5 ms·

Focus on things that don't change

72 points by dSebastien 4y ago

pubby 4y ago
This strategy is low-risk but also low-reward. The most successful people in life often gain expertise in some specific, changing area, then get extremely lucky to have it pan out. I think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz - the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.
- vladsanchez 4y ago
  Thanks for such compelling historical perspective! The title should've been: "Focus on things that don't change (initially)"
- davidivadavid 4y ago
  Jeff Bezos might disagree about the "low reward." “I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Eh, this is kind of an odd statement here... He did take something that didn't change much and applied a lot of rapidly changing high technology to it. Much like Walmart before them, they did something kind of like everyone else was doing, but but their high risk, high reward twist on top of it.
  - brongondwana 4y ago
    Interesting that he identifies three things and then comments on the two which really ARE obviously true long term and not on the third which is much more debatable. When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of items for common categories, with better price/quality tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to get an inferior substitute. Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it claims without having to wade through thousands of shady vendors".
hackitup7 4y ago
I completely agree, which is why frontend frameworks give me existential dread
- borbulon 4y ago
  this is an underrated comment. Any long-term software, really. What you're building will, if it's big enough, essentially be a snapshot of a moment in tech.
Werewolf255 4y ago
I want to like this article but I think it really underplays the nature and (modern) frequency of black swan events. If I were to take the advice of this article in 1994, I would be going full bore into telephony and set-top internet boxes that attach to 4:3 SD televisions. This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works. - Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog. - Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.
- k__ 4y ago
  The trick is to identify what will change and what won't.
- sogen 4y ago
  > telephone It should be mostly about "communication" > televisions, news Same, "entertainment", and "know about latest events"
gtrevorjay 4y ago
Extending this idea beyond technical topics is why I stopped bothering to put effort into most humanities or liberal arts and advise those younger than me to do the same. Most new work in the sciences is driven by an obvious gap in current theories or disagreeable data. Dramatic exaggerations of "scientific revolutions" aside, the relationship of the old to new knowledge is generally as either a subset, a superset, or an approximation of the other. See Newtonian to relativistic to quantum physics. See set theory to arithmetic etc. If you got a PhD in physics in the 70's and didn't learn a thing since, you're still in a great position to help a teenager with their homework. This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is even negative?
- dbtc 4y ago
  The reward of reading well does not require anyone's approval. Study Shakespeare and prosper.
- 52-6F-62 4y ago
  Psychology hasn't moved? Maybe not in a way that's as easily exploitable for profit, but it's certainly moved... There are dividends outside of financial. If you can't see them then maybe you should study some psychology.
  - gtrevorjay 4y ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm saying it's definitely moved. It's just moved in such a way that almost all of the new knowledge replaces rather than extends or builds on the old knowledge. Thus almost all effort learning the old knowledge was a waste and we can expect the same for learning it today. Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of unhappy housewives with icepicks?
donnowhy 4y ago
ah, so focus on the inherent void behind all reality... very zen ...this is a skill that is difficult to develop, hard to teach, and impossible to test (if somebody can do it)
dieselgate 4y ago
This is just the article I wanted to see this morning. Not perfect advice for everyone all the time but highly relevant to keep in mind in general. Things that will change are the other-side-of-the-coin for things that don’t.
- dSebastien 4y ago
  Glad you liked it. I wrote it with kids and newcomers in mind, but I believe the advice is more generally applicable
jschveibinz 4y ago
From a certain eastern philosophical point of view, it makes sense to focus on what doesn’t change to reach a level of comfort with one’s self—which is to say, we become selfless in the process, which is the goal of that philosophy. From a western philosophical tradition, everything is in flux: in a continuous state of change, from actuality to potentiality. The goal of this philosophy is to find purpose, to become something more. As with most things, the push and the pull go together. The answer is likely in recognizing the time and place for both philosophical points of view: being, and becoming.
lukasb 4y ago
Talked to a lawyer yesterday who works in an area where the key laws haven't changed in 90 years. He's built an excellent career based on deep knowledge of those laws.
pedalpete 4y ago
I would recommend not to only focus on the things that don't change, but look at how things that do change impact the things that don't. For example, very few customers have "new" problems. The problems of society have existed for decades or centuries. Almost everything maps back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, therefore, when looking at the new, it should be viewed in the impact it has on things that don't change. The author's example of the internet being a Black Swan, I believe, is wrong. Sci-Fi had been writing about such a network for over a century. The thing that didn't change was our desire for knowledge. The internet was the new library initially, and the internet was able to expand into other needs that didn't change. I feel like it is better to take both a macro view and a micro view. We work in the neurotech and sleeptech space. From a macro perspective, sleep, and the health impacts have not changed, so we focus on solving that problem. The micro-details is that we now have the technology to serve that need, that is something that does change, and will continue to change.

