Paths to Leverage

Happiness is being able to wake up everyday being excited about work. Being excited to execute on the ever exploding and fun ideas in your head, the satisfaction of seeing it work and come to life, and having that spur more cool and interesting ideas to work on.

Happiness is when sleep is seen as a barrier to fun, a barrier to interesting addiction of consciousness.

The question is how can I achieve that fun, and how can I achieve it in a timescale that is fast enough to warrant enduring the pre-fun timeframe and still continue to choose existence versus death?

The path to that happiness is dependent on two things. First is the ability to execute. Are there things that I can work on independently with little dependencies, such that I can immediately work on those things right now at this moment? If not, what are those depedencies, and how hard and how long would it take the fulfil those depedencies. Second, is the satisfaction of the feedback loop. For the thing I want to work on, would the current scale in which I am working in create enough surplus satisfactions to kickstar the exponential feedback loop and virteous cycle? If the answer is no, what would it take to make the satisfaction equation worthwhile, the unit economics of fun, the fun-to-effort ratio. Would it mean operating at a larger scale, so that the same amount of work creates a bigger impact such that it increases satisfaction? Would it be the moral nature of the work, helping people, the human connection, or the social recognition in terms of making a change that is considered virteous?

Leverage touches on quite a few of those points. With leverage, and with resources, it is probably easier to fulfil those dependencies faster. For example, if you have an idea you want to execute on but yet don't have the technical expertise to execute on those ideas, you can hire the best engineers to work on that idea. Without that leverage, you might spend 1-2 years acquiring that technical expertise yourself and then executing on that idea (with full-time locked in effort probably possible to compress it into a few months). There are certaintly positive externalities to learning to do it yourself (read: https://stephango.com/understand). But even so having leverage allows you to hire the best engineers and get them to teach you on what they are working on which is probably much faster than learning from random online videos.

To be clear, leverage does not mean money or resources. It can come in the form of reputation, social capital, money, etc. It is anything that can serve as a catalyst with an amplifying factor.

Leverage also increases the impact, because for the same effort, leverage (eg. having a team of humans/agents) allow you amplify that direction that you are moving towards x100-1000, so that the same effort has much larger impacts on society. And if directionally correct and good,allows you to reap greater satisfaction for the same amount of effort, likely balancing the unit economics of fun to be higher than the critical threshold for fun addiction.

I guess, there is the tension between acquiring vs delegating. Self-skill acquisition takes a long time, you might spend a few decades of your life becoming a 5x in skill level to have a 5x leverage over your work. Whereas you could have just hired 50 people and amplified your impact to acheive much more leverage. The counter to that is that a 5x skill level person when given the 50 people might also apply the 5x multiplier to those 50 people, allowing much greater impact that a person that has spend their entire lifes delegating and never spending time for skill acquisition. The answer here is somewhere in the middle, where hiring people to increase leverage makes sense but to never lose out of skill acquisition, get the people you hire to teach you things to become the 5x skill level faster than you would otherwise have. A good way to think about this is the exponential. Where your skill levels it the base term while the external leverage you employ using your resources is the exponent. So the result optimising strategy is to do both at the same time, to hire the best in the world while constantly getting them to upgrade yourself.

There is also a question about what skill are you trying to 5x when you are trying leveraging the power of many people? I think management is a poor answer because that is easily commoditizable. The main skill is vision setting and RDS (rate determining step) elimination. When you are leading hundred or thousands of people, the key is to set the right direction. And this direction is not those corporate fluff like values etc, rather it is a vision of the future and exciting future to work towards, a better tomorrow that people are excited to wake up everyday to. For example, a company that works on supersonic planes, is a real unlock in the 'tech tree' becomes it gives humans the gift of supersonic flight which was previously impossible. These kind of tangible visions where you give humanity new superpowers through innovation and engineering is something to be excited about. Once the vision is set, it is impossible for you to work on each intricate part of the engineering work because there is simply too much work to catch up on. But rather, it is being able to effectively remove blockers in the team, to remove the RDS. To do this effectively, you need overwhelming and authoritative power to cut away the bureauracy and human barrier and get things done, and as well as a picture-perfect understanding of the underlying system. It is therefore crucial to be technically well-versed and gifted to be able to easily understand what is the technical implementation and direction that the team is trying to head towards, to course correct when needed and to help debug the blockers when required. In this sense, perhaps the biggest driver for self-improvement in self-technical expertise is to serve this role, the role to unblock and therefore allow the entire company to move at the hyeprspeed timescale.

