Tag: Competence

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Emotional Work

Day 673 and Balance

A boyfriend who loves to game once called me a glass cannon. I didn’t know what he meant at first. A glass cannon is an archetype in gaming representing a character with high offensive status but little to no hit points or HP.

When a class cannon goes crit they go off. Boom! When facing a glass cannon you’d better hope you kill them before they rock your world. They hit so hard that if they cycle back for another hit you are fucked. Glass cannons are hard to kill despite the appearance of weakness.

Day 409 and Glass Cannon

I like to hit hard and I like to hit fast. And I’d really prefer to recover quietly by myself to bring back my stats.

There are, of course always, things you can do to recover your capacity. If you are in a game they will find little ways speed up your energy bar. Maybe it’s special armor or equipment you need to wear or training branch that improves your stats once you’ve researched it. But what about in real life?

When I have gone “crit” I like to sleep it off. But I also find that time with my therapist speeds up my process. Activities like meditation and mobility work like stretching and yoga also help. Watching trashy tv rests my mind. Taking a short walk outside near our mountains. Reading quietly in bed helps.

There are things that don’t recover me quickly. Having our with friends is only restorative if we share some of the same interests. I love to go down an autistic interest rabbit hole. Going to event like concerts or sporting activists is exhausting. Doing things is my nemesis.

I am being gentle and affirming with myself this week as I recognize that balancing my recovery is important. And I’m proud of myself for not giving in to the desire to go faster. I’m not criticizing myself for impossible standards. I am balanced between my intensity and my recovery. And wouldn’t you know it I’ve gotten a lot done.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 672 and Self Confidence

My therapist yelled at me this week.

“How are you so good at being objective about business but so bad at being objective about yourself?”

Dagmar

My therapist is not what you’d call the warm fuzzy type. She’s more of an old school “dig deep into your childhood trauma to overcome your self limiting beliefs” type. She’s also in her mid-eighties. They really don’t make them like they used to.

My inner child is still fighting the battles of pre-rationalism where everything is about core emotions. Do I feel love? Do I feel fear? Do I feel shame? And my adult needs to parent her with the comforting objective reality that she has nothing to fear and is deeply loved.

I did not feel loved as a child. Without getting into my parents particulars, there was a belief I absorbed that that the path to secure love was through improving myself. I wanted authority figures to see how hard I worked and how dedicated I was to fixing my flaws. It’s hard to imagine someone as brash as I am as a good girl archetype but I was a Daddy’s Girl.

Nevertheless it is true that I get caught in self improvement loops. I’ll fixate on my trackers and personal data and fuss and futz about how things could be better. And I have to consciously remind myself that outcomes are what matter not “trying really hard.” Ironically I have no problem with reaching challenging specific outcomes. I have problems rolling back my inputs to only what is necessary to achieve my outcomes.

Now my therapist is no slouch. She’s one of the smartest and best connected women I know. She is more than qualified to rate my mental acuity and processing power. And she’s now on a mission to remind me of the fact. She wants me to have self confidence in the objective reality that I can achieve my desired outcomes.

And she is correct. I am not being rational in my assessment of my own capacity and talents. I let my inner child’s fears well up and her illogical viewpoints do my adult no favor. In reality I’m competent, capable and absolutely good enough to compete in the arena.

I have an uncanny sixth sense for future market moves and social trends, a numerate mind with a literate education, and all of the skills necessary to source and invest in early stage startups thanks to years in the trenches as an operator and angel investor. If you’d like to invest with me I am objectively very good.

Categories
Startups

Day 645 and Progress

I was recounting a few pieces of work that have been ongoing to some family last night. Both items were the result of choices and trends I’d been following and cultivating for well over two years. One of the items was even set to debut next week. I had some demonstrable proof points that I was right and right long before anyone else took any notice.

I was extremely pleased to recount the long arc of work that had gone into these trend lines and how they were manifesting in successful investments and media attention now.

Usually when someone asks me what I do I have a tendency to stumble around a few more or less goofy bits. I am retired from working in propaganda. I am a house wife that manages the family budget (this works only with stay at home mom or high net work wealth managers). If I’m feeling chatty I explain the Thursday Styles Problem. If I’m not feeling chatty I’ll just say I’m an investor. Occasionally I will make an attempt to explain the founder to angel investor to venture capitalist career arc.

It’s not actually that easy explaining work that involves years of waiting. If you work for an established name brand venture capital firm it’s probably easier than being an angel investor with a small syndicate or seed fund. But even if you are Sequoia it still takes a decade on average to prove out your bets.

