone points out a problem? When someone comes up with an idea? Does it lead to good or bad outcomes? What’s the track record of caring? Does it lead to good personal outcomes, or does it lead to wasted effort? If you want your people to be more engaged, change the track record of caring. Make sure that the next time someone cares, good things happen to them. Or at least they aren’t taught the lesson that it would have been better to care less. ### Teamwork is a track record Similarly, and contrary to common belief, teamwork is not about liking or trusting your colleagues. Instead, teamwork is the track record of what happens when colleagues interact. What happens when someone asks a colleague for help? Does what follows teach them that it was a good idea to ask for help, or that asking for help is a waste of time? What happens when someone gives feedback to a colleague? Are they listened to and thanked? Or are they made wish that they hadn’t voiced their feedback? Again, to improve teamwork, improve the track record of interactions. ### Improving the track record Let’s work on this last point. How do you improve the track record of interactions? The trick is to not address all interactions at once – such a generic goal will produce a generic approach that won’t be effective. Instead, begin by picking one type of interaction and working on that. For example, let’s work with the interaction of “asking and receiving feedback.” People won’t ask for feedback unless, in your team, there is a track record that, when people ask for feedback, they receive helpful and actionable feedback that doesn’t feel personal. And people won’t give good feedback unless the track record in your team is that, when people give feedback, it is well received and taken seriously. So, if you want your people to give more feedback to each other, you need to create these two track records. ### Leading by example Achieving this requires, first and foremost, that your personal actions contribute to the new track record. Whenever you give feedback, make sure it’s not just correct but also helpful, and that makes the receiver glad to have you as a manager rather than wishing you didn’t exist. And whenever you receive feedback, make sure you take it seriously. This doesn’t mean accepting all feedback as correct – some will be wrong – but always making your interlocutor feel listened to, and if you disagree, let them know why. Never take any feedback you receive personally, and never make any colleague giving you feedback feel like they wasted their time. The more your actions show that in your team there is a good track record associated with giving feedback, the more people will give and request feedback. ### Teach skills However, leading by example is necessary but not sufficient. Not only must your people be open to giving and receiving feedback, but they must also have the skills to do it in a helpful way that makes their interlocutor want to have more such interactions in the future. This requires you to train and coach them on how to give and receive feedback. "Politically correct” actions, such as forcing people to say thank you even when they receive bad feedback, won’t work. Instead, what will work is to teach your people to give such helpful feedback that saying “thank you” is a natural reaction. ### Conclusions So, to summarize what we’ve seen so far. Organizational culture – what your team does, what your team cares about, what your team doesn’t do – is not a bunch of words but a track record of actions and reactions. So, changing your organizational culture means changing the track record. Find out the behaviors you want your team to exhibit, and ensure that there’s a track record of good things happening to those who exhibit them. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/depolarization https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/depolarization Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/adversarial-vs-collaborative-feedback https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/adversarial-vs-collaborative-feedback Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/planner-and-gatekeeper https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/planner-and-gatekeeper Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/reproducible-success-strategies https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/reproducible-success-strategies Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/dellanna-method https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/dellanna-method Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/dellanna-diagrams https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/dellanna-diagrams Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT This is very important because if you merely aim to make yourself or your organization robust to problems, you will promote behaviors that leverage rigidity – a property that decreases antifragility. In fact, a rigid person or organization wants to minimize and avoid problems, whereas antifragile people and organizations do the opposite: they proactively surface problems in order to adapt to them. ### Creating engagement It might seem like the Dellanna Diagram of disengaged students and disengaged employees looks like the one below: problems are either too easy, triggering complacency (the yellow area), or too hard, triggering paralysis or frustration (the red area).  However, their actual diagram is like the one below. There is a green area. It’s just so small that it looks like it’s not there.  This is important because it means that there is a size of problems that is small enough to get acted upon yet significant enough so that solving it triggers learning and increased motivation. Great teachers and great managers excel at finding the right problem to give to their disengaged students and employees, hitting them in the green area and triggering antifragility, progressively growing their skills and motivation until they become skilled and engaged. If you are not convinced it’s possible, think about a 50-year-old person living a sedentary lifestyle. If they suddenly start going to the gym, they might believe that their body’s Dellanna Diagram only has a yellow and a red area: the weights they lift are either too light to create any muscle gain or too heavy to create pain and injury. However, even for them, there is a right size of weights to lift that is heavy enough to hit them above after the yellow area and before the right one, triggering muscle growth but not an injury. That’s the green area. And if they do find that size of weights and lift them, they trigger antifragility and get stronger, which means that they grow the range of weights that they can safely lift. They grow their green area. ### Becoming more antifragile The Dellanna Diagrams are useful because they help you understand how you can become more antifragile. How do you grow the green area? Easy: by shifting the threshold between the yellow and the green area to the left or by shifting the threshold between the green and the red area to the right. Let’s see what that means. Shifting the threshold between the yellow and the green area to the left means that problems that previously hit you in the yellow area and were ignored now hit you in the green area and trigger adaptation and strengthening. This means you start adapting to smaller problems. Fragile organizations do not start adapting to problems until the problem is large enough to become a priority – at which point, it is usually too late. Conversely, antifragile organizations understand that problems grow to the size they need for you to acknowledge them, so they proactively surface small problems and adapt to them before it is too late.  Shifting the threshold between the green and red areas to the right means that problems previously hitting you in the red area and causing failure now hit you in the green area instead, triggering adaptation and strengthening. This means making yourself more resilient to large problems. Fragile organizations overoptimize their investments, ending up with too little balance and resources to face unexpected problems. Conversely, antifragile organizations understand that you can only adapt to problems you survive and that long-term efficiency requires capping short-term efficiency. Therefore, they always keep more resources than they need and never get into situations that might become dangerous in case of unexpected changes.  In the video below, I explain in greater detail what this means concretely, both for individuals and for organizations. https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/agency https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/agency Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT **That second dialogue is agency.** **Having that second dialogue is an action, albeit a mental one, and like any action, it is gated by motivation.** Put another way, you only have this second dialogue if you believe it’s worth having—which depends on your previous experiences with it. If someone has low agency, it’s usually because, in the past, having that second dialogue led to bad experiences. You teach agency by letting your people experience that having that second dialogue leads to good outcomes. ### How to teach agency First, let me tell you how you would do it in an idyllic world. 1. **Assign one of your subordinates the smallest task requiring agency you can think of.** It has to be job-related and meaningful, but it doesn’t have to be big. In fact, the smaller, the better. For example, “Find two ways we can lower our costs and verify their feasibility.” 2. **Make it explicit that you expect them to use agency.** For example, “I expect you to tackle any unexpected problems.” 3. **Provide a concrete example illustrating the previous point.** “For example, if you do not know how to do any part of the task, I expect you to google that, and only if Google doesn’t have the answer, ask a colleague.” 4. **Get them to work on the task.** When they complete the task, acknowledge their successful outcome, specifically highlighting your appreciation for their display of agency. This will teach them not only that they have the skills to be high-agency but also that it’s easier and worthwhile. Bam, that’s it. Doing this a few times with each of your subordinates should be enough to transform 30%-80% of them into high-agency people. The problem is that, in the real world, if you ask low-agency people to do something high-agency, they might still try to do it the low-agency way. Hence, there are three things you should be paying attention to: 1. **The task must be as simple and easy as possible.** Of course, it should still be relevant to their job and require some agency, so don’t come up with a trivial task. But it should be something that ideally can be completed in no more than a couple of hours. The larger the task, the higher the chances they fall back into low-agency mode. 2. **You should be extremely explicit and specific in your request for them to be in high-agency mode while completing the task.** Give them a few concrete examples of what completing the task in low-agency mode would look like, and tell them it won’t be enough. For instance, if the task you assigned was to invite a client to a customer event you’re organizing, you can say something along the lines of, “Just inviting the client to our event is not enough; you must make sure they read and accept the invitation, and if they really cannot come, find ways to set up a later meeting with them. No excuses.” 3. **Follow up with them frequently while at the same time avoiding micromanaging them.** Ask them how it’s going. But if they face any obstacle, do not solve it for them; just encourage them and/or repeat your expectations that they will overcome it. If you follow all three points above, the chances are that you will succeed. It won’t work all the time, not with all your employees, but it will work most of the time with most of them. Keep in mind at all times the following: **Your job is to make them undergo experiences that teach them the opposite.** ### More on this I recently recorded a video on this topic. https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/10-ways-to-kill-motivation-as-a-manager https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/10-ways-to-kill-motivation-as-a-manager Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/3-catalyzers-for-change https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/3-catalyzers-for-change Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT ### A common mistake When I advise my clients to do the above, a common mistake is waiting too long. If you ask your people to follow a new procedure on Monday, you should have already acknowledged their good work on Monday. If you are waiting for Friday, by Tuesday, they will have learned that their efforts are not valued. Feedback must be early; ideally, immediate. ### A second way to implement the first catalyzer The second common way to give clues that efforts aren’t going to waste is to get positive customer feedback in front of those whose work caused it. If your product changed the life of a customer, everyone needs to know about it, from the janitor to the accountant – not just the product design team. Go get customer feedback, interview your best customers, and show the relevant bits to your employees who need to see it. And do it fast – before the doubt that efforts are going to waste creeps in. ### A second common mistake When I advise my clients to do the above, a common mistake is only getting feedback from customers. However, in a company, every employee is each other's customer. Everyone benefits from the janitor’s work, for example. And yet, how many provide the janitor with clues that their work is improving their lives? Get feedback from all departments, and show it to the workers who worked hard for them. ### A third common mistake Another common mistake is to approach the above too mechanistically. For example, if you ask all your employees to make a video thanking someone else in the company, people might doubt the sincerity of these videos. Instead, hire a freelancer for a couple of days, provide them with a list of roles in your company, and ask them to find someone who benefits from each role and record a 30-second video interviewing them. Then, distribute the videos as appropriate. Similarly, such videos should not be too effusive; simply explaining why people’s work matters is sufficient. People do not need to feel loved at their workplace, but they do need to feel like their efforts are not going to waste. Aiming for the former will lead to a lot of insincerity and other counterproductive outcomes. Aiming for the latter is easier and more effective. Of course, the above won’t work for all companies, but for many, it could be a turning point in the engagement of their workers. ### A fourth common mistake Some managers understand the need to give people early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste. However, they immediately start thinking about ways to provide it in a scalable way – for example, a dashboard or a monthly report. Don’t. People need personal and early feedback, whereas scalable feedback tends to be impersonal (the dashboard) or late (the monthly report). Or, more accurately: you can also use dashboards and reports, but they should always complement personal and early feedback, not substitute it. ### Summarizing the first catalyst for change Just as toothpaste uses a mint flavor to provide immediate feedback that our efforts to brush our teeth are not going to waste, workers need similar early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste; otherwise, they will disengage. Managers should constantly ask themselves, "Am I providing that immediate feedback?" – or, more precisely, "Are my people receiving early feedback that their efforts are not going to waste?" It is a manager's job to consistently provide early feedback and, where appropriate, to collect personal and meaningful feedback from customers or other departments and share it with their people promptly. Common mistakes include waiting too long, only collecting external feedback, and making the feedback collection process