I read the first few sentences of this article and immediately thought to myself, "Yup, this is the world we now live in. Attention spans are dwindling." And since Monday was back to work for many of us, I figured it was timely.
The piece is about Mark Manson's new book called, Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope. In it, he talks about anxiety, depression, intolerance, and the attentional challenges that are, arguably, a result of today's modern economy.
His proposed solution is something he calls the Attention Diet. Similar to how it's important not to eat bad things, it's important, in today's information economy, not to consume bad things. And like junk food, there's a lot of junk information fighting for our attention. I like the parallel.
Here are the 3 steps to the Attention Diet:
Correctly identify nutritious information and relationships.
Cut out the junk information and relationships.
Cultivate habits of deeper focus and a longer attention span.
Put even more succinctly, it's about filtering for quality in a world of endless information. Here's an interesting line from Mark: "Because in a world with infinite information and opportunity, you don’t grow by knowing or doing more, you grow by the ability to correctly focus on less."
Related post: The value of saying no.
Benedict Evan’s latest post on Microsoft, IBM, and anti-trust is excellent. In it he argues (reminds us) that market power during one generation of tech, doesn’t necessarily guarantee market power in the next. And that anti-trust intervention isn’t actually responsible for Microsoft missing out on, among other things, mobile. The rules of engagement simply changed. The PC is now a smartphone accessory.
Here is an excerpt:
The tech industry loves to talk about ‘moats’ around a business - some mechanic of the product or market that forms a fundamental structural barrier to competition, so that just having a better product isn‘t enough to break in. But there are several ways that a moat can stop working. Sometimes the King orders you to fill in the moat and knock down the walls. This is the deus ex machina of state intervention - of anti-trust investigations and trials. But sometimes the river changes course, or the harbour silts up, or someone opens a new pass over the mountains, or the trade routes move, and the castle is still there and still impregnable but slowly stops being important. This is what happened to IBM and Microsoft. The competition isn’t another mainframe company or another PC operating system - it’s something that solves the same underlying user needs in very different ways, or creates new ones that matter more. The web didn’t bridge Microsoft’s moat - it went around, and made it irrelevant. Of course, this isn’t limited to tech - railway and ocean liner companies didn’t make the jump into airlines either. But those companies had a run of a century - IBM and Microsoft each only got 20 years.
For the full post, click here.
Fred Wilson's latest blog post about "grinding" tells the story of how Twitter solved the infamous "fail whale" problem that plagued its platform in the early days. I remember that whale, as I'm sure many of you do as well. It was a problem and, according to Fred, it was a real threat to the business. The solution wasn't all that sexy; though sexy solutions were attempted. The team just rebuilt everything, piece by piece. And eventually the fail whale problem went away.
The lessons here go well beyond just this Twitter example (or at least, it triggers something for me). Here's how Fred ends his post:
If given a choice between a flashy operator or a grinder, I will take a grinder every time. It is a much higher percentage bet. It requires faith and patience and the results are sometimes hard to see. But if you look at the results from grinding it out over a long enough time frame, you can see the power of that approach.
This kind of long-term patient thinking can be difficult, especially in an increasingly instantaneous world. We are all drawn to magic solutions, hot stock tips, and new condos that are destined to double in value over the next year. I suppose that's partially why so many people enjoy playing the lottery, even though the odds of winning big can be as low as 1 in a million.
Being a grinder is largely a higher percentage bet because you're taking a longer, more disciplined, view. Warren Buffet has, admittedly, no idea how stocks will behave over the next week or year, just as I have no idea how condo prices in Toronto will behave over the next week or year. Instead, Warren chooses to bet on "The American Tailwind" and I choose to bet on the role of Toronto as a global city.
Warren first invested in an American business in 1942. He was 11. Over the next 77 years, the S&P 500 would go on to return an average of 11.8% annually. Had he invested in a no-fee index fund and reinvested all dividends, his gain would have been 5,288 for 1. In other words, a $1 million investment would have grown to $5.3 billion on a pre-tax basis. (See: The compound effect.)
77 years is, of course, a long time. But I am sure you get the point: faith. patience, and tenacity -- even when, sometimes, the results can be hard to see. Real estate development is very much that kind of business.