I’m thrilled to have concrete examples to point with any of my investment thesis points. I’m lucky that I have exposure to media so I occasionally get the chance to share what I work on online and in print. Not everyone has the skills to be as visible as I am. But it sure felt great to make some progress. And yes I promise I’ll share publicly when I can.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 644 and Status Equivalence and DAO Leadership

Capitalism has largely been a triumph of hierarchy as an organizing mechanism. As we evolved from mercantilism into corporatism, appointing and holding accountable a single point of failure in a chief executive officer has become an effective shortcut for managing complexity when deploying capital. Leadership is responsible for the outcome.

The aphorism “failure is an orphan but success has many fathers” abuts against the reality that while we love to lavish praise upon executives, monarchs and other singular nexuses of responsibility it’s often not reflected in reality. Our bias in the post-industrial revolution has been towards leadership via individual even as post Enlightenment values valorize democracy and community participation. It’s been a tension for since the Industrial Revolution. America exemplifies this as the country most committed to both participatory federalism and corporate capitalism.

I am particularly interested in this tension as I believe we may be on the crux of larger organizational needs and are seeing them begin to coalesce in crypto. As decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, make an attempt to become the new corporate governance structure in Web3, it seems worth studying the question of whether leadership is a singular or collective exercise for humans.

What does the historical and anthropological record have to say about how we organize? What are we evolved to prefer and are we capable of evolving further?

The bias we operate with now is great man theory. But what if that is not just wrong but not even the predominant form of human organization through history? Critics of cooperation might do well to explore this in particular.

I came across a Rob Henderson blog post which is an extended overview of a piece of sociology Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by the UCLA anthropologist Christopher Boehm. According to Rob’s post, the main question of this work is whether humans are by nature hierarchical or egalitarian. And it turns out our hunter gatherer forefathers were mostly egalitarian. The bulk of our history is egalitarian.

The anthropological record along with research on extant modern hunter-gatherers suggests that for most of human history we have been egalitarian, defined as “status equivalency among the decision-makers of a group.”

Rob Henderson reviews Hierarchy in the Forest

If you extrapolate this into a modern corporate context, the C-Suite or executive team, or perhaps even the founding team, are roughly the status equivalent decision makers. Maybe there is a first among equals in the CEO or founder but they can, in theory, be replaced by a board. But what if instead of a C-corporation you are managing a cooperative like a DAO? What then?

Apparently we humans are rather good at maintaining status equivalence. Richard Wrangham’s Goodness Paradox discusses how humans have self domesticated to avoid too much resource and power aggregation.

Over time, early humans eliminated those who were overtly aggressive. They killed or ostracized upstarts hungry for power; men with aggressive political ambitions. Other men would quietly organize to commit collective murder of troublesome male

Rob Henderson on Goodness Paradox

Moral communities evolve and punish those who deviate from acceptable standards. If you are too ambitious as an individual we swoop in as a species. It seems a bit miraculous in that light that we live in an era of kleptocracy and power consolidation given our tendency to murder upstarts. Great man theory isn’t all that sustainable. Or is it? Perhaps it’s that we asset influence obliquely. I’d wager any woman would agree.

Oftentimes, headmen display “self-effacing” behavior. Headmen and informal leaders usually obtained their roles through talent in hunting or warfare, storytelling ability, or congeniality. They rarely assert direct authority.

Rob Henderson on Boehm

If indirect authority is a sustainable organizational preference in the anthropological record, perhaps corporations are more amenable to reconstruction as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) through the principle of status equivalence.

The autonomous part seems the trickiest, but decentralized authority inside tribal organizations are at least recognizably human. If as a group we disliked a status or resource hungry “great man” we leaned on the leadership preferences of status equivalent equals and forced you out.

I see no reason we can’t write in similar parameters into a smart contract as an experiment. At the first hint of a rug pull let the burning begin! We are already seeing political battles for resource allocation inside bigger organizations like MakerDAO. Crypto may be a worthy space for experienced leadership to show that figureheads like CEOs or founders are not the crucial lynchpin for progress and stability we believe.

Which would be quite a balm to me personally as I’m deeply skeptical of authoritarianism as a solution for our technical and social problems. I’d much rather we explore the wisdom of past tribal knowledge to guide us than look to a mythical great man to save me.

Categories
Community

Day 639 and Act Local

I grew up in a hippie college town that was fond of bumper sticker activism. Showing off your sense of humor and your political priorities was a fun thing to do with your Subaru Outback in the late nineties and early aughts before Facebook and the rise of social media.

A classic of the genre was “Think Global, Act Local.” I found this example on Etsy. And no I’ve got no idea what charity it ties back into.