too mechanical. Instead, strive for feedback that is early, personal, and meaningful. ## The second catalyst Have you ever wondered why our arteries divide into capillaries? That’s because our blood cells can only exchange oxygen with tissue cells that are close by. The same happens in organizations: people do not change when asked by someone from afar. CEOs are the pumping heart of companies, but they require a capillary structure that can drive change from close by: middle management. Yes, I know middle management gets a bad rap as an unproductive layer of the company. But that is true only for bad middle managers. Good ones are invaluable and indispensable for driving change. Put yourself in the shoes of a line worker. You receive a corporate-wide email from the CEO saying that there is a new way of doing things. You do not know the CEO, so you might not trust him: does he know what he’s doing? Does he have your best interests at heart? Or perhaps you trust him but do not trust that he knows how to do your job. Or you do not trust the full repercussions of the change he proposed. Long story short, workers are rationally suspicious of any change coming from someone they do not have a close working relationship with. Instead, a direct supervisor is uniquely positioned to explain the change to his team, listen to their questions, and answer them personally. And he can do so in a way that is impossible to reproduce at scale. Moreover, as we saw with the first catalyst, change requires early feedback that efforts are not going to waste, and that can only be given by someone close enough and trusted – reports take too long, and dashboards are too impersonal. Change requires trust, and trust does not scale, hence the need to drive change through a capillary structure made of middle and lower management. This does not mean that communication from the top is useless; on the contrary, it is fundamental. It just means that it is not sufficient. ### How to implement the second catalyst There are four steps to implement the principle of driving change through a capillary structure. First, involve middle and lower-level management. Cascade down the goal of driving change through supervisors, explain the rationale, and clarify that supervisors need their own supervisors to drive change. Hence the need for a capillary structure (CEO → middle management → supervisors → workers) rather than a flat one (CEO → supervisors → workers). Second, train middle and lower-level management. You cannot expect that your managers know how to communicate change. Train them on what to communicate and how to communicate it. Train them to listen for questions and to answer them without dismissing them. Train them to provide early feedback that efforts are not going to waste. Third, explicitly demand middle and lower-level management to be agents of change. Be clear and use visual examples. Describe three managers: one doing their job of driving change, one doing too little, and one doing too much – this will clarify expectations better than anything else. Set high standards: communication does not happen when you can be understood but when you cannot be misunderstood, and change happens not when it is communicated but when it is followed up with consistent action. Fourth, sustain the change initiative. Constantly demonstrate the behaviors you are demanding in others, and keep them accountable to the high standards you asked of them. The moment you stop is the moment doubt will arise that the change you requested yesterday is not relevant anymore (and therefore, any further effort would go to waste). ### To summarize Change requires trust, and trust doesn’t scale – hence, the need to drive change through a capillary structure made of middle and lower management. To achieve this, involve middle and lower management, train them, and explicitly expect them to be agents of change; then, constantly sustain the change initiative by taking action that demonstrates it is still a priority. Never allow fertile ground for doubts that efforts are going to waste. ## The third catalyst Years ago, I consulted an operations manager about a warehouse problem. Employees were constantly leaving mechanical parts and components scattered on the floor—a safety hazard and an efficiency drain. Despite repeated instructions to store components properly on shelves, his workers never complied. The root problem was that the manager was too busy and the warehouse too large for him to consistently enforce the standards he set for his employees. Therefore, we decided to narrow the scope of change to a single point in the warehouse, small enough for him to consistently provide feedback on. He chose the area next to a safety exit. He held a stand-up meeting with the warehouse employees and told them that the area next to the exit had to be kept clear of components at all times. He asked them to clear it immediately, and he did not leave the warehouse until it was done. Then, the hard part began. For the next month, he had to visit the warehouse multiple times a day. First thing upon arrival, he would check the floor next to that safety exit to see if it was clear. If not, he was to immediately stop whatever he was doing, walk to the nearest employee, remind them that the area had to be clear, and stay there until it was. Here is what happened. After a week, the warehouse employees learned that the safety exit area was to be kept clear. After two weeks, the employees began noticing that the area next to the machine was easier to walk in, and parts stored there were easier to find. After three weeks, the magic happened. The employees began to clear the other areas of the floor on their own initiative. You see, habits require consistency, but once learned, they can easily be expanded to other areas. The bottleneck was achieving a critical mass of consistent repetitions of the desired habit within a few weeks. However, that requires time and effort from both workers and their managers. They are both busy and have limited bandwidth. The solution was to shrink the area of change from the whole warehouse to the few square meters next to the safety exit—an area small enough for busy people to focus on it frequently enough for habits to become ingrained. This is the third catalyst for change: to avoid compromising consistency, compromise on the scope of change. Do not attempt to change too many habits or too many people at once. Instead, focus on a single habit at a time, with a single team, in a single area of their work—and then be obsessive about it for the next three to four weeks. By focusing change on a small area, obsessing over it, and allowing others to see the benefits of the change, you will achieve what you couldn’t before. This is the magic of obsessive consistency. Once the workers understand that they can change faster than their manager, they will. Once they understand that good things happen when they change, they will. Good managers embrace the effectiveness of obsessive consistency, and so should you. ## To summarize Achieving consistency requires reducing the scope of change so you can focus on it intensely for a few weeks. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/mimetic-societies https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/mimetic-societies Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-key-to-success https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-key-to-success Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/how-to-kill-a-countrys-education https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/how-to-kill-a-countrys-education Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-trajectory https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-trajectory Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/ai-faster-adoption https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/ai-faster-adoption Sun, 16 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/soft-metrics https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/soft-metrics Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-managers-role https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-managers-role Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/five-marks-of-good-managers https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/five-marks-of-good-managers Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/reversing-the-arrow-of-time https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/reversing-the-arrow-of-time Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/races-to-the-bottom https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/races-to-the-bottom Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/mixed-signals-mixed-results https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/mixed-signals-mixed-results Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT This principle surely applies to individuals. For example, those with mixed feelings about money have trouble taking decisive action to improve their income. But this principle also applies to business. Managers who give their teams mixed messages get mixed results. When they ask for feedback, they should demonstrate that they really want to hear what their team has to say. When they assign a priority, they should explicitly address that everything else is less important. And when they assign a task saying it’s important, they should follow up as if it were. ### Mixed signals are the #1 reason change initiatives fail Whenever a manager introduces a new process, their team likely wonders: "Is this going to stick, or will it be abandoned after a few weeks?" To answer this, employees observe their manager's behavior. Is the manager following up on the new process and treating it as important? Or are they acting as if they don't care? Hence, it is critical that managers send clear signals that the new processes are important and here to stay. Otherwise, they might as well not try and not waste anyone's time. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/ergodicity-non-binary https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/ergodicity-non-binary Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT ### The purpose of studying ergodicity Ergodicity is one of the most important concepts in economics. If you are unfamiliar with the term, I suggest [my book](/books/ergodicity) on the topic. If, instead, you are familiar with the term, you might have wondered how it applies to everyday life. In particular, you might have wondered which activities in life are ergodic and which are non-ergodic. The answer is simple. Almost everything in real life is non-ergodic. The fully ergodic mostly lives only in theory and simulations. What's the purpose of studying ergodicity, then, if nothing is ergodic? The answer is that, while everything is non-ergodic, something is more non-ergodic than others - and questions such as "what alternative is less non-ergodic" or "how can we make this activity less non-ergodic" matter. I recently published [a paper](https://luca-dellanna.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Ergodicity-as-a-non-binary-property.pdf) on ergodicity as a non-binary property, where I examine these questions. You will learn how to interpret ergodicity as a spectrum and how to apply it to real-life conditions. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/email-coaching https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/email-coaching Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/lindy https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/lindy Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT ### What justifies the Lindy Effect? The older something is, - the more conditions it must have been fit for, - thus, the broader range of possible futures it is fit for, - thus, the longer it is likely to survive, (in the absence of bounds such as senescence). Taleb also presented a statistical justification for the Lindy Effect in his books. I won’t cover it here, as I try to keep the understanding of the Lindy Effect intuitive. ### Perishables and non-perishables The reasoning above doesn't apply to people, as senility poses a natural limit to the maximum age they can reach. An 80-year-old person cannot survive another 80 years. The Lindy Effect mostly applies to entities with no natural boundaries to life expectancy, such as technologies and ideas. For example, it applies to books, movies, and technologies like bicycles (but not necessarily to objects subject to decay, such as a bicycle). However, the applicability of Lindy based on the criterion of perishable/non-perishable is not as clear-cut as it seems. For example, Lindy doesn't apply to adults but does apply to babies. A baby that survives its first week has a considerably longer life expectancy than a newborn. Therefore, we can say that the Lindy Effect applies to perishables, but only when they are far from natural limits such as senility. As an entity approaches its natural limits, decay dominates Lindy (more on this later). ### The Hazard Rate For non-perishables, such as objects and ideas, the main determinant of life expectancy is the hazard rate (the chances of dying/disappearing at age X). When we observe an object’s life, we can use Lindy to estimate its life expectancy or hazard rate. For example, we can estimate a book’s life expectancy on the bestsellers’ list (its life expectancy) or its chances of dropping off next week (its hazard rate). Of course, the two are negatively correlated. That said, we can reason the following. The older something is, - the more conditions it must have been fit for, - and thus the broader range of possible futures it is fit for, - and thus the lower its hazard rate. Our estimate of an entity's hazard rate decreases as time passes without that entity disappearing. The first keyword is "an entity's." A book staying for months on the NYT bestsellers' list does not mean that all books on it are less likely to drop off next week. It just means that that specific book is less likely to disappear. The second keyword is "our estimate." The book's hazard rate does not decrease over time; its hazard rate is probably constant. Instead, it is our estimate that decreases. The longer the book survives, the more reasons we have to lower our hazard rate estimates. ### The hazard rate for perishables We previously saw that Lindy applies to perishables, but only when they are distant from natural limits, such as senility. Now that we know about the hazard rate, let’s clarify this sentence. We can decouple the effects of Lindy and of decay into multiple hazard rates that we can aggregate together to obtain an entity’s total hazard rate. For example, a person’s total hazard rate is made of: - The hazard rate from accidents (subject to Lindy; the more a person survives, the more we can suppose them to be cautious, and thus, the lower our estimate of their hazard rate from accidents). - The hazard rate from illnesses and internal conditions (e.g., stroke) is a component not influenced by genetic causes (this increases linearly or exponentially with age). - The hazard rate from illnesses and internal conditions is a component influenced by genetic causes (subject to Lindy – the more a person survives, the less likely they are to have genetic conditions). The total hazard rate of a person is the sum of the three points above. The second one becomes dominant as one person approaches the natural limits of human longevity. Hence, it’s not that Lindy does not influence the life expectancy of perishables – it does, but it loses relevance over time. ### The Lindy Effect, generalized Lindy applies not just to time, but also to other dimensions: space, cultures, uses, conditions, etc. Here are a few examples of practical applications. Continuing the NYT bestseller example, a book sold in one country might be successful because it’s a great book or because it discusses something very relevant to that country. Once it’s translated and does well in another country, the odds that it’s a great book increase. In general, the more geographically widespread something is, - the more conditions it must have been fit for, - thus the broader the range of conditions it is fit for, - thus the lower the estimate of