mental frames for the future
A window of opportunity opens infrequently and rarely stays open for long. When the window is open, you must jump through it with your entire will. In the process, you have to abandon your well-laid plans.
On the internet, people in the tech world are sharing old screenshots of DMs from Michael Truell asking them to interview for his (then) fledgling company, Cursor. Not answering, one person jokingly bemoans (post SpaceX’s acquisition of Cursor for $60B), lost them upwards of $600M by some napkin math.
Facetious or not, behind the joke is the underlying knowledge that you have to actively participate in exponential opportunities when they present themselves. Yet it is difficult to recognize them when they appear raw and half-baked. This is a psychology problem. How do you remain plastic and pliable enough to clock potentially singular outlier moments? What kinds of mental frames help you better recognize windows of opportunity?
Through conversations with exceptional people who I’d consider first movers in a few different categories, here are the mental frames I have observed:
Pay local costs that buy compounding long-term advantage. What is “expensive” or “taxing” in the short run can have high potential upside, but we’re often bad at visualizing long term payoffs. Scaling businesses that think in exponentials act on this well. You could spend a painfully large amount on a marketing campaign or client dinner or billboard. Outcomes-wise, merely 1 conversion, or 1 hire makes this up front cost trivial in hindsight. It's a good exercise to think, in our personal lives, which investments are worth making for exposure to nonlinear returns.
Discovered goals > pre-conceived goals. In Sasha Chapin’s latest essay, he makes the distinction between pre-conceived goals and discovered goals. Discovered goals appear when you do things in the world with a “lack of some previously decided agenda,” you collect market feedback and act accordingly. The example Sasha gives is noticing that when you pick up a guitar and sing, people stop and stare, then eventually becoming a musician. This is very different than wanting to be a musician so that people stop and stare. The intention is the wrong way around!
Take more shots on goal. Progression requires testing and iterating, often straying from the original concept or modality into something that fits the right context for the opportune moment. TBPN, a live technology show recently sold to OpenAI for a reported $100M+ after running for approx a year and a half, is a good example of something that appeared to be a “sudden success,” but in fact was the result of many years of shots on goal. On Dialectic, the creators of TBPN, John Coogan and Jordi Hays shared that it was only through “stack(ing) learnings” from deeply understanding the revenue stack from previous media business, and the craft of choosing the right format that ultimately led them to start building their live show.
The thing I always come back to is John’s understanding that with content, your product is not the file that you upload to YouTube; it’s the format of what you’re doing. You add all of those key insights together, and I feel like we both started working on TBPN a decade ago.
Find “temporal leverage points.” Most of us plan for the span of 1-2 years. However, for moonshot goals, it’ll look like nothing is working or moving for an agonizingly long period of time. I borrow the term “temporal leverage points” from Aishwarya Khanduja (from Analogue, a neo-grant maker for exceptional projects not suited for venture or traditional philanthropy). It’s rare to survive the long periods of uncertainty without some social proof, and it serves people well to find ways to earmark progress - whether it be collecting grants, joining fellowships or even just consciously choosing your friends and capital partners who think on similar time horizons and can be your “baffle against the world.”1
We are just in Act 1. Perhaps the goal should just be getting to a better vantage point so we can see the path to Act 3. There’s a delicate balancing act between ‘planning far ahead to act 3,’ and simply getting to the next vantage point that will help you see the landscape better. R recently put it this way, assess what “business you build to build the next business.” This is generally true for personal vantage points as well - or as I wrote about recently, the multi-turned endeavor:
Like tuning an instrument string by string, I’d notice one note was off and I’d play it again. Turn the peg. Listen again. Turn the peg. It strikes me searching for your life’s work is just that. Eventually, the music rings clear and sweet.
…
What we seek is some wild step change that plunges us into clarity. Instead, we should embrace the little pivots that get us closer. It might be a series of smaller changes over a long period of time that feel less than radical. But in five years, you’ll look back and hardly recognize yourself.
