SD#72: Conversations, money, and change
October 1, 2023
Welcome to the 72 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Have you ever parted ways with someone and thought ‘That was a great conversation’? Have you had the opposite? We interact with others on a daily basis, conversations occur whether we actively seek them or not. We are social creatures after all. But how often do we look at how we could make those conversations better, more meaningful, open?
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. The most important factor in determining a person’s future is when and where they are born People embellish their origin stories, as it’s the only thing others have to go on — from potential employers and friends to potential mates. We are the product of our circumstances, personally and professionally, and a good origin story confers meaning to our life and career. We should recognise that and embrace it … but also be honest about it. Each of us, born into any other situation, would experience a different outcome. Just as the market trumps individual performance, so does circumstance. This isn’t just true across continents and centuries — it’s also evident at a micro level. Being born one year earlier or later can make a big difference. People who graduate into a recession earn less for 10 to 15 years than those who graduate amid prosperity. Fate also changes block to block: One of the strongest signals of life expectancy (and much else) is the ZIP code where you’re born. Within the same city, life expectancy can vary by 30 years based on ZIP code. This all confirms a basic point: The cards you’re dealt matter … a lot. Your income is the clearest indicator of how much money your kid will make when they’re 30. Churn is increasingly a rare-earth element in the U.S. Per a Georgetown analysis, “It’s better to be born rich than smart … The most talented disadvantaged children have a lower chance of academic and early career success than the least talented affluent children.” 👉 No Mercy / No Malice |
2. Is money up for an upgrade? Money needs an upgrade. Money should be programmable. It should be able to apply taxes, pay royalties and manage refunds. That’s all possible today, but not with the currencies, banks, and apps people trust. Digital technology and a global world didn’t exist when money was invented. The invention of money solved another problem entirely. Money was a solution to barter. In barter, everything is tradeable for some other quantity of item or service, but there’s a glaring problem. It’s hard to know how many pigeons are worth one cat. How many bushels of wheat are worth a new plough? Money is an efficient way to exchange value, store it and account for it. Coins and paper money become a simple way for a farmer to exchange their value (e.g., wheat) and receive the value they can also exchange for other staples like tools from the blacksmith. They can also sell all of their wheat in one transaction and store that value for later, in a measurement we can all agree on (or account for). That’s why central bankers spend so long saying the three tests of money are it must be a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. That’s how it adds value, but not why. Money is memory. It remembers the value you’ve created and can grow over time in a way perishable assets struggle to (e.g., the grain goes stale). Money is also a fuel for action. If you want something to happen, it usually takes money. Want to build a school, travel to work, or have a place to live? You either have to buy or pay for that. Money incentivises others to act to meet your need (or for you to meet theirs) because they can exchange, store, and account for it. But money is dumb. It is a legacy technology. So how do we upgrade it? Tokenization’s impact will be monumental, according to Blackrock. Citi says $4 trillion in assets will be tokenized by 2030. Starting with the thesis that all cash (and assets) will be tokenized, the next question is how? Some of that will live on Blockchain networks, and most will reference some classic database like a central bank or stock market, but much of it might reference new, digital-only assets. 👉 Fintech brain food |
3. Making normal conversations better Most conversations between people who’ve just met, or loose acquaintances, are pretty shitty. And it’s not for lack of desire. The majority of people want to connect with people and open up about something. Almost everyone is full of some vital matter they’d like to express but that exceeds the capacity of the average conversational venue. But many conversations can be nudged in the direction of openness, spontaneous complexity, and shared emotionality. And a surprising number of conversations, thus encouraged, can become quite connective. Here are some ways to make normal conversations better: 1) small talk is vital. Some people get frustrated with small talk because the words themselves are not enlightening. But they’re focusing on the wrong thing. The spoken content of small talk is, it’s true, mostly vapid. However, the relevant information underneath the spoken content is fascinating if you learn to care about it. What you’re doing is mutually establishing tone and finding boundaries. 2) Extending the invitation. If small talk is going well, you might be able to increase the depth of the conversation. 3) Give the right attention. People love attention, almost more than anything. Part of what makes people open up, conversationally, is the sense that someone is paying them more attention than normal. 4) Don’t be afraid of silence. 5) Avoid and end autopilot. Good conversations often contain moments that, on paper, look like monologues, which is to say, one person divulging something for some time, or telling a story. But the key thing is that they can’t feel like monologues. 6) Let yourself surprise and be surprised. 👉 Sasha’s Newsletter |