its hazard rate upon entering a new geography. I suppose the same works across cultures, use conditions, and most dimensions. (Remember the limitation that “estimates made by the Lindy Effect are subordinate to intrinsic limits.” For example, a book read in 150 countries is not likely to be read in 150 more countries if there are only 200 countries on Earth.) For example, bicycles are Lindier than cars. Not only are they expected to be around for longer, but they can also be used in a wider range of conditions (off-road, in the absence of fuel) and can be built/repaired by more people with less specialized tooling. Therefore, we can often use the Lindy Effect to estimate not only life expectancy but also usefulness, relevance, and maintainability across a wider range of conditions or use cases or skills, etc. (again, a reminder: it is probabilistic, not deterministic) Before closing this essay, I have two more remarks. ### What the Lindy effect is not The Lindy Effect estimates an entity’s hazard rate, not whether that entity is good or bad. You can’t say, “It’s Lindy, therefore it’s good.” Mosquitoes are Lindy. Second, being Lindy doesn’t mean that something cannot disappear tomorrow. It only suggests we have reason to believe it is less likely to disappear than if it hadn’t been around for so long. The Lindy Effect doesn’t tell you how long something will survive. It helps you estimate its hazard rate or life expectancy, both of which are probabilistic. ### Lindyness, what is it? Lindiness is the property of being Lindy, in other words, of having been around for a long time and, therefore, being expected to be around for a long time from now. It only applies to the non-perishable (e.g., ideas, book contents, technologies, songs, etc.) and carries no moral valence. Its use is to estimate whether an assumption will still be relevant over long time horizons. ### What are some examples of Lindy? Some examples of things that are Lindy: - Books - Songs - Ideas - Technologies - Recipes Some examples of things that are not Lindy: - Food - People - In general, anything with a bounded life expectancy ### Further readings I first learned about the Lindy Effect in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, a book I strongly recommend. In this piece, I’ve shared some thoughts on the process behind it and how we can apply it to more use cases. Much like this essay, [my book](/books/ergodicity) on Ergodicity simplifies a complex concept related to survival, making it practical. ### Conclusions - The Lindy Effect: For ideas and technology, every year of existence increases their life expectancy. - The Lindy Effect also applies to perishables, but only when they are distant from their natural expiration. - The Lindy Effect is not deterministic but probabilistic; it does not tell you how long something will survive, but helps you estimate its hazard rate or life expectancy. - The Lindy Effect does not tell us whether something is good or bad. - We can often use the Lindy Effect to estimate not only life expectancy but also usefulness, relevance, and maintainability across a wider range of conditions, use cases, skills, and so on. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/wittgensteins-ruler https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/wittgensteins-ruler Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT ### Examples of Wittgenstein’s Ruler The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to someone can imply two things: either that the recipient is very intelligent, or that the judges are very unintelligent. At the time of the award, we likely did not know which of these two possibilities was correct. Certainly, the recipient of the prize must have appeared intelligent, but we could not ascertain whether they were truly intelligent or if the judges were simply unintelligent and easily deceived. With more than one free parameter (the quality of the recipient and the quality of the judges), we do not know which one the award assesses. A similar phenomenon can be observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, a few studies were published on antibody prevalence in certain populations. However, we do not know if these studies are measuring the prevalence of the virus or the accuracy of the tests. ### Wittgenstein’s Ruler: a definition Wittgenstein’s ruler can be formalized as follows: ### Extending Wittgenstein’s Ruler Interestingly, Wittgenstein’s Ruler is not just about the precision of the ruler but also about its choice. For example, centralization tends to result in the choice of metrics that, regardless of their precision, only measure some of the results that matter to the general population, leading to effects such as “centralization is only efficient to the central observer.” This is because the central observer is the one who chooses the ruler, i.e., the metric used for measurement. I used to understand the term “ruler’s reliability” as simply a matter of precision/variance; instead, it’s also a matter of the choice of the ruler and the metrics used to conduct the measurement. Do they reliably help estimate properties of the object of the measurement, or do they estimate something else? Hence, we can use Wittgenstein’s ruler even before the measurement is conducted, using the choice of the ruler to deduce the properties of the measurer. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/critical-mass https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/critical-mass Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT ### Good managers aim to reach critical mass They know that habits need a critical mass to form. Some experts say an action becomes a habit once it is repeated for 21 straight days. Others say it becomes a habit once everyone in the room performs it simultaneously. Both groups of experts recognize the importance of reaching a critical mass of action, both in terms of time and social impact. Consistency is essential for two reasons. First, it helps to achieve the critical mass that leads to action being converted to habits in our brains. Second, lack of consistency kills habits. The first time that you allow an employee to perform below standard without consequence, you open the door to him doing it a second time or to others doing it for the first time. They and their peers will interpret it as a signal that no one cares if someone performs below standard. It doesn’t matter whether it is true. What matters is the perception that is created. Because good managers know the importance of reaching critical mass, they restrict the scope of the change to be achieved at a time. Instead of asking their subordinates to adopt five new habits this month, they ask them to adopt only one. Otherwise, they would have to divide their limited time between noticing and praising or reprimanding five habits or lack thereof. By focusing on noticing a single habit, good managers decrease the likelihood of missing an instance where a subordinate failed to express the required habit. Because they know the importance of reaching critical mass, good managers restrict the number of people who must adopt a new habit at a given time. Instead of requiring their whole building to adopt a new habit, they focus on one or two teams at a time. This way, they won’t have to spread their attention too thin. They ensure that no bad habit will go unnoticed and no good one unreinforced. They know that employees watch how their colleagues are treated. If they see a colleague failing to adopt a new habit and nothing is happening, they will learn that they can do the same. By obsessing over a single new habit of a small group of people at a time, good managers ensure that no such occurrence occurs. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/pain-signal-vulnerability https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/pain-signal-vulnerability Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT _Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional and this is not medical advice. This post only states my beliefs as a result of my research on the topic. Full disclaimer [here](/disclaimer)._ ### Introduction Millions of people are affected by chronic pain. For some of them, there is an injury or a disease causing it. For others, their mind is causing the pain. This essay explains the rationale behind this behavior of our mind and explores some ways to cure such kind of chronic pain. ### The purpose of pain Pain serves a purpose. When we twist our ankle, it becomes painful. This is good. It makes us aware that we twisted it, and it ensures that we do not step on it before it has healed. ### But pain is not a signal of damage Many believe that pain is a signal of damage occurring somewhere in our body. This is incorrect: **pain is a signal that we are vulnerable,** that damage can occur to us in the future. Most times, we are vulnerable because of damage (as in the example of the twisted ankle), hence the confusion between pain as a signal of damage and pain as a signal of vulnerability. I will try to explain why pain is indeed linked to vulnerability, but not (necessarily) to damage. **Not all times when there is damage in our body we feel pain, and not all the times we feel pain there is damage in our body. However, every time that we feel pain there is a potential for future damage (a vulnerability).** Here are some examples of cases in which our body has been damaged and yet, pain is not felt: - There are numerous reports of soldiers in World War I & II[^1] who lost a limb in an explosion and yet, did not feel any pain. Why? Because the injury would mean they would not have to fight anymore and that they would soon be sent home. They felt less vulnerable to death in a hospital bed with a severed limb than when they had to fight in the trenches. The future feels safe(r), so no pain. As I will show later, the pain neurons in the affected limb still fire to signal pain, but the signal is probably suppressed by their brain. Now that the soldier is in a boat on the way home, it has no utility towards changing the behavior of the soldiers: they are now attended by doctors and on their way home. - When doing sports, it might happen that we procure ourselves a small injury. Often, we do not feel the pain until after we stop the physical activity. This is likely a consequence of the fact that sports are often not very different from activities such as fighting or fleeing. In such cases, there is a much higher risk of damage to our body if we rest in front of an enemy or predator which might kill us rather than if we step on that twisted ankle or keep using that muscle we just sprained. As a consequence, using the damaged body part is perceived as less dangerous than not using it, and no pain is felt (at least after the first initial seconds). The pain signal is suppressed. Examples of cases in which we feel pain but there is no actual damage in the body: - If your finger touches a hot pot, you will feel pain, even if the touch only lasted for an instant and your skin did not receive any actual damage. In this case, pain was not a signal that your skin got damaged (it didn’t), but a signal that your skin might get damaged if the behavior persists (i.e. your skin is vulnerable). Similarly, when exposed to extreme cold for a short amount of time, your skin will feel painful. It is not damaged yet, but it will assume, if the exposure continues. Pain is not a signal of current damage, but of future one. - Science writer Erik Vance tells us an interesting story. Sitting in a lab, he got administered electrical discharges. When the screen in front of him would turn red, he would receive a stronger charge; when it would turn green, he will receive a lighter one. After following this pattern for a few minutes, the researchers changed the rule: all discharges will be strong ones. Erik, who was not aware of the change, still perceived little pain when the screen was green, even though the actual discharges were strong. His brain overrode reality with expectations (of imminent body damage). Expecto, ergo est.[^2] - Psychosomatic pain. A condition for the emergence of psychosomatic pain is a perceived condition of generalized vulnerability (and, by association, future physical damage). I will clarify this later in the chapter. I can draw an example of psychosomatic pain from my personal experience. When I was 23, I noticed a fast-growing black mole on my right foot. I did not feel any pain, but I decided to visit a dermatologist anyway. After the examination, he told me that the mole could degenerate if left unchecked. We scheduled the removal for the following week. During the 7 days between the dermatologist’s visit and the surgical operation, my foot ached. Of course, there was no good reason for my foot for aching: I had no injury and there is no way that a tiny mole, even if malignant, is painful. However, there I was, feeling pain. Why? During the first visit, dermatologist said that the mole could degenerate if not removed. My brain captured that information and inferred that my foot was vulnerable. To ensure that I would stay focused on the task of removing the mole, it made me feel pain. (How physiologically my brain managed to make me feel pain will be explained later.) ### Damage does not have to be physical Physical damage can predict further physical damage. For example, if our ankle is twisted, we are in a vulnerable situation. Not only stepping on our ankle can make the injury worse, but a twisted ankle is also a liability in case we have to escape from a predator or fight with an enemy. **Physical damage is a vulnerability.** However, current physical damage is not the only predictor of future physical damage. **Also psychological damage, social damage and lack of resources predict future physical damage.** When we are healthy but in a condition that might lead to us being unhealthy in the future, we are vulnerable. Some examples: - If I lack the resources I need for living (food, money, sheltering, etc.), I am at a higher risk of physical deterioration. - If I did something wrong which hurt other members of my community, I face the risk of being isolated and ultimately ostracized by my community (social damage). Alone, it is much harder to find the resources needed for living and the help or support in case of need: over time, physical deterioration might follow. - If I am depressed (psychological damage), I am a less attractive mate and a worse friend. This might lead me to get left alone by my previous friends. As explained in the previous bullet point, if alone, I am more likely to face a shortage of resources and external support, which directly leads to a higher risk of physical damage or deterioration. Therefore, **it makes sense for my body and brain to consider lack of resources, social damage and psychological damage as a vulnerability and thus akin to a risk of physical damage. Such risk of physical damage then manifests as pain.** However, such vulnerability and pain are generalized: they are linked to our personal situation, but not to any specific part of the body. **If our body does not have reasons to target a specific part of our body with pain, it manifests the generalized vulnerability as stress.