72 points by dSebastien 4y ago

This strategy is low-risk but also low-reward. The most successful people in life often gain expertise in some specific, changing area, then get extremely lucky to have it pan out. I think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz - the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.

vladsanchez 4y ago
Thanks for such compelling historical perspective! The title should've been: "Focus on things that don't change (initially)"
davidivadavid 4y ago
Jeff Bezos might disagree about the "low reward." “I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
- pixl97 4y ago
  Eh, this is kind of an odd statement here... He did take something that didn't change much and applied a lot of rapidly changing high technology to it. Much like Walmart before them, they did something kind of like everyone else was doing, but but their high risk, high reward twist on top of it.
- brongondwana 4y ago
  Interesting that he identifies three things and then comments on the two which really ARE obviously true long term and not on the third which is much more debatable. When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of items for common categories, with better price/quality tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to get an inferior substitute. Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it claims without having to wade through thousands of shady vendors".

hackitup7 4y ago

I completely agree, which is why frontend frameworks give me existential dread

borbulon 4y ago
this is an underrated comment. Any long-term software, really. What you're building will, if it's big enough, essentially be a snapshot of a moment in tech.

Werewolf255 4y ago

I want to like this article but I think it really underplays the nature and (modern) frequency of black swan events. If I were to take the advice of this article in 1994, I would be going full bore into telephony and set-top internet boxes that attach to 4:3 SD televisions. This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works. - Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog. - Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.

k__ 4y ago
The trick is to identify what will change and what won't.
sogen 4y ago
> telephone It should be mostly about "communication" > televisions, news Same, "entertainment", and "know about latest events"

gtrevorjay 4y ago

Extending this idea beyond technical topics is why I stopped bothering to put effort into most humanities or liberal arts and advise those younger than me to do the same. Most new work in the sciences is driven by an obvious gap in current theories or disagreeable data. Dramatic exaggerations of "scientific revolutions" aside, the relationship of the old to new knowledge is generally as either a subset, a superset, or an approximation of the other. See Newtonian to relativistic to quantum physics. See set theory to arithmetic etc. If you got a PhD in physics in the 70's and didn't learn a thing since, you're still in a great position to help a teenager with their homework. This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is even negative?

dbtc 4y ago
The reward of reading well does not require anyone's approval. Study Shakespeare and prosper.
52-6F-62 4y ago
Psychology hasn't moved? Maybe not in a way that's as easily exploitable for profit, but it's certainly moved... There are dividends outside of financial. If you can't see them then maybe you should study some psychology.
- gtrevorjay 4y ago
  Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm saying it's definitely moved. It's just moved in such a way that almost all of the new knowledge replaces rather than extends or builds on the old knowledge. Thus almost all effort learning the old knowledge was a waste and we can expect the same for learning it today. Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of unhappy housewives with icepicks?

donnowhy 4y ago

ah, so focus on the inherent void behind all reality... very zen ...this is a skill that is difficult to develop, hard to teach, and impossible to test (if somebody can do it)

dieselgate 4y ago

This is just the article I wanted to see this morning. Not perfect advice for everyone all the time but highly relevant to keep in mind in general. Things that will change are the other-side-of-the-coin for things that don’t.

dSebastien 4y ago
Glad you liked it. I wrote it with kids and newcomers in mind, but I believe the advice is more generally applicable

jschveibinz 4y ago

From a certain eastern philosophical point of view, it makes sense to focus on what doesn’t change to reach a level of comfort with one’s self—which is to say, we become selfless in the process, which is the goal of that philosophy. From a western philosophical tradition, everything is in flux: in a continuous state of change, from actuality to potentiality. The goal of this philosophy is to find purpose, to become something more. As with most things, the push and the pull go together. The answer is likely in recognizing the time and place for both philosophical points of view: being, and becoming.

lukasb 4y ago

Talked to a lawyer yesterday who works in an area where the key laws haven't changed in 90 years. He's built an excellent career based on deep knowledge of those laws.

pedalpete 4y ago

I would recommend not to only focus on the things that don't change, but look at how things that do change impact the things that don't. For example, very few customers have "new" problems. The problems of society have existed for decades or centuries. Almost everything maps back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, therefore, when looking at the new, it should be viewed in the impact it has on things that don't change. The author's example of the internet being a Black Swan, I believe, is wrong. Sci-Fi had been writing about such a network for over a century. The thing that didn't change was our desire for knowledge. The internet was the new library initially, and the internet was able to expand into other needs that didn't change. I feel like it is better to take both a macro view and a micro view. We work in the neurotech and sleeptech space. From a macro perspective, sleep, and the health impacts have not changed, so we focus on solving that problem. The micro-details is that we now have the technology to serve that need, that is something that does change, and will continue to change.