Think Globally, Act Locally Bumpersticker

Maybe it was just less cringe to have this sort of thing on your car before we all spent half of our days yelling at strangers on the internet. I personally remember thinking Visualize Whirled Peas (a band from Austin) was a hilarious way to protest American war mongering as a teen. Of course, I still wrote Amnesty International letters at the time.

Now I’m not even sure who to donate money to at the end of the year as institutional trust continues to break down. Thinking globally is often the source of much anxiety. Currency collapses and the threat of nuclear war from Russia might be throw backs, but doomscrolling and feeling helpless is too modern. What is old is new again but in more potent anxiety inducing form.

So it was a bit of a relief to enjoy the “act locally” part of the classic bumper sticker this morning. Our local volunteer fire department had a pancake breakfast. Now as an adult my husband and I live outside of a completely different college town in the wider surrounding Gallatin Valley.

The rural (as opposed to city) county fire departments operate with a lot of local good will. They have a professionally trained but all volunteer force and cooperate with other districts through mutual aid frameworks. Practically, that meant a lot of college students taking advantage of living at the fire station to offset their costs while deepening ties to the community. A pretty ideal set up for a tight knit rural community. We get talent and they get skills and housing during their college years.

But calling them volunteers makes it sound less professionally run than the reality. I was impressed with not only the depth of knowledge of the entire department but also just how well maintained all of the equipment clearly was. Sure they probably cleaned stuff before letting their neighbors come in for a visit but everything was so shiny and new. I came away feeling a lot more secure about making a 911 call.

Now maybe that’s just function of meeting the fire chief and chatting with EMTS. And that’s probably exactly why they host these pancake breakfasts. But after two hours of touring equipment, and talking to everyone from the Medivac helicopter pilot to the youngest college kid on the squad, I felt like this was a team that has its shit together.

Now I’m actually excited to vote for a bond issue to get another fire truck or two! But in the meantime we dropped a few twenties into the boot on the table.

Pancakes and a fire boot for donations to the county fire department.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 637 and Loyalty

I was discussing with a friend their planned to trip to London to capitalize on sterling parity. The pound and the dollar being worth the same amount is an opportunity for American travelers. The conversation turned to optimizing for travel points structures, maintaining status, and other loyalty programs. I suppose anyone who finds traveling opportunities during a currency crisis almost certainly enjoys a good deal and being rewarded for consumption during hard times.

The pandemic upset so many consumer patterns that it’s a little bit hard to remember why we bought some of the things we did in the past. We’ve got vague positive memories and we are attempting to recreate them. Travel is inarguably one of the most confused spaces in the wake of those upheavals. Status got rolled over so when travel opened back up stuff got weird. Lounges got more crowded just as business travelers were being removed from the financial base of the space. It led to a lot of chaos this summer as the economics got reliance’s.

The most loyal travelers got back on the proverbial road in the aftermath and were met with materially worse products despite paying just as much as the remembered in the past. For all of the rich yuppies who showed up to say Italy or other Mediterranean vacations, they were reminded that travel wasn’t so glamorous without the perks. And it certainly made more than a few of us consider the economics of being on the road.

There are other industries where loyalty is being rewarded with worse producers and shittier user experiences. I’ve been experiencing quite a bit of disappointment with the offerings in cosmetics recently. I’ve complained endlessly about shittier packaging and lower grade formulations even though I haven’t really cut down my spending any. Like the loyal travelers, I am putting up with less quality as I don’t really want to simply stop a hobby I enjoy.

But how long will residual loyalty and affection remain? If travel to London must be combined with currency debasement and travel rewards perhaps our loyalty is not endless. Consumers often underestimate our power with industry because it takes them some time to adapt. But if we don’t change our behaviors in response to dwindling quality or service the incentive structures don’t force improvements. The balance is cost of loyalty.

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Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 597 and Responsibility

I’ve noticed a deepening of my sense of personal responsibility for my own experience of daily life since we moved into our home in Montana. It’s the first home my husband and I have ever owned our own house. And we jumped into the deep end with a rural farmhouse.

The freedom to do whatever we like to our own property has been intoxicating. Even small changes are deeply satisfying. Or perhaps it is because they are small that they are such an effective demonstrations of how it is possible to derive a sense of satisfaction by taking responsibility for absolutely everything.

Let me give an example. I always apply moisturizer after washing up so my hand tends to slip on rounded knobs. That used to be a thing I’d just tolerate as a small inconvenience. But now that we can do absolutely whatever we like to the house we decided to just replace all the door knobs with door handles. Just said fuck it this little annoyance simply doesn’t have to be something we tolerate. We can take responsibility.