** In the next section I will explain this process. ### Stress as generalized vulnerability First, let me explain the purpose of stress. The feeling of being vulnerable is used to trigger reactions and to find solution to the root cause of the vulnerability (how this takes place in practice will be the topic of the next section). However, such reactions, like all actions and reactions initiated or mediated by our brain, have to undergo motivational gating by the basal ganglia. If such reactions are repressed (they do not manage to overcome the motivational gating), no solution or damage mitigation plan is found, and the vulnerability keeps going unaddressed. What started as a clear signal of vulnerability is now a generalized signal of vulnerability. Our brain still knows that something is wrong, even if repression through motivational gating does not allow it to know exactly what is wrong. Nevertheless, something has to be done. The signal that something has to be done is stress. Our brain is mostly an inference machine. The role of each neuron or group of neurons is to recognize a pattern in the inputs it receives. Such inputs are of three types: sensorial data (bottom-up), context (lateral), and expectations (top-down). Let’s see a (much simplified) example of how this works. Let’s say that a neuron’s job is to fire when it recognizes a dog. This means that it will fire if it recognizes sensorial input corresponding to four paws, a body of a certain size, a fur, a head, and a tail. If the only sensorial input is a tail, it will generally not fire. It needs a minimum number of sensorial stimuli matching the pattern of what a dog looks like in order to fire. Such minimum number is called the admissibility threshold. For example, it might fire when 4 of the 5 visual characteristics of a dog listed above are recognized. However, top-down expectations might reduce the number of sensorial data needed for the neuron the fire. If I am at home and I own a dog, I expect to see it in the living room. If through the kitchen door I only see a tail, my neuron will fire: it is highly probable that that tail means that my dog is there. In other words, top-down expectations reduce the admissibility threshold and thus the amount of proof (sensorial stimuli) needed to conclude that what is expected is indeed there. Now, enter stress. **Stress is a state of generalized vulnerability:** our brain knows that we are vulnerable, but such vulnerability is not associated with a specific body part and thus does not generate pain. However, because of the vulnerability, our brain has a higher expectation of feeling pain. This top-down expectation lowers the sensory threshold for experiencing pain. My hypothesis[^3] is that, because of this top-down expectation, our brain will be more likely to find admissible sensorial signals that are precursors of pain. Let’s see an example: I do some work in the backyard. Usually, I would need to lift a very high load to damage my back. Let’s say that lifting 50 kg would cause my back to suffer damage (such as a herniated disc). At this point, I will suffer pain: a signal that I need to rest; otherwise, I will suffer worse injuries. Even after healing, my brain is likely to remember that lifting 50 kg might cause back damage. The next time I lift 50 kg, even if my back does not actually get injured, I am likely to feel pain: a signal that I’m vulnerable to damage. Now, let’s imagine that I am in a stressful period of my life. This time, the pain threshold will be lower (due to the stress). One of two phenomena is likely to occur: 1. Since the pain threshold is lower, the sensorial signals sent by my back to my brain when I lift 40 kg are enough to cause pain. I might think that I am injured and got a herniated disc, even if my back does not actually have any. 2. A generalized vulnerability manifests as stress because it does not have any admissible location where to manifest as body pain. Lifting the weight gives my brain an admissible location where to feel the pain: my back. So, I feel pain there. (In some cases of chronic pain, doctors recommend serotonin uptake inhibitors. They work because lack of serotonin signals a lack of resources – which is a condition of vulnerability and therefore causes the admissibility threshold for pain to lower.) You might feel skeptical: can our brain really imagine pain? Why would it do that to itself? Let me show you some medical results that suggest it really is like that. ### John Sarno’s patients In his books _“The Mindbody Prescription”_ and _“The Divided Mind”_, Dr. John Sarno describes numerous cases of patients with psychogenic pain: pain engineered by our brain. Dr. Sarno would make an objective analysis to eliminate other diagnoses. Then, he would interview them and notice that they were very stressed. Then, he will tell them that their pain is psychogenic: it originated in their brain. They didn’t feel pain because something was wrong in the body, but because their brain was making them feel pain. Their brain, he would explain them, was doing so in order to distract them from thinking about inadmissible thoughts about themselves, which were unconsciously generating guilt, shame, and other emotions which would all create stress (Author’s note: I do not agree on this very point – I will explain my theory later). In some patients, the pain vanished over the next 24 hours; others needed to attend a few group sessions in which such mechanics would be explained more in depth. The results are surprising: after having worked with Sarno, about 85% of his patients reported improvements in their condition, 44% of them reporting little or no pain[^4]. How could the brain of his patients generate pain? Sarno hypothesized that the brain achieved this result by contracting some blood vessel and generating mild ischemia (deprivation of oxygen) in the target tissues. If you doubt the ability of the brain to alter the size of blood vessels, just think about how we blush after doing something embarrassing: our brain increased the diameter of the blood vessels in our cheeks. ### Arthroscopic surgeries of the knee Sham surgeries are fake interventions where the patient gets transported into the operation room and anesthetized. However, the doctors do not actually perform any surgery – they merely make the patient believe they did. The results have been surprisingly positive: for example, **sham surgeries for arthroscopic surgery of an osteoarthritic knee proved to be as effective as real ones**[^5]. This means that at least some cases of knee pain are not caused by actual body damage, but by the perception of a state of vulnerability. ### Herniated discs In his book _“The Mindbody Prescription”_, Dr. John Sarno reports a study published in the journal Spine. Doctors made lumbar CT scans to a group of people without lower back pain: they found disc abnormalities, stenosis and other aging changes in 50% of patients over 40 years old. Such abnormalities were not causing any pain. Contrast this with the common procedure when a patient tells a doctor he has been suffering from back pain. Often, a scan of his back is ordered; if an abnormality is found, such as a herniated disc, responsibility for the pain is attributed to it. Sometimes, surgeries are even recommended. However, if herniated discs are present also in painless patients, how can we be sure that they are the cause of the pain in patients with back pain? There is a chance, writes Dr. Sarno, that at least in some of the patients with chronic back pain, the herniated disc is not the cause of the pain (or it is the cause of its onset, but not of its persistence). In such cases, psychogenic pain would be the cause. ### The sources of pain There are three sources of pain: - **Nociceptive pain:** this is the pain we generally refer to in common talking. It is caused by external harmful factors which excites our nociceptors (the neurons responsible to detect extreme heat, extreme cold, wounds, impacts, and so on). This kind of localized pain causes a bottom-up inference of a localized vulnerability. - **Psychosomatic pain:** this pain takes place when nothing is wrong in our body and, nevertheless, our brain infers from our present situation that we are generally vulnerable (e.g. to social isolation, lack of resources, etc.). This inference generates stress and a top-down expectation of pain, which is eventually manifested in the most admissible body location. - **Psychogenic pain:** technically, this is a concurrence of the two previous cases. However, I listed it as a separate occurrence to highlight the specific process. As for psychosomatic pain, our brain expects a body part to manifest pain. Differently from purely psychosomatic pain, this top-down expectation triggers some physiological processes (such as mild ischemia – a lack of oxygen delivered to muscles[^6]) which in turn trigger nociceptive pain. In this case, there is something unusual with our body, but only because of signals given by our brain causing the unusual condition in our tissues. Some might be skeptical that our brain indeed can generate changes in our body which in turn provoke pain. But just think about how our cheeks turn red when we are embarrassed: our brain can very easily initiate such physiological processes. ### Chronic pain Many theories on chronic pain propose that its onset is triggered by an episode of extreme stress. I believe that this is partially true. My hypothesis is that **stress is not the trigger of chronic pain, but the enabler.** There would be little reason for pain to persist if the vulnerability (the stress) is gone. Rather, it makes a lot of sense that pain persists as long as the vulnerability is there, and that it goes away once the vulnerability is gone. ### Placebos Professor Nicholas Humphrey tells a story[^7] about placebos and hamsters. “Suppose a hamster is injected with bacteria which makes it sick – but in one case the hamster is an artificial day/night cycle that suggests it’s summer; in the other case, it’s in a cycle that suggests it’s winter. If the hamster is tricked into thinking it is summer, it throws everything it has got against infection and recovers completely. If it flings to study its winter, then it just mounts a holding operation, as if it is waiting until it knows it’s safe to mount a full-scale response. […] In winter, we are conscious about deploying our immune resources. That’s why a cold lasts much longer in winter than it does in summer. […] Placebos work because they suggest to people that the picture is rosier than it really is. […] Placebos give people fake information that it’s safe to cure them.” The purpose of pain is to modify our behavior in such a way that we reduce our exposure to the vulnerability causing the pain. This might include finding a solution (e.g. treating a wound), dispensing ourselves from the potential source of harm (e.g. taking our finger away from a hot pot) and putting ourselves in the situation where it is safe to heal (e.g. staying in bed). Healing is often a costly process. Knowing whether now the time is to address the root source of harm is an important ability. Our body has to commit resources (energy, nutrition, attention, time, antibodies, etc.) which would be better used elsewhere. Here are some examples of situations where it is not a good idea to heal: - A wolf bites my hand. Instead of treating the wound, I better fight the animal or flee. - The harvest is late and we are suffering from malnutrition. Instead of lying in the bed to reduce energy consumption, we should work in the field to ensure that we will have the maximum number of vegetables once they will be ready. - I sprained a leg muscle during a long hike in the mountains. The optimal reaction is to keep using the muscle, although with caution, to reach home, where it will be safe to rest and heal. Our brain evolved the ability to infer whether now is a good time to commit the resources required for healing or to persist in our default behavior unmodified by pain. Many factors, stress being the most important one, can influence this inference. In particular, stress (which is a signal of a generalized vulnerability) might suggest to our brain that now it is not the time to heal, and that it is appropriate to feel pain is a signal that we are not safe yet and a reaction is needed. **Placebos work by suggesting us that we are safe. If we are safe, there is no need any more to save resources for fleeing or addressing the external source of harm. Instead, we can now commit them to healing.** ### Behavioral placebos In the previous paragraphs, I said that placebos are suggestions that we are safe and can commit resources to heal. **Placebos are permissions to heal.** There is a second definition of placebo, which is more interesting from a behavioral point of view: **Placebos are permissions to change.** They are a narrative we can tell ourselves to justify a change in our behavior. Here is a story to use as an example: _Elbert always wanted to dress in a more elegant way; however, he never did so as it “wouldn’t fit him”. He already had some suits in the wardrobe, and he liked to use them during weddings and other formal events. However, he could not get himself to wear them in any other occasion. He feared that others would ask questions such as “why did you start dressing elegantly” and “why didn’t you do it before?”. These thoughts prevented him from dressing up for a long time. One day, he received permission to change: his wife gifted him with a suit. Finally, he got a coherent narrative to justify himself wearing one in informal occasions. It would not be his choice: it would be his wife’s._ Comedians do not only know a large number of funny jokes, they are also very good at giving us permission to laugh. Similarly, a lady might have different perceptions of a serenade, based on whether it is performed by a cool handsome guy or by a shy and uncool one. In the former case, it is perceived as a romantic gesture; in the latter, as a creepy one. Rory Sutherland said: “Trumpets and marching are bravery placebos”. Placebos allow us to be confident. (As a side note: if being confident is a good thing, why aren’t we all always confident? It is because being confident isn’t always a good thing. Often, it is a bad idea to being confident when there aren’t reasons to be confident. For example, it can lead to being perceived as arrogant, as a bully, and lead to shame and to being ostracized. This is why our brain had to evolve the ability to infer from the situation at hand when to be confident, and when not to. Lack of confidence, like all bad feelings and emotions, has an overall beneficial purpose or is the necessary byproduct of something beneficial). ### Conclusion Physical damage is only one of the causes of pain. If you suffer from chronic pain with no clear physiological cause or with a physiological cause which doesn’t seem to heal, consider the possibility that your unconscious self might feel so threatened that it believes that pain is an appropriate reaction. In that case, two approaches might be beneficial: placebos, and taking care of those sources of stress which are making your unconscious self feel vulnerable. - Note: this was an excerpt from the 2nd edition of my book, [The Control Heuristic](/books/the-control-heuristic).\* #### Footnotes: [^1]: As reported in Henry K Beecher’s studies. [^2]: Some readers might still doubt the ability of our mind to consider inferred stimuli equal to sensed stimuli. The paper “Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors” (Powers, Mathys, Corlett, 2017) reports “Pairing a stimulus in one modality (vision) with a stimulus in another (sound) can lead to task-induced hallucinations in healthy individuals. After many trials, people eventually report perceiving a nonexistent stimulus contingent on the presence of the previously paired stimulus”. [^3]: The next part of this sub-chapter on pain is based on the work of Dr. John Sarno. I personally quite agree with his theories regarding the ways psychogenic pain is generated and how to cure it. I think, however, that he missed part of the purpose of pain: it is not (only?) a distraction, but a signal of vulnerability (and thus, a desperate focus signal). And I also think he failed to catch the similarity between stress and pain: they are two faces (generalized and localized) feeling of the same concept: vulnerability. [^4]: John Sarno, “The Divided Mind”. [^5]: Moseley JB, O’Malley K, Petersen NJ, Menke TJ, Brody BA, Kuykendall DH, Hollingsworth JC, Ashton CM, Wray NP (2002). “A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee”. New England Journal of Medicine. [^6]: Dr. Sarno named TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome) the clinical condition whose symptom is psychogenic pain induced via mild muscle ischemia. [^7]: In his edge.com piece dated 12.5.11 [^8]: In Farnam Street’s podcast with Rory Sutherland ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/positive-sum https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/positive-sum Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-missing-element https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-missing-element Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/maintenance-culture https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/maintenance-culture Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/cars-efficiency https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/cars-efficiency Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/talking-with-your-manager https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/talking-with-your-manager Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/tactics-vs-strategies https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/tactics-vs-strategies Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/circularity https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/circularity Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT ### Examples of circularity The best way to understand circularity is through some examples: - On the one hand, high IQ is associated with higher education and higher-paying jobs. On the other hand, school exams and job interviews contain IQ tests – not actual IQ tests, but questions that are better measures of the candidate's IQ than their job-related abilities. Hence, there is a circularity: part of the reason high-IQ people have higher-paying jobs is that we designed exams and job interviews to be IQ tests. - In finance, when a stock rises in price, it often triggers mechanisms that cause more traders to want to buy it, further increasing its price. The fact that the price is both outcome and cause is a circularity. - Have you noticed, when studying history, how exceptional it is that the good guys always win in the end? Victors write the history books, and historians belong to the winners. This creates circularity: those being measured (the winners) are the same doing the measurement. - On the 8th of January 2025, the New York Times titled "Meta [Facebook's holding company] says fact-checkers were the problem. But fact-checkers rule that false." Fact-checkers ruling on themselves creates an obvious circularity. These examples show that modernity is full of **circularities: contexts in which those doing the measuring and those being measured overlap significantly, or when the act of measurement itself influences the outcome.** ### Is circularity bad? Circularity is not always bad, though it often is, especially when we are unaware of it. For example, in science and truth-seeking, circularity makes correlations appear as causations. In finance, it might mislead traders into believing an asset is better or more stable than it actually is, causing them to enter trades whose risk they do not understand. Hence, the importance of detecting circularity: to prevent costly mistakes. ### Partial circularity Note that circularity is not a binary property, either fully present or fully absent; often, circularity is only partial. For example, finance is full of circularities, because current prices influence future ones, as highlighted by the fact that some traders buy a stock for the sole reason that it has risen. However, circularity is seldom total, for past prices are only one of the factors considered in evaluating an asset, and estimations of intrinsic value matter, too. ### How to detect circularity? Here are two tests useful to detect circularity: 1. Given two metrics A and B, does the act of measuring A influence B? For example, in the case of IQ and life outcomes, the question is not only whether A (one’s IQ) influences B (their life outcomes), but also whether the act of measuring A (administering tests that, directly or indirectly, measure IQ) influences B (life outcomes). In this case, it does, for school tests and job interview tests have an obvious effect on one’s access to good schools and good jobs. 2. Given a metric, who defines how it should be measured, and were they selected based on that same metric? For example, to some extent, it can be said that academicians are both those who decide who is smart and are selected for being smart, leading to at least some partial circularity in the definition of smartness. A positive answer to either of the points above indicates circularity. **Note: A reader submitted the topic of this article. If you also have questions you would like me to answer, let me know!** ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/minimal-quality-of-life https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/minimal-quality-of-life Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/cultural-subsidies https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/cultural-subsidies Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-power-of-commitment https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-power-of-commitment Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-003-margin https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/the-003-margin Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/managerial-capabilities-assessments https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/managerial-capabilities-assessments Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/assessing-communication-quality https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/assessing-communication-quality Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/lasik https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/lasik Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/how-to-kill-a-countrys-economy https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/how-to-kill-a-countrys-economy Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/ai-adoption https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/ai-adoption Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/everything-2024 https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/everything-2024 Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/static-thinking-idiotic-policy-making https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/static-thinking-idiotic-policy-making Sat, 14 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/chess-paradox https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/chess-paradox Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT It’s important to remember this. Underestimating the importance of luck is a common reason for bad decisions. Use strategies that work even if you have bad luck. ### Imperfect Execution That said, even if chess players had perfect information, there would still be a luck element. People do not always perform at their best. Even the strongest chess player might fall sick or make a blunder, and the eventuality of that happening is at least partially due to luck. Consider the following example, in which the strongest chess player plays two chess games against the second-strongest player. Both players play one game in full health and one game while sick. If they fall sick on the same day, the strongest player is likely to win both games, whereas if they fall sick on different days, the weakest player has a chance of winning the game on the day he is healthy, and his adversary is sick. In this example, whether the strongest player wins one or two games is entirely due to luck – even though, of course, were he to win both games, he would 100% deserve the victory, and it would be right to attribute it solely to his skills and hard work. Of course, it’s possible to lower the role of luck by having two players play multiple games against each other. That’s what happens in chess championships, and this is the takeaway of this post. **Even in contexts overtly about skill, luck plays a role, too. Therefore, you must manage its impact,** for example, by leveraging the law of large numbers and guaranteeing you can make a large number of attempts. ### Skill and Luck As the Chess Paradox demonstrated, **skill being of paramount importance does not imply that luck might not be important, either.** This is important because a common reason smart people fail is that they become so focused on the importance of skill and doing things right that they forget that even if they do everything right, they might still fail. **Your strategy should allow for the possibility that you do everything right and still fail. Therefore, it should contain fail-safes such as having a plan B or ensuring that even if you lose this time, you can try again in the future.** ### Case study: sports It is obvious that basketball is a game of skill. And it’s evident that the best basketball players – think about Michael Jordan, LeBron James, etc. – won because of their extreme talent and hard work. Yet, there is a reason why the NBA finals are played in a best-of-seven format instead of in a single game. It’s because luck still matters, and playing multiple games reduces its influence. You should consider applying a similar approach to your ventures. Reduce the impact of luck by making multiple bets – the more you make, the more the Law of Large Numbers will apply to you, and the more likely you will be to grab the rewards your skill would allow. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/maintenance-paradox https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/maintenance-paradox Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Plenty of activities share this characteristic: working out, spending time with your loved ones, training employees, building a solid organizational culture, and managing risks are all activities that seem unnecessary in the short term yet are indispensable in the long term. The root cause of the Maintenance Paradox is the deep-rooted belief that if we get the most out of each day, we will also make the most of the year. But it just doesn’t work this way. Some actions, such as performing maintenance, have benefits that are only visible in the long term and, thus, are unaccounted for by short-term evaluations. ### Example: Why Managers Plateau The Maintenance Paradox is a common root cause of why brilliant managers sometimes fail to have a brilliant career. Managers constantly face high demands for their team’s output. So, it always feels like there’s no time for training. But unless they find the time to train their people, the situation will not improve. It actually gets worse over time as the work to be done outgrows their team’s capabilities. The solution is to switch from short-term to long-term evaluations and realize that training is not only necessary but also makes the future easier, as people will be more efficient and effective. Only managers who can shift from short- to long-term evaluations reliably succeed over the long term.  ### Summary Improving skills, working out, resting, strengthening relationships, performing maintenance, managing risks, and taking a step back to consider the broader picture are all activities that seem like a waste of time in the short term yet are indispensable in the long term. If you use only short-term evaluations to decide how to spend your time, you will make suboptimal choices and plateau. Instead, use long-term evaluations. This doesn’t mean you should never take any short-term action; it means to take a mix of short- and long-term actions as optimal to sustain success over the long term. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/bad-good-great https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/bad-good-great Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/five-thoughts-on-management https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/five-thoughts-on-management Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/hobby-mode https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/hobby-mode Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/selection-effects https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/selection-effects Thu, 21 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/democracies-and-long-term-games https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/democracies-and-long-term-games Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/how-to-get-feedback https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/how-to-get-feedback Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/coaching https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/coaching Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/values-time-horizons-and-social-technologies https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/values-time-horizons-and-social-technologies Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/adulthood https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/adulthood Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Yesterday, I was asked about what it means to be an adult. I answered that to be an adult means to take responsibility and have learned how to commit. Taking responsibility means acknowledging that one’s actions (or lack thereof) greatly impact one’s self (and others). And learning how to commit means acknowledging that committing creates more value than retaining optionality. ### But why is commitment so hard? The answer is to be found in why many people have trouble arriving to meetings on time. Punctuality is hard if we see arriving early as something to minimize. Similarly, the trick to commitment is to stop seeing optionality as something to maximize. Don't get me wrong. Optionality and selection are still important. You shouldn't rush and you shouldn't settle. But. It is also true that building anything that matters requires time, and committing to a good but not best option produces better results than committing to the best option but too late or not fully. Adulthood is the realization of precisely this. That commitment is not something you reserve for the optimal option but how you make good options optimal. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/long-term-risks https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/long-term-risks Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/pulled-forward-growth https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/pulled-forward-growth Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Don’t be tricked by their early success in believing you’re falling behind and must pull growth forward in order to keep up. It’s almost never worth it. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/culture-wars https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/culture-wars Sun, 18 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/learning-from-losses https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/learning-from-losses Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Don’t be like them. Constantly ask yourself, how did people who pursued the same goal as me fail? And what can I do to avoid the same mistake? If you do, you will realize that winning reliably is often more complex than apparent. There’s not just one thing you must do right. There are plenty of things you must do right. You must have hard and soft skills. You must be good at your craft and at building relationships. You must work hard and manage your health. **Fail to do any of them and the rest might not matter.** As many losers discovered. And as you might learn from them. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/short-term-activism https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/short-term-activism Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/mentorship-meetings https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/mentorship-meetings Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT ### Download the checklist Here is the checklist mentioned in the video [(PDF file)](https://luca-dellanna.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Mentorship-meetings.pdf). ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/twitter-network https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/twitter-network Wed, 23 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/metapractice https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/metapractice Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/why-people-do-not-listen-to-feedback https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/why-people-do-not-listen-to-feedback Wed, 19 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/lindy-for-managers https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/lindy-for-managers Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT the longer an idea or technology has been around, the longer it is expected to stick around in the future. I first learned about the Lindy Effect, also called Lindy’s Law, in Taleb’s book “Antifragile.” ### Some examples of what is Lindy and what isn’t Before discussing how managers can use it, let’s see a few examples of what is Lindy and what isn’t. - The non-perishable (e.g., ideas, technologies, recipes) are Lindy. The longer a song has been on the radio, the longer we can expect it to remain on the radio. - The perishable, such as food and people, aren’t Lindy: the older they are, the sooner they are expected to perish. After all, a 90-year-old is expected to die sooner than a 40-year-old despite a higher conditional life expectancy. - Groups of people and animals, such as cults and species, do are Lindy. The longer a species has been around, the longer we expect it to still be around. - Jobs are Lindy. The longer a job has existed, the longer we can expect it to still be around. (If you disagree bringing the counterexample of farmers, consider that farmers are still around.) - Careers are partially Lindy. The longer someone has been in politics, the more we can expect them to be in politics until they retire. The latter example gives us an insight into the two mechanics that explain the Lindy Effect. ### The rationale for the Lindy Effect There are two mechanics underlying life expectancy. On the one hand, life expectancy is inversely proportional to hazard rate: the lower one’s likelihood of dying in any given year, the longer their life expectancy. We can turn this around to say that the longer something has been around, the lower its hazard rate must have been, and therefore the longer it is expected not to perish. On the other hand, some entities (the living) have a bound to their life expectancy. People seldom live above 90 years old, and the closer they get to this bound, the more their hazard rate increases. These two mechanics sum up into a general theory of life expectancy: The longer something has been around, the longer it is expected to be around, and the closer it gets to its natural bound of life expectancy (if any), the earlier it is expected to perish. ### How can managers use the Lindy Effect? Here are a few principles we can derive from Lindy’s Law that can be useful to managers: The longer a problem has been around, the longer it is expected to be around in the future. Address it now once and for all. To estimate the life expectancy of one of your products (or one of your competitors’), consider how long it’s been around and how long the assumptions upon which it survives (habits, technologies) have been around. The more areas someone has exhibited competency in, the higher the chances they will demonstrate competency in a new area. What other examples of the Lindy Effect can you spot in your job? ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/wittgensteins-ruler-and-business-metrics https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/wittgensteins-ruler-and-business-metrics Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT This heuristic is called “[Wittgenstein’s Ruler](/posts/wittgensteins-ruler).” I like to formulate it more precisely as follows: ### Some examples of Wittgenstein’s Ruler - When prizes (such as a Nobel) are awarded too often to a non-deserving candidate, awards tell us more about the awarding committee than about the winner. - Feedback sometimes tells us more about the person giving it than about its object. - When a ranking based on objective metrics is published, the choice of the metrics used sometimes tells us more about the committee choosing them than about what the ranking is supposed to evaluate. ### How does Wittgenstein’s Ruler apply to businesses? Here are a few examples: - When you survey your customers, make sure that you choose the questions well so that the results will give you information about your customer’s preferences for your product and not about your own preference for survey questions. - When you ask for feedback, use very specific questions and have a track record of responding well to feedback. Otherwise, the feedback you receive won’t be about what it’s supposed to describe but about your relationship with the feedback provider and your mutual expectations. - When you choose which business metrics to measure, make sure you pick metrics that describe well what’s going on and don’t instead measure the amount of “gaming” your people do to achieve them or the measurements that you’re comfortably making. Personally, I believe that in many cases, it’s impossible to avoid Wittgenstein’s Ruler effect entirely. Instead, it is possible to mitigate it by increasing direct qualitative observation. For example, if now and then you go to your teams’ workstations and observe how they work and how metrics are collected, you might get a better overview of what’s really going on in your business than any metric might tell you. I’m not saying that metrics are bad. They’re good. Instead, I’m saying that metrics cannot be relied upon and must always be coupled with direct qualitative observations. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/presentation-tips https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/presentation-tips Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/superclarity https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/superclarity Sat, 05 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT ### Why aren’t managers superclear? It is often a deliberate choice. For example, some managers believe being superclear would insult their interlocutor’s intelligence. While this might be true, it’s also true that any misunderstanding from not being superclear will damage their subordinates’ trust and respect – and the latter effect is stronger. Other managers aren’t superclear because they believe they must leave space for their subordinates to be creative in coming up with a solution. But it is possible to be superclear about an objective and yet leave space for how to achieve it. Conversely, being unclear about what you want them to do might lead to paralysis or playing it excessively safe. And finally, some managers aren’t clear because they do not know what they want, at least not concretely. ### How to become superclear The theory is easy: aim to be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood – and, to avoid micromanaging – focus on the outcome you need, not on how to achieve it. The practice is harder. I have three actions that help achieve superclarity. 1. **Be concrete and make examples.** Don’t just mention abstract concepts, such as “be ethical.” Talk in terms of actions. Explain what it means to be ethical. What does an ethical person do? And an unethical one? 2. **Ask yourself, “Let’s imagine that after I finish speaking, my interlocutor has a different understanding than me. What might they have missed or misunderstood?”** Then, of course, proactively add information that will pre-empt the misunderstanding. 3. **Ask your interlocutor to rephrase what you asked them.** This will help catch omissions and misunderstandings. Asking to rephrase isn’t an insult to your interlocutor’s intelligence – after all, rephrasing and repetition are performed mainly by high-stakes and highly-professional specialists such as surgeons and airline pilots. That said, if you feel uncomfortable asking to rephrase, you can instead ask, “what do you plan to do?” and then notice if their answer is aligned with the outcome you want them to achieve. ### Conclusion As a manager, you are responsible not only for communicating values and objectives but also for your people understanding them and, crucially, for your people not misunderstanding them. This requires embracing high levels of communication standards. Be clear and concrete. Don’t aim to be so clear that you can be understood. Instead, aim to be so clear that you cannot be misunderstood. **Be superclear.** ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/first-order-thinking-bias https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/first-order-thinking-bias Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/musk-luck https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/musk-luck Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT A recent comment by Nassim Taleb made me reflect on extreme performers and what we can learn from them: First of all, let me clarify that I agree both with Taleb (most of Musk’s wealth is due to luck) and with Musk’s fans (Musk is very skilled). In fact, the two are not at odds: Musk is probably both very skilled and very lucky. Skill is sufficient for becoming wealthy, but given that one is wealthy, how wealthy depends a lot on luck. It’s easy to imagine that in many parallel universes, Musk is also a very successful billionaire, but with how many billions? One, twenty, a hundred? It would still be less than half of his wealth in the current universe. The difference, which makes up for much of his present fortune, must be due to luck. Similarly, skill is sufficient for becoming rich, but becoming the richest man on Earth also requires a lot of luck. Let me justify this statement with a thought experiment. Imagine taking a thousand entrepreneurs, all with the same starting conditions (cash, connections, etc.) and only differing in skill. Then, let’s observe how their wealth evolves in a few decades. As expected, we would notice that, in general, the more skilled a person, the wealthier they became. And yet, if you took the wealthiest one amongst them, the chances that he is also the most skilled one are slim. It’s more likely that the richest person is almost as skilled as the most skilled one but considerably luckier. My point is not about whether Musk deserves his wealth – I couldn’t care less. Instead, my point is about reproducibility. We often wish to imitate the person with the highest score assuming they are also the most skilled, whereas the most skilled person is more likely to be found among those with a high-but-not-highest score. Note that I wrote “more likely.” There may be someone so skilled that he ends up with the highest score. But he must be that much more skilled than everyone else. Otherwise, the chances are that one of the “great-but-not-best” participants will get enough luckier than the best one to overcome the difference in skill. That said, my point is not “don’t imitate the best one” or “imitate the second-best one.” Instead, it’s “be critical about whose strategies you aim to imitate and why.” Ask yourself, how reproducible is that strategy? In ten parallel universes, in how many do they end up as successful as in this one, and in how many do they end up bankrupt or in jail? Are you okay with not only the outcome in the current universe but also with the full range of outcomes across universes? Moreover, consider another point Taleb made. “You get to the tail by increasing the variance (or the scale) rather than raising the expectation.” In other words, to get extreme outcomes, you must reduce average outcomes. Do you really want to be the one with the highest score? It will come at a cost. Not just effort and opportunity costs but also risk – risk that will increase the best outcome but decrease the average outcome. Let me explain this last point with another thought experiment. Again, let’s take a thousand entrepreneurs, all with the same starting conditions (money, connections, etc.) and only differing in skill. Five hundred of them take extreme risks, whereas the other five hundred only take small risks. Let’s observe what would happen after a few years in ten parallel universes. We would notice that, in all universes, the wealthiest entrepreneur would come from the risk-taking group. However, and this is the key point, in each of the ten universes, it would be a different person! Each of these ten people would have extreme success when lucky and terrible outcomes when unlucky. In contrast, a skilled person who only takes moderate risks would have great-though-not-extreme outcomes in almost all parallel universes. Let me clarify a couple of things. First, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take risks – here, we’re talking about extreme risks, bets that damage you irreparably when they go wrong. In general, taking small risks is a good strategy. Similarly, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take extreme risks. Instead, it means acknowledging that competing for the first place often means using strategies that reduce your average outcome. Then, the choice of whether to aim for the first place is yours. And if you really want to become the best, I suggest restricting the scope of “the best at what.” For example, aiming to become the best singer in your town rather than the best artist in your country. Not only does a smaller number of competitors make it easier to win, but it also increases the chances that the winner is the most skilled rather than the luckiest one – in other words, it increases the possibility that a reproducible strategy can lead to victory (because there are fewer chances that someone gets so lucky to overcome the difference in skill with the most skilled person). This is advantageous because it means you can have a strategy that lets you win and has relatively high outcomes even if you’re unlucky. An addition, as of November 2022: the FTX crash and it’s CEO’s Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) quick rise-and-crash from little to billions to nothing is another example of the principles described in this article. If you take extreme risks, you will have worse average outcomes than if you didn’t. As Nassim Taleb noted, “SBF got temporarily rich because he is both aggressive and clueless about finance.” And the fact that SBF overshadowed other more honest and conservative crypto exchange owners is another example of the principle, “if you don’t take extreme risks, even if you’re the most skilled person, you will be outperformed by someone who did.” ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/micromanagement https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/micromanagement Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/career-tips https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/career-tips Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT Similarly, there is this common misconception that once you get promoted, you can become more proactive. No. It’s being proactive that will make you promoted. ### Don’t do chronic overtime Occasional overtime is okay; needed, perhaps. Every now and then, there will be important milestones such as a product launch. You are expected to do what it takes to ensure that they are completed on time. However, doing overtime every week is a signal that you can’t manage your current job. In other words, that you are not ready for the next one. Your boss might be afraid that if he promotes you and gives you more responsibilities, your reaction would be to work even longer – eventually dropping some balls or burning out. No thanks, better give the promotion to someone else. Wait – what? Isn’t working overtime something that companies reward? No, not really. They’re glad if you work a lot, of course. But they won’t promote you just because of that. Here is what I would do instead. If your office hours end at 5 pm, stop working on your current tasks at 5 pm. Then, if you want, keep staying at the office – but work on something that would make you better at the job above yours. For example, learn a relevant skill, spend time getting to know senior colleagues, or think about new business opportunities for your company. But don’t do more of what you’re already doing. It won’t bring you forward much. Even better: if your office hours end at 5 pm, strive to finish your current tasks by 4 pm. Then, reserve the last hour for growth activities. This is hard to pull off at the beginning. However, this constraint will force you to delegate more and to drop the least important tasks, ultimately making you more effective. You’ll also be more likely to leave your workplace on time and have more time for yourself and your loved ones. ### Your to-do list On your first day, your boss probably took some time to walk you through a list of tasks you have been assigned. Never make the mistake of believing that these are all you should do. If all you do is completing these tasks, career progression will be slow, if any. More importantly, getting better at them or working overtime on them is unlikely to bring you any tangible benefit. Instead, you should consider the list of tasks assigned by your boss to you as a starting point. Over time, you should discover which of these tasks should be done well because they matter, which should be done at the bare minimum level just to “check them off” your to-do list, and most importantly, which important tasks are not on your to-do list but should be. A good place to start is by asking yourself, what do your boss and your boss’ boss do that is not an exclusive prerogative of their role? For example, telling others what to do is a prerogative of their role, and you probably shouldn’t do that. But finding business opportunities and making processes more efficient are two tasks you might consider taking on. Of course, do not break any boundaries. For example, come up with ideas of potential clients to contact, but do not contact them unless you have your boss’s approval. But the point is: you get to the next job by showing that you would be good at your next job, not just the current one. ### Why you must discover by yourself what’s to be done Let me clarify a common doubt. If there is anything you should do, your boss would have told you, right? Wrong. There might have been many reasons for which your boss might not have mentioned that. For example, he didn’t know about it, or he put it on his to-do list to let you know but always forgets, or he hinted at it but not explicitly enough for you to notice. Alternatively, he might think that the task is someone else’s job. For example, he might think that finding new business opportunities is the salespeople’s job. Yes, it is, but that doesn’t matter that if you work in the back-office you cannot come up with good ideas for new opportunities. Nor it means that being able to recognize business opportunities isn’t a prerequisite for a promotion – especially if the next role is expected to be able to do so. I got myself into consulting from a back-office job by making suggestions no one asked me to make. Two more reasons your boss might not tell you what’s important that you do is that he’s afraid that you might take his job or that he doesn’t think that you’d be up for the challenge. Neither is a reason good enough for you not to try. Finally, there’s one last reason might not tell you everything that you need to do to get promoted. He knows that the role to which you aim to get promoted requires proactivity – and the best test to know whether you’d be a good fit is to see if you’re proactive enough to find out what you should do to get there. It’s by being who you want to become that you get there. ### Some good questions Consider asking the following questions to your boss: 1. What, of what I’m doing, is not adding value (and I could stop doing)? 2. What am I doing wrong? 3. What are you expecting me to do that I’m not doing yet? 4. Anything I can do to help you? Better to know the answers sooner than later. Don’t worry about the risk of being given more stuff to do. First of all, questions #1 and #2 are likely to decrease your workload instead of increasing it. Second, if your boss gives you additional tasks, you can always say, “there would be too much on my plate, what other tasks of mine should I give up?” Here are some more good questions to ask, this time to people in the position you aspire to reach over the next 2-5 years: 1. What are the requirements, explicit and implicit, to get where you are? 2. What did you do that helped you get here? 3. What did you do that, in hindsight, turned out to be a waste of time? The people to whom you ask these last three questions do not have to work at your company – look for answers inside and outside (but careful with contacting competitors, though, if policies or ethics forbid it; consider asking to people covering the position you seek in another industry or reading information from public sources, taking everything with a grain of salt). ### Asking for support It is your boss’s job to help you be effective. Whenever you face an obstacle that you cannot solve by yourself, or that would be addressed much faster if your boss intervened, ask him for support. Some examples of support you can request: - “I’ve never done X. I would need some training.” - “To complete my task, I need input from Legal, but they’re not replying to my emails. Can you give them a call so that they do not delay my project?” - “This task is way below my paygrade. Can we outsource it?” Of course, you should not ask for help on anything you can solve within 15 minutes with the help of a Google search or by asking your colleague next door. ### Lazy vs. Effective It will happen that one day, your boss gives you one task too much. It is your responsibility to tell him or her that you have too much on your plate. Many prefer not to ask because of the risk of appearing lazy. They try to handle everything – either burning themselves out or making some mistake. This is not good, neither for you nor for your company. Instead, you can ask in the following way, which will make your boss think not that you’re lazy but that you’re effective: “Boss, I have too much on my plate and cannot possibly do everything well enough and on schedule. Which of my tasks should I postpone or outsource?” It’s not lazy to ask for support. It’s lazy not to ask. ### Efficacy vs. efficiency Here’s a mistake that too many young employees make. At university, money was the constraint. Students do what they can with what they have. Later, they use the same approach at work. If they are given a task and a budget, they would rather achieve 80% of the target with 50% of the budget rather than going over budget. Sometimes, this is appropriate. Other times, it’s a mistake. In many companies, the constraint is not money but results. Your boss might be glad to increase your budget by 20% if that means you will reach your target but might be furious if you fail to achieve it – even if that meant money saved. Never compromise on results. If you are given a target and feel like you might not achieve it, raise your hand as soon as possible and ask for what you need. When you do so, make sure that you ask for support first, and only ask for a target relief if you’re denied the support. Asking for a target relief first does make you seem lazy. Asking for raises and opportunities The first rule of raises and opportunities is: don’t ask, don’t get. Sure, you might have seen someone getting a raise because it would be impolite not to do so after five years of loyal service. But the point is, how much more would she be paid now if she had asked for a raise the right way every 12-18 months? You must ask for raises and growth opportunities. ### A test for proactivity Many companies do not tell their employees about opportunities for professional growth, such as internal job openings or career programs. Their reasoning is that career opportunities and cash are limited resources. They should be given not just to those who deserve them but to those who have enough ambition to do more for the company. And what’s a better test for ambition than seeing what comes asking for more? Don’t ask, don’t get. I know; I also wish that I hadn’t had to ask for what I deserved. Sadly, that’s how things work in some companies. And if that’s representative of your workplace, there is little you can do other than acknowledge the situation and either ask for more, get yourself another job, or accept that nothing will change much anytime soon. ### The 3 ingredients to a raise There are three components of getting raises. 1. Know what is possible. In many industries, a raise every 12-18 months is realistic. 2. Do the work. You must show that you delivered value to the company beyond what’s expected from your current paygrade. Not that you worked harder, but that you delivered more value. 3. Ask for it. Make a well-thought case of why you deserve more. Let’s see each point one-by-one. ### Know what is possible You must know what reasonably talented people in your role and industry can expect as a career progression. It will make the next two points easier: you will be more motivated to put in the work, you will be more likely to ask for a raise, and you will have a better argument when asking for it. Common sources to know what a good career progression looks like in your industry is to consult dedicated websites such as glassdoor dot com, online communities, and hanging out with people who’ve been where you’re at. Yes, I know, if you ask an ethical professional how much he makes, he might not answer the question (because of confidentiality). But it’s fair to ask how frequently he asked for a raise and what it took for him to get it. ### Do the work Of course, you should do the work to ensure that you provide enough value so that when you ask for a raise, it’s justified. Also, unless you genuinely believe that you did the work to deserve a raise, you won’t feel confident enough while asking for it. “Do the work” means “do what it takes so that your boss is willing to ask his own boss to give you a raise and that he has a great argument for it.” (Yes, I know, your boss might have the authority to give you a raise without asking – but it doesn’t mean that he won’t have to justify it to his own boss.) ### Ask for it The best time to ask for a raise is perhaps during your yearly performance review, but you don’t have to wait for it necessarily, especially if it’s months away. Before meeting your boss, make sure you’re well prepared. List down the following: - The tangible value you brought to your boss or to the company, preferably with the financial value of your contribution (e.g., I closed the Nike project for $X, the process I improved saved $X, and so on). - How much you’re asking for a raise. - Why this is not much (because you can make their money back, because other companies offer similar progressions, etc.) Show you did the work. ### Handling objections The most common objection your boss might give you is, “we don’t have the budget.” This might or might not be true. Regardless, you should ask for clarifications on whether it is a temporary thing that will resolve soon. Unless you’re given a clear answer that explains step-by-step when funds will become available and from where, you should assume funds will always be an issue. Too many people waited for “just a few more months” for a raise that never materialized. At this point, you have three options. 1. Ask for a raise but not in cash. More vacation days, for example, but also growth opportunities (such as trainings, mentorships, etc.) or more interesting projects to work on. Alternatively, you can ask to be relieved from some of the tasks that are draining your energy – such as having to file travel expense reimbursements yourself or other menial tasks that can be outsourced to someone else. 2. Look for another job. If you are not satisfied with the career paths that your company is offering, feel free to look for another job – at another company, or at your current company but in a better-funded department, if any. 3. Work with your boss on a solution that would give the company enough funds to give you a raise. This doesn’t apply to all companies, but you can always propose to your boss something along the lines of: “let me pursue this new project / client / opportunity, and if it succeeds, I get a raise.” If you go for the last solution, make sure that you define what “if it succeeds” means in objective terms. Example: “if I bring a new client worth at least $200k” or “if I manage to increase production to X units an hour.” _(We’re about halfway through this post… If you think that it has been useful, please share it with your network!)_ ### Asking for a career opportunity This is not so different from asking for a raise. The points listed above apply here too. In addition, you should also list: - The times you demonstrated the skills that are needed for the career opportunity you’re about to ask. - The tangible benefits that your boss and company are likely to receive if you are given the opportunity. Be realistic but not conservative. ### When to ask for a raise or a career opportunity The number one rule is: inform yourself to what a reasonably fast-paced career progression looks like in your industry, then try to match this pace. You do not want to look for geniuses for whom work is the sole focus of your lives, but you do not want to look for average employees either. Look for reasonably ambitious people whose life you would be willing to exchange places with (both the good and the bad). Once you know how fast a good career progresses, try to replicate it. If, for example, this means a raise every 18 months, then ask for a raise at least every 18 months. ### Do not let too much time pass by It’s important that you do not let too much time pass for two reasons: compounding and precedents. Compounding. In most cases, raises depend on your previous salary. This means that failing to increase your salary once means that all future salaries of yours will be lower than they could have been. For example, let’s s say that Adam and Bob both got hired at the same time, for a salary of $2000 a month. After one year, Adam gets a raise up to $2200. Bob doesn’t. At the end of their second year, they both ask and receive a raise. Adam now earns $2400 whereas Bob earns $2200. This is true even if Adam’s and Bob’s output is the same! And what’s worse, it’s that this difference will keep compounding over the rest of their careers. This applies to promotions too. A fast early career might make your later career faster. Similarly, you might want to consider that grabbing job opportunities is easier when you’re in your twenties and flexible than when you’re thirty and perhaps with children. Setting a precedent. The more times you let pass without asking for a raise, the more you set a precedent that you’re okay with not receiving raises. This is bad for two reasons. First, your boss will be more likely to think that he can refuse or postpones eventual future requests of yours, for you’ll keep being a good employee anyway. Second, you will be less likely to ask for raises in the future or to do so confidently. If you want to go fast, you must keep the momentum up. Of course, the fact that a fast progression is possible doesn’t mean that you should go for it. Look inside you, what you want, and what your values are. Consider the negative impact that a promotion that requires a move might have on your social circle and family. Again, this essay is a map, and as with any map, it should only be used if it contains the path you want to take. ### Never accept an increase in responsibility without getting something in return For the same two reasons listed above, whenever it happens that your boss increases your responsibilities, always ask for something in return. It doesn’t have to be a raise or a promotion, especially if you received one not long ago. You can ask for more holidays, flexible working hours, better tools to do your job more efficiently, more internal support, trainings, certifications, and so on. You can ask to work on better projects or to be relieved from bad clients. (“Better” depends on what you look for: less stress? Bigger challenges? It’s up to you. But don’t let chances to make your time at work better.) ### Weekly updates Send your boss weekly email updates – especially if he didn’t ask for it. Keep them short. Do not waste his time. Don’t write what you did last week (do so only if you did something remarkable; you do not want to pass as needy). Instead, write about what you’ll do this upcoming week. Mention the bottlenecks you’re facing. Your boss might help and will anyway be more considerate of the obstacle you face. He might even improve your processes or give you support. Here’s a template. _Boss Name,_ Last week, Mark and I closed the Williams contract, worth $300k. This week, I will work on the Chicago project. I am still waiting for the contract review from Legal – could you please give them a call to ensure they send it by tomorrow? This would help ensure that the project continues smoothly. Thank you, _Your name_ Short, to the point, actionable, not wasting your boss’ time. ### Mentorship Some people find mentors to be of great help. I do agree, though I do not believe that you need a formal one. The alternative would be, at each stage of your career, to find a person whose advice can help you. Then, reach out to him and ask for help or advice. This will help you get where you want to be much faster than otherwise. ### Asking for help and advice The first rule of asking for help is to avoid wasting your mentor’s time. This means, when you first reach out to him or her, always ask for what you need directly. Do not ask for a call or a meeting. Ask for what you need. Meetings should be an option at his or her discretion, not the object of your request. This is because many people are willing to help you but have little time available. The less time you request for them, and the easier you make it for them to help you, the more chances you have they will do it. The second rule of asking for help is to explain what you will do with it. The more your mentor sees that what you want to do is impactful, the more he will be willing to help you. Of course, if there’s something in it for him, highlight it. But it’s okay to ask for something he or she will gain nothing out of it, as long as it’s impactful. The third rule of asking for help is to write personal emails. Cold emails (the technical name for an email sent to someone you never met) don’t have to be “cold” as in “impersonal.” The opposite: you should tailor them to their recipient, explaining why you are reaching out to him or her specifically and why they are uniquely positioned to help you. As a rule of thumb, if your cold email could have been sent to any other recipient just by changing the name, it’s spam. To summarize: make it easy and worthwhile for others to help you. If you do, you will be surprised by how many people will be willing to help you. If you don’t, you might end up believing that you’re alone and the world is a selfish place. ### Understanding metrics You must know and understand three sets of metrics: the ones that measure your performance, the ones that measure your boss’s performance, and the ones that measure your company or department’s performance. Unless you do, you will not be able to know what tasks are for. You will risk doing something useless and not knowing it. Also, you will miss a lot of opportunities to be effective. The three sets of metrics listed above can and should become one of the compasses you can use at work to decide what to do, what to prioritize, and what to explore (the other compass should be your values). Finally, there’s one more set of metrics you should familiarize yourself with: the metrics that measure performance at the next job in your career progression. You do not need to work on them right now, but you must work on the skills that will be needed – and eventually find ways to showcase them. After all, that’s one way to demonstrate you’re ready for your next job. ### The three factors that influence your career Three factors will have a disproportionate influence on your career. 1. How good you are at your job. Obviously. 2. How fast is your department / company / region / industry growing. The faster it grows, the more budget and opportunities will be available. 3. How good is your manager, and how aligned your values are. A bad manager might become your worst nightmare and significantly affect your income and stress levels, and thus your life outside of work. Too many people focus on the first one and leave the other two to chance. Don’t. The impact work has on your life is too important. Of course, this doesn’t mean “forget about your childhood friends and dreams and go to work in tech in San Francisco.” It means to know that where you work opens some doors and closes others, and that good opportunities can be found in the unsexy city if you look for them in the right industry. Make an intentional choice based on your dreams and values, and do not let it up to chance. Similarly, your boss might be the best or worse thing that happened in your career. While interviewing for a job, make a point of meeting your new boss or ask your potential future colleagues about him or her. If you find yourself with a terrible boss, find a way to get a new one (for example, by transferring to another team or company). Otherwise, he or she might wreck your career, health, and personal life. ### A recap of the most important points - Doing more of what got you here won’t get you there. - Don’t work more hours than necessary; if you want, use the extra time to do what will get you your next job, not more of the work you’re already doing. - Ask for what would make you more effective – it’s in everyone’s benefit. - Know when you should ask for raises. Prepare yourself by showing the value you delivered in $$ terms. Handle objections. - When asking for help, don’t waste your recipient’s time and make it easy for them to help you. - Know the metrics that matter to your job, your boss’, and your company. - Don’t leave to chance who you work for and who’s your boss. ### Conclusions These were a few of the things I learned too late about career in a corporate environment. Hopefully, they will be of help to you. I wrote a book from a similar point of view, called [100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late](/books/100-truths-you-will-learn-too-late). It got great reviews and helped hundreds of people. You can download a copy here. If you know anyone who could benefit from this blog post, please share it with them! Also, you might want to subscribe to [my newsletter](/newsletter) to receive future ones. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/just-in-time https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/just-in-time Sun, 06 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/bottom-up-manifesto https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/bottom-up-manifesto Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/fragilization https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/fragilization Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/paretoing https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/paretoing Tue, 07 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT If the rewards (outputs) of a given activity are nonlinear, the inputs shouldn’t be either. Some examples: - If you’re reading the same percentage of pages for each book, you’re doing it wrong. (given that time is a finite resource). Some books are worth skipping after having read a few pages, whereas other books are worth reading many times. - If you are attending all classes or all meetings, you’re doing it wrong. Some are worth not attending, and some are worth preparing for before and reflecting upon later. - If you are spending the same amount of attention on each customer of yours, you’re doing it wrong. Some customers are worth following with double the attention, some are worth the minimum, and some are worth firing (you might discover that 20% of your customers generate 80% of your customer service costs). - If you are spending the same amount on Twitter each day, you’re doing it wrong. Some days, you’ll be inspired, or great conversations will be going on, and other days, you’ll be just passively scrolling. - If you are spending the same amount of hours at work every day, you’re doing it wrong. Unless you are the lowest employee at your level in a super-optimized operation, chances are that some days there will be opportunities worth spending more time on, and other days could be finished much earlier. And so on… Ruthlessly Pareto your activities. ]]> https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/optimizing-for-the-wrong-metric https://luca-dellanna.com/posts/optimizing-for-the-wrong-metric Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT ### Proxy optimization I once wrote: “Humans are extremely good at succeeding at their priorities, and extremely dishonest about them”. With that, I meant that we are great at acting in such a way to succeed at the metric we chose, but often choose the wrong one or do not realize we subconsciously chose another one. I call this phenomenon commitment to failure. Every time we fail at something we had the resources to succeed at, it is due to the fact that we considered an internal success to fail at it (because we were uncomfortable with the consequences of succeeding at it). In other words, we acted optimizing an internal metric (Expected Emotional Outcome) instead of an external one (success at whatever activity we were doing).[^1] Even when we choose a proxy that is initially correlated with the ultimate outcome we desire, we often fail at misunderstanding a key concept:[^2] As an example, imagine an author in the business of selling books online. He discovers that about 2% of his Twitter followers bought his book. He decides to run an advertisement to get more followers (the number of followers becomes a proxy for book sales). Such ad selects followers based on their sensitivity to advertisements, not on their propensity to buy. In other words, it tends to select people who are interested in following the author on Twitter, regardless of whether they are interested in buying his books. As a result, if before the advertisement 2% of followers would end up as customers, after the ad it it is likely on 1% will. The proxy optimization (running an ad optimized to get new followers) diluted the correlation between the proxy and the ultimate metric (the % of followers buying the book). A useful heuristic: **if there is a way you could maximize the proxy without contributing to your ultimate goal, it will happen.** Proxies are not chosen because they are more impactful; they are chosen because they are easier to measure or to influence. And the reason they are easier to influence, is generally because there is a population of low-hanging fruits which contribute to the proxy but not to the ultimate metric. Collecting these is a waste: they do not do anything to improve your standing towards your ultimate goal. Optimizing for a proxy often brings a dilution in quality. Proxies promote unwanted behavior by introducing unwanted rewards towards wasteful actions. It is the same thing that happens when you are not specific in rewarding someone. Let’s say that you told your son “Congratulations for having gotten an A on the test!”, without knowing that he cheated. By rewarding a proxy (the mark) instead of the real thing (the study), you would have reinforced an unwanted behavior (the cheating). ### Define success without using proxies Naval Ravikant said: “A cockroach is just as evolved as we are, just across different fitness functions.” What metric you choose to define success, i.e. your fitness function, matters. It will apply evolutionary pressure on your behaviors and personality traits and shape you, by reinforcing those traits that led to a progress on your chosen metric and by weakening those who did not. Choose your proxies wisely, don’t become a cockroach. Another reason why proxies should not be used, is because circumstances change over time. It might sound useful to choose a proxy to focus on what appears to be the most beneficial sub-objective now, but this might lead to tunnel vision or to a lack of periodic reevaluation to determine whether the current proxy is still beneficial to follow. What got you here won’t get you there[^3]. Memorizing concepts might be a useful skill to get your degree, but it is a terrible one for a successful career (other than in acting). Money is great to increase your life quality when you’re poor, but it doesn’t do much once you’re rich. **What looks a great proxy now will almost invariably be a bad proxy then.** A last reason not to use proxies: they bring noise (because they are partially decoupled from the ultimate metric which we do want to measure) and they bring cognitive dissonance (for the same reason; if we ever take an action which is good from the point of view of the proxy but not of the ultimate metric, we’ll end up asking ourselves “Why did I did it?”. Following proxies instead of the real thing is similar to drug addiction. Addicts become reactive to the cues (the proxy). Living a diverse life increases happiness because it avoids addiction and tolerance due to repetitively associating rewards to the same cues[^4]. (I am inclined to believe that humans are fundamentally good and happy; evil and unhappiness emerge when they follow unnatural proxies or when they encounter constructs or products engineered to hack metrics, such as advertisements and drugs, and become addicted to them). ### Eliminating proxies Prioritization is the art of spotting proxies and exclude them from our to do list. Proxies are fought with not-to-do lists. A good example is Warren Buffet’s 25–5 rule. Write down the 25 most important things you should do. Circle the 5 most important. Move these 5 to your to-do list, and the other 20 to your not-to-do list (these 20 tasks would be busywork, which, by the way, is a proxy for real work). Intelligence is the skill of optimizing a given metric; wisdom, the skill of choosing the right one to optimize for. Some heuristics on how to spot proxies and get rid of them: - Everything which causes addiction is a proxy. - Any metric which is not weighted by the impact it generates is a proxy. (And any metric whose correlation/impact to your ultimate goal is approximated to be static in time, is a proxy.) - If a proxy is chosen because it is easier to improve, rather than easier to measure, don’t choose it. - If a process describes what it is, rather than what it is for, it has been optimized for a proxy. - If it won’t be important in five years, it is a proxy. - If it weren’t important for people one thousand years ago, it is a proxy. - Doubt everyone whose core competency is a proxy (students whose competency is to pass exams, which are a proxy for knowledge; teachers whose competency is to get papers published, which are a proxy for teacher quality; financial advisors whose competency is looking trustworthy; the salesman who’s great at presenting a slide deck but not at actually making sales happen; speakers whose competency is to use words rather than choosing them; and so on)[^5]. These heuristics won’t be always true, but you’ll be better off by acting like if they did (that’s the point of heuristics). _This was an excerpt from my book [“100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late.”](/books/100-truths-you-will-learn-too-late)._ _Many thanks to Damian Ocean for providing insights to the first drafts of this post, which appeared on Twitter._ #### Notes [^1]: Alexander Wolfe noted that “What people who don’t risk don’t understand is that it is better to risk and fail at something that resonates deep within than to do nothing”. To which I replied: “That’s the difference between external failure (proxy) and internal success (actual metric to consider).” [^2]: This is not (only) a repetition of Goodhart’s law. Goodhart focused on people gaming the system once a regulator introduced a policy. My heuristic is more general and works in single-player scenarios too. It is because the easiest way to improve an unweighted metric is often to include items whose weight towards the ultimate goal is lower than the past (e.g.: in the example in the text, the easiest way to improve the number of followers is to attract those who won’t buy anything). [^3]: As far as I know, Marshall Goldsmith made the expression famous, in his homonymous book. [^4]: Living a diverse life means acknowledging that because of the problems of addiction and tolerance, pursuing a single proxy will yield diminishing returns over time and lead to dissatisfaction. [^5]: Did you notice any similarity between this list and the contents of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto? That’s because the Incerto is, too, about how to spot and get rid of proxies. Fooled By Randomness is about spurious correlations between proxies and real metrics; The Black Swan is about frequencies used as proxies for impact; Antifragile is about averages used as a proxy for distributions; Skin In The Game is about incentives (and proxies are incentives). ]]>