Find, and invent, real edges rather than vaguely ‘working harder.’ maja recently wrote about entering side doors as both an inbound/outbound strategy - where you could either reach out unusually thoughtfully to a particular set of people and convince them to take a bet on you (outbound), or you can make your signal visible for more people to find by sharing artifacts of your thinking e.g., building research tools, datasets, make video explainers, write online (inbound).
This requires considerable amounts of effort. As Cate Hall shares,
Radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.
In any case, inventiveness is a life skill. It requires you to think of opportunities as open, complex, search functions where you can exert personal agency by making the signal clearer and less lossy.
Negotiate across different dimensions. The best sorts of negotiations are rarely purely compensation. Rather, they are about time, frame, and ownership. Can you dial up the time you can spend on orthogonal bets (experimentation), or can you make the scope of a role fit you better so that you can get better at what you’re n-of-1 good at? Could you do a project? An externship? An experiment? A grant? People vastly underrate freedom of time and space to think as part of a role.
In a work context, this could mean negotiating for a role that might not yet exist. See people who have created new roles: I think of Mishti Sharma at Clay in leading narrative, or jacky (: at Hard Launch who made a ‘Launcher in Residence’ role at Bain Capital Ventures.
Do good work. Then be unafraid to talk about it. This is a little tongue-in-cheek, but doing better work and improving at craft and doing the “ancillary” work of “distribution” are not mutually exclusive. If you view your work as a vessel or container around an important message, you have to get good at distribution. The internet, and the world more broadly, is noisy and forgetful. It benefits you to speak a pitch louder than you’re comfortable with.
Choose people over thematics. My whole life I’ve been nerd-sniped by the abstract interestingness of problems. I somewhat underweighted that excellent people make the world around them infinitely more interesting. By spending more time in arenas that seem, upon first glance, “boring,” I’ve come to realize that interesting-ness is much more meta than content. Most things are only unremarkable because we lack imagination and texture.
Learn how to gain context quickly, for “context is that which is scarce” (Tyler Cowen). Assume that you almost never have enough context to make normative judgments on opportunities, people. Instead, try to find ways to gain spatial awareness. Can you talk to someone who works in the role (or adjacent to) the one you’re looking for? Can you ask to sit in on a day? Can you shadow a friend and learn about their scope? The subterranean nature of things are often deeper, and richer, than they originally appear. If we do this right, we become less prone to judging from pure external perception and coining them ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘nonsensical’ or ‘rational.’ Often the answer is somewhere in between.
Thanks for reading,
Nix
If you liked this piece, you might like an essay I wrote a while back on formative experiences:
As a child, one marks being “grown up” as a physical transition or ownership: a mortgage, children, education, responsibility, bills. The older I get, the more I believe that to think like an adult is to recognize how you construct meaning from your own experiences. To know your patterns of attention, awareness, and direct it well. Perhaps you’ll get a lot of things wrong, but it is precisely the lack of certainty or correctness that enables a great degree of learning
fun life tidbits
hello from new york, again. I am here to write a new longform piece for new ontologies and am sitting shoulder to shoulder with a high slope team for 2 weeks. there really is nothing quite like new york in summer, a crisp glass of white wine in East Village, the swarms of bodies in central park, and a uniform joyousness and social openness.
Most recently I’ve been hosting creative technologist dinners: artists who code, researchers who like poetry, founders who care deeply about history/culture/literature - this is the latest one I did in NYC, we had a mixed bag of fun discussions.
agency vs intellect
new forms of patronage/support for fine art
80s film and the liminality of ‘backrooms’ - cc katie who wrote a great piece
making fashion more social
how to find the right “next act” through self reflection
effective parenting techniques
how to take opportunities when they appear
(as pictured with architectural theory book) urban planning, Robert Caro, Charles and Ray Eames, and how to think about “great cities” - cc Coby Lefkowitz
previous one was here:
I borrow the phrase ‘baffle against the world’ from Notes to John by Joan Didion on her husband John.
Have been too-hazily thinking about asymmetrical bets lately, this is such an insightful and perfectly curated guide ⚡️