Is this giving us a false sense of control over our lives? Maybe! Being human is still mostly a chaotic experience. But we don’t have to tolerate any of the little bits of chaos over which we now have total control. Did I have control before? Also yes.

I could have stopped applying moisturizer and accepted needing dry hands to turn a doorknob. There are obviously always ways to take responsibility for any situation. But it sure feels great to take responsibility for living the way you prefer. Which in my case is with soft hands.

Categories
Aesthetics Finance

Day 584 and Fraudsters

I hadn’t bothered watching any of the numerous Netflix documentaries on how Americans love a beautiful fraud until this weekend when I made an attempt to watch Inventing Anna. I can’t tell if I regret the decision. I’ve avoided any glamorizing of the various grifters that we love to hate.

I don’t love stories about hustles gone bad because I fundamentally believe the difference between success and failure is a lot thinner than than the average person knows. “Fake it to you make it” is part of the great Pentecostal American prosperity gospel. You can come from nothing and become someone in America. We worship the idea of social mobility even if we don’t always like how people gained their fortunes. It’s an entire aesthetic in America.

This is particularly true because sometimes we actually do let the fraudsters win. Especially if we admire their hustle. And let’s be frank it’s a lot harder to tell who is a fraud these days because decades of publicly being a fraud doesn’t stop you from sitting in the Oval Office anymore.

Is it any wonder we aren’t quite sure how to feel about wealth and privilege and the black magic required to obtain it? We act like fraud is a temporarily embarrassing discovery on the way to respectability. Because it often fucking is.

Being in startups has given me a front row seat to just how much talent and capability matter. Except when they absolutely don’t. It’s genuinely hard to reconcile how little effort and outcome can be correlated occasionally.

And this absolutely lends itself to people being willing to take shortcuts. Mistaking that some hard doesn’t pay will kill you if you aren’t able to stay one step ahead. If you get caught, well that is clearly bad but who is to say you couldn’t have kept it up? It’s not like Americans trust cops or prosecutors (except for the line blue line fetishists). Maybe you were just too much of a loud mouth.

I will say the Inventing Anna series has shown me Americans are genuinely confused on how the rich stay rich. In so far as I can tell it boils down to gambling on who might be the real deal and simply writing off the frauds.

Cost of doing business. It happens to everyone. And the worse your boundaries are, well, the worse off your percentages. If your bullshit radar is bad that’s how generational wealth disappears unless you can figure out a way to rig the system (which is always an option).

Categories
Travel

Day 581 and Lost

I still can’t locate a few basics that are part of my every day routine. My razor is AWOL, the box with my night time cosmetics routine hasn’t been located, and I’m not entirely sure where most of my tee-shirts are located. I don’t think they are lost but they sure aren’t found yet.

I keep making amazing progress on adjusting to the new house and unpacking, only to find that I’ve actually got no idea where something crucial might be located. My ambition to get into a routine? It’s bumping up against the reality that I’m still basically lost.

And in my case I got literally lost on the drive back from the airport. I had full on meltdown as my phone wouldn’t connect to the CarPlay and some urgently late California driver cut me off which forced me onto a right turn only lane. This ended up putting me on a highway for an additional 20 miles of transportation. I found myself lost and hollering into the phone “I have no idea where I am” as I couldn’t get myself turned around or in roads I recognized.

Categories
Travel

Day 549 and Rekt Travel

One more institutional bit of trust has frayed and snapped for me. I don’t trust travel any longer. Maybe I trust the big airlines and well traveled routes but off the beaten path travel isn’t for me any longer.

Someone didn’t fully understand my limits and I found myself struggling in a situation well beyond my physical means. The trust was so broken I don’t know how to even begin putting back the pieces from it. I’m exhausted yes, but the worst part is the fear I feel from being put in a bad situation and seeing just how incapable I was of fixing it myself. I’m not independent anymore. And I’m scared and angry about it.

I envy people who can have a situation change and have it’s impacts be immaterial on their day. Oh it’s inconvenient if the travel estimates were three times longer than planned. Oh it’s annoying that there is no air conditioning. Oh it’s frustrating that all these minor details are annoyances for you and intense health risks for me.

I fear I’ll come out of this experience paranoid and much much sadder. I feel stupid I couldn’t protect myself. I feel gullible that I let someone else handle the details. People tease me that I prepare for travel so aggressively. That it’s eccentric and odd and a sign of being a crazy woman.

But when the consequences are so expensive; a thousand dollars gone in a hotel scam, a fortune in gas, an extra thousand to weekend hour doctors to stabilize. I think it’s sensible to be extremely prepared. Nothing black pills you faster than being sick. I tried to act like I could be a normal person and just got rekt.