4. Every industry seems to be caught up in the pervasive narratives of fear of ‘inevitable’ change That things are changing faster than ever, that everything is different now. That what you know is no longer enough. That tech X and Y will take your job and that every new startup will eat any company that happens to have thrived for decades or centuries, by default. These things are largely not true at all, but there is more money to be made by the business media, consulting industry, analyst reports, and more speaking slots to be had by chaos creation, not context and balance. The last two decades have seen an interesting shift. For the first fifteen years, the world of advertising largely ignored the internet, data, and new behaviours and technology, and found this all a bit beneath them. For the last five years, as a way to restore the balance, the industry talks about little else other than every new shiny new technology and big data. The pendulum has swung too far. Tech is fast becoming THE idea, not the enabler of the idea. We seem more keen to talk about technology in great detail, using buzzwords, more to signal to others in the industry that we get it, and to create barriers than to make better marketing. 👉 Nowism |
5. To be yourself, fully, is to open to the free flow of love — and thus to power What does it mean to be “in” one’s power? It can happen in situations where we’re trying to earn someone’s approval or acceptance, where we try to be “good.” There is a sense, in these moments, that we are trying to be somebody for somebody else. Rather than being ourselves, we are trying to contort ourselves into who we think someone else wants us to be. We are trying to fit into their definition of “good” — rather than our own. And that is where the power leaks out — in thinking that we should be looking anywhere else, to anyone else, to understand how to be ourselves. In thinking that there’s a way to get it “right.” Which, by extension, means there’s a way to get it wrong. A wise being once told that power is the free flow of love. To be yourself, fully, is to open to the free flow of love — and thus to power. To not block that flow by trying to be somebody for somebody else. To not block that flow by trying to be “good” by someone else’s standards. To not block that flow by trying to contort yourself into an unnatural shape to fit in. You must give yourself the approval you need. You must choose yourself. No one else can do it for you. 👉 Hurry Slowly |
6. People will not remember your thing unless it’s connected to a narrative We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative, we can’t make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts of events are less salient, which means they’re less real. Scott Hershberger speculated in Scientific American along similar lines about why historians paid little attention to the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though it killed more people than World War I: “For the countries engaged in World War I, the global conflict provided a clear narrative arc, replete with heroes and villains, victories and defeats. From this standpoint, an invisible enemy such as the 1918 flu made little narrative sense. It had no clear origin, killed otherwise healthy people in multiple waves and slinked away without being understood. Scientists at the time did not even know that a virus, not a bacterium, caused the flu. The doctors had shame, it was a huge failure of modern medicine. Without a narrative schema to anchor it, the pandemic all but vanished from public discourse soon after it ended.” 👉 Surfing Complexity |
7. Boredom is telling you what you’re doing right now is not working. It’s uncomfortable but not necessarily negative There is a kind of cultural stigma attached to boredom, particularly in the United States. Regardless of education, income or race, parents believed children who are bored should be enrolled in extracurricular activities. Yet, guarding kids from ever feeling bored is misguided in the same way that guarding kids from ever feeling sad, or ever feeling frustrated, or ever feeling angry is misguided. What can you and your children learn from feelings of boredom? 1) Boredom is telling you what you’re doing right now is not working. It’s uncomfortable but not necessarily negative. 2) Boredom offers children an opportunity to experiment with the kinds of pursuits that feel fulfilling and interesting to them. 3) Phones and devices require little effort, so children and adults often turn to them as a way to soothe feelings of boredom. It makes complete sense, but obviously, that doesn’t mean that’s what’s best for them in that situation. Almost all advice for kids doubles as advice for adults. When was the last time you let yourself get bored? 👉 NY Times |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
Neils Bohr
🎁 Fun things to click on:
You’re in a space elevator. As you scroll, you ascend and learn about the wonderful world between solid ground and outer space. How to be a better movie watcher, according to film critics. AI emoji search engine.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom