No. 37: Success is part luck, so take advantage of making small bets
Life's outcomes are not guaranteed so increase your exposure to luck.
Prepare for the future of work. Join us.
Hi friends! đđŒ
Caught a bug over the weekend so I wasnât able to send out our usual Saturday issue.
In my downtime, I had time to reflect and decided to add AI for Creators as a new section to Future You. After working on AI projects for the past three years, Iâm astounded by the rise and attention of accessible AI tools in just the past two months.
AI tools are no longer constrained to high-level business applications Ordinary creators - like you and I - have easy access to power AI tools to help us on our creative journeys.
The conversation has shifted from âAI will replace meâ to asking âWhat can I create with AI?â
It is impossible to ignore this movement and time to accept that AI will be an essential part of our personal and work lives.
AI will only replace you, if you let it.
Join us as we continue the conversation in AI for Creators.
First, some numbers:
100% - Owners of Patagonia, the Chouinard family, has transferred 100% of its ownership to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization.
5 & 7% - Average scores for age 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020.
10,000 - Almost 10k baby boomers hit retirement age every day in the US. About 8.3% are self-employed, meaning ~303,000 boomer businesses face retirement every year.
Making small bets and letting randomness work for you
Most people assume that the world is predictable and that results are guaranteed if you follow a plan well enough. Daniel [Vassallo] says that the real world is usually not like this.Â
Success is mostly randomly determined.
Power Laws and Paretoâs Law dominate in many creative fields and entrepreneurship. With such wide ranges in outcomes, the vast majority fail.Â
But the successes have huge upsides. The winners can pay for all the losses.
Venture Capital is a good example of this. Most businesses fail, so venture capitalists pepper their investments across many businesses; the few that succeed pay for all the losers. The film industry is another example. The studios may fund many films only to have a few make all their money. Venture Capitalists and Film studios donât put all their eggs in one basket.
So what does randomness have to do with newsletters? Well, newsletters fall into that same type of creative work and business world that the VCs and Film Studios have figured out how to tame.
Instead of fighting randomness, let randomness work for you.Â
Read The Role of Randomness via Newsletter Launchpad
What is metacognition?
When you want to learn or build something new, itâs tempting to just get going. Read as much as you can, do some tutorials, work on some related projects. Short-term, this gives you a motivation boost. You feel like youâre moving forward. But, after a while, you notice that youâre not progressing as fast as you expected. You may even start burning out. Turns out, cramming content inside your brain is not the most effective way to grow.
Instead, you need to develop your metacognition.
The word âmetacognitionâ literally means âabove cognitionâ â itâs one of the most powerful forms of self-monitoring and self-regulation. Itâs a fancy word for something fairly simple once you break it down.
Put simply, metacognition is âthinking about thinkingâ or âknowing about knowing.â Itâs being aware of your own awareness so you can determine the best strategies for learning and problem-solving, as well as when to apply them.
Read about the three main components of metacognition via Ness Labs
The college pricing game
When President Biden canceled college debt last month, he left untouched the problem that created that debt: the soaring price of college.
In the 1980s, the list price of undergraduate education at a private four-year institution could hit $20,000 a year. At some of these schools in the last couple of years, it has topped $80,000.
Why has a college education become increasingly costly, and why has that become such a difficult problem to solve?
Listen to The College Pricing Game with NY Times columnist Ron Lieber
Till next timeâŠ
Innovation happens when people are free to think, experiment and speculate.
-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works