SD#73: Masculinity, expectations debt, and AI
October 15, 2023
Welcome to the 73 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,
It’s not my usual style to be covering masculinity or gender issues within my newsletter, but the article is too important to be missed. There’s a clear void in today’s society of what healthy masculinity looks like and some people are brave enough to highlight it. My beloved Scott Galloway highlighted several times how it pushes young men to extremism, and how the dating scene is driving division rather than unity. These topics are not trying to take away the spotlight from feminism. Can’t we speak about both and strive for a better society and better parents? It’s less of a ‘learning’ than most ideas shared in this newsletter, but it’s something I care about and hope I can inspire a few more to care too.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness Long, thoughtful articles can be tricky to summarise, but this topic was too good to be missed. So here we go: Young men might be in an identity crisis. In the 4chan-fueled 2016 campaign for Donald Trump, in the backlash to #MeToo, in amateur militias during the Black Lives Matter protests. Misogynistic text-thread chatter took physical form in the Proud Boys, some of whom attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Young men everywhere are trying on new identities, many of them ugly, all gesturing toward a desire to belong. What does good masculinity look like these days? Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labour market dramatically, and not in men’s favour — the need for physical labour has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded. Growing numbers of working-age men have detached from the labour market, with the biggest drop in employment among men ages 25 to 34. For those in a job, wages have stagnated everywhere except the top. Meanwhile, women are surging ahead in school and the workplace, putting a further dent in the “provider” model that has long been ingrained in our conception of masculinity. Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall. In 2020, nearly half of the women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960. And while the past 50 years have been revolutionary for women — the feminist movement championed their power, and an entire academic discipline emerged to theorise about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, and less defined. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at all. At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honourable and desirable. What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive. If a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes. It’s on young men themselves to take responsibility, embrace masculinity and redefine it. For all their problems, the strict gender roles of the past did give boys a script for how to be a man. 👉 The Washington Post |
2. Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.” Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid. When Amazon was on top of the world in 2021 – reputation gleaming, stock price booming – you could feel the pride and prosperity. You could practically smell it. That was Amazon in 2021. Then Jeff Bezos left, the stock fell 50%, 10,000 employees were laid off, and hundreds of thousands more fear they’re next. What do you call the top-of-the-world status Amazon had in 2021? Was it a gift? A reward for hard work? The natural swings of capitalism? Yes, all of those. But there’s another way to look at it: An expectations debt. Expectations were so high in 2021 that investors and employees had to achieve extraordinary things just to break even. When results were merely good, they felt terrible. Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing. 👉 Collab fund |
3. When practice doesn’t make perfect In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his popular book Outliers, exploring why some seemingly extraordinary people achieve much more than others. “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.” Malcolm branded this the 10,000-hour rule. Study whichever topic for 10,000 hours, and you will master it. There were a few things wrong with the approach. First, the study wasn’t about studying a topic for a specific amount of time. It was about deliberate practice. Finally, and maybe the biggest problem with the 10,000-hour rule, there is absolutely nothing in the study that suggests that anyone can become an expert in any given domain by putting in 10,000 hours of practice, even deliberate practice. To show this, the researchers would have had to take a random sample of people through 10,000 hours of practice and see if the results were statistically significant. In fact, a research study from Princeton shows evidence that practice accounts for just a 12% difference on average in performance in various domains, specifically 18% in sports, 21% in music, and 26% in games. 👉 Ness Labs |
4. We tend to see others as internally motivated and responsible for their behaviour. Yet when we judge ourselves, we look at the whole picture Fundamental Attribution Error was coined by Lee Ross some years after the now-classic experiment by Jones and Harris. Ross (1977) argued in a popular paper that it forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology. We tend to see others as internally motivated and responsible for their behaviour – if they’re late to a meeting, that tells us everything we need to know about them. Yet when we judge ourselves, we look at the whole picture – it’s not a big deal that you forgot about your meeting. And it’s not your fault Zoom decided to install a new update. What does it mean for businesses? Service businesses are built on systems. It’s the only way to scale. These systems make sense internally. But, externally, they may feel slow and clunky. Don’t let your clients think it’s because your business is slow and clunky. Tell them what’s going on behind the scenes. Once they can see why you’re doing things a certain way, they can understand it’s situational…not a character flaw. 👉 Why we buy |
5. The way to get ideas is to do something boring. They fly into one’s head like birds Neil Gaiman’s advice for writers? Get bored. “[Ideas] come from daydreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say ‘I want to be a writer,” I say ‘Great, get bored.‘” And Nicholas Carr, expanding “We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is the process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.” 👉 From Austin Kleon |
6. If you can’t write, design, create, etc.… find someone who can and make a fortune with them Charles Bukowski, the infamous underground poet and writer, died with a net worth of $4 million. Surprising, considering that despite his tremendous talent, he was a dirt poor drunk who jumped from job to job at nearly the same alarming pace he changed beds. His unlikely fortune can be almost entirely attributed to John Martin. John Martin was first and foremost an entrepreneur. But, not unlike most entrepreneurs, he was a voracious reader. One day, whilst thumbing through an indie magazine, Martin stumbled upon a fairly unknown LA poet and writer by the name of Charles Bukowski, who wrote almost entirely about drinking and having sex but did so in such a poetic way that it left the reader flipping violently through the pages as if each sentence were a bump of cocaine. Martin was certain that Bukowski was the next Walt Whitman. So much so that he sold his collection of D.H. Lawrence’s first editions to raise $50,000 to fund a publishing house created with the sole intention of bringing Bukowski to the masses. “I believed in him as much as he believed in himself.” John Martin and Black Sparrow Press is a lesson in taste. If you can’t write, design, create, etc… find someone who can and make a fortune with them. While everyone wants to be the next Picasso, it pays to simply have good taste. And, perhaps the hustle to bring that taste to the masses. 👉 Honey Copy |
7. AI won’t take your jobs Here are a few reasons why: 1) Most companies are about power more than efficiency, and power typically comes from having big internal budgets and employing more staff. Both of which are more powerful than the case to be made for automation. Power is what drives company dynamics, not profit. 2) Companies have a terrible track record of using even basic technology to improve how they do things, mostly because companies are made up of people and people are strange. I’ve known places where booking a meeting room took phone calls and ages because it was just ‘how things were done around here”. Many people today still use paper calendars not shared digital ones. If companies care about AI, why didn’t they care about using Excel properly or training staff on how to use email better? 3) AI won’t be as good as people think it will be. So far it’s mainly a way to do things badly but fast and free, most processes in business should ultimately be about better, not easier or cheaper. Yes, Zapier can automatically cancel a meeting, but what if it emails someone who is grieving a lost family member with the same tone as everyone else? Life is more complex than we make out, relationships matter too much to outsource feeling to machines. 👉 Tom Goodwin |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt.”
K. Anders Ericsson
🎁 Fun things to click on:
An interactive starter guide for anyone building an app for the first time. Histography is an interactive timeline that covers 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. Every dot is a historic event from the Wikipedia. What the web looks like to someone who is colorblind.
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