Being directionally acute is probably the hardest of the bunch. It is about taste, which is formed from intuition live experiences, personal innate cursiosity. The idea is to get a sense of in which fields I have a good historical track record of being 'right' and having a very good intuitive sense and mental clarity and choosing to be in those fields.

All this a quite a hard optimisation problem, because you need to optimise for fun, optimise for taste / clarity. What if the field you have very good taste in you find is absolutely not fun? Taste is also very cruel because a small inaccuracy in direction-setting can cause catastrophic effects especially when those directions are leveraged. The question is, at what point if your taste good enough that you should start commanding leverage? Taste is not something that you can just learn from hiring people and getting people to teach you. Taste is something that is unique to each individual, and that comes from introspection over existing life events and finding out what is interesting, what is cool and what is useful. I think the answer to this is to be innately curious and follow your passion. If there is something that excites you and gets you obsessed, it is probably a sign that your tastes in that direction would be more accurate. Probably because you spend more time on it, or because you have special insights and views about that field that makes it uniquely fun and interesting to you.

This is where the idea of optimising for fun fits in because by optimising for fun you are also indirectly optimising for taste. They are directionally aligned.

It is quite unclear what the threshold is to determine if your tastes have been explored and matured enough where it is worth commencing the leverage build up. On one hand, some tastes and intuitions can only be realised and developed when you are operating at a large enough scale and you are deep enough and invovled in the intricasies of the field to be able to see it. On the other hand, some taste and intuitions needs to be explored in a freedom, low stakes, low requirement / business need environment.

I think the answer to myself is that leverage ramping should come naturally when it occurs as a blocker to curiousity and fun. When it is clear that more fun and more curiosity satisfaction can only come about with more leverage, that is the time to build leverage, almost an on-demand model of leverage acquisition. For example, go and get VC money or raise funds only when money is the limiting factor for more fun. For now, as long as more fun can be obtained without any leverage I would choose to exploit the current fun, and use that time to mature my tastes and to establish a deeper understanding of why that field intrigues me and why it feels so fun.

Going back to the original point, the path to happiness is to pursue happiness, and to be unrelenting in that goal, to ignore the distractors. Find things to do that are fun with near zero execution dependencies, so that you can start working on them immediately. Pick problems to work on where the unit economics of fun is already in your favour even in the early pre-leveraged stage, where you can just wake up and do the thing, rather than waiting for something or someone. Zero-dependencies, immediate, and great fun is a good recipe to start out with. The positive feedback cycle needs to be kickstarted early to maximum productivity and effectiveness. And as that flywheel is spinning, things escalate until leverage presents itself as the solution to more fun.

** one thing to be careful about are institutionalised dependencies. those are always very very tricky to navigate. it is naive to think that everything is fully open and accessible for you to contribute. that might hold true for fields like programming and machine learning (even so with many constructed barriers). but for field such as medicine, there is a massive institutional gatekeeping and serve as an immense external dependency. you can't just waltz into an operating theatre and invent a new surgical procedure (or perhaps if you are Elon with enough power resources and influence -> lending the power of leverage to break down those barriers). however, if you are starting out, these institutions forces you to play their game to be able to follow their rules before you can contribute. i guess the question is: is the field important enough that you are willing to play their game to have a ticket inside their gatekept garden? or is there another field that is more open and accepting? personally, i think medicine is interesting and important enough to play their game just have an entry ticket into their garden, because the potential to change lives and change the course of the human lived experience is immensely valuable. however, it that always presents a conflict with chasing fun, developing tastes, versus playing the same set by these institutions to gain entry. i think the general principle still stands - the on-demand principle. the first and upmost priority would always to pursue fun and curiosity. i think at the point where i think more fun lies within the opportunities within a gatekept field, then it is worthwhile to play the game to gain an entry ticket. the question is: how much forward planning should you do? for medicine, it takes half a decade to become a doctor, in the US closer to an entire decade of your life. the on-demand principle posits that you should only 'play the game' when the time calls, but would it be too late by then? Or perhaps the perception of the 'gate' is fake in the first place, that engineers and non-doctors can fully access and contribute to medicine and healthcare through learning quickly and gaining on-demand domain expertise. There are plenty of healthtech founders who are not doctors. Or perhaps the play is the amass large amount of leverage in other fields first, and using that leverage to break down barriers in these gate-kept institutional dependency fields. the answer is probably in between. the 'gates' are probably leaky enough such that if you are scrappy enough you probably would find a way through, and on the other hand, perhaps something you do need an official ticket. as usual, it is unclear what the right strategy is.