Your Next Two Zeroes

This intuitively makes sense, but then it raises the question of how anybody scales. I think you've got choices:

1. Hire actual experts at the things you're not expert at. Most successful startups did this. Hilariously we then ascribe to the founders - Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Page/Brin, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Musk - these "genius" characteristics, but in fact they set a vision and get OK at getting other people to do the work at each stage while keeping a sense of shared culture going. Often with a lot of external support and advice. They might then develop the skills themselves through osmosis: fake it until you make it.

2. Become a novice again, as the author of TFA suggests. I think this is harder, but I think it's the route most authors take: start with short stories, learn some craft, figure out how to scale it. I'm not an expert, but I'd guess composers must start with learning composition for an instrument and hone the craft and learn anew as they scale before they take on something for an entire orchestra.

3. You have another choice. Just don't. Find the limits of what you can do and stay within them. The Peter Principle[1] warns against trying to rise above your level of competence. For many people here, figuring out how to build a unicorn is a serious obsession. For many, many more (myself included), figuring out how to build something that provides freedom without the burden of 100x growth beyond what is possible with current skills is more appealing.

I hadn't quite thought about it in terms of two zeroes though. I wonder if in some disciplines the difficulty is one zero, or in others its three or more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

The author concludes with becoming a novice again, and again, that's in a way similar to the idea of `Beginner's Mind`(shoshin) in Zen Buddhism[0]. Alan Watts would talk about this quite a bit.

I think that's a nice way to look at it, or even just, taking a step back and observing. Adding the next zero, or two, and in that, consider whether if it's worth it too.

You can get a decently fit body and be healthy by going to the gym or taking up some kind of sport and doing it weekly, and well you can become exceptionally fit by living by very strict rules. Whether that's worth it to you depends entirely on the person. Same applies for money, knowledge of the crafts, or even personal relationships. I am willing to spend a lot of time in computer science and I am very much interested in being the best person I can be, and honestly I am decently interested in a lot more things, but there's a certain amount of energy in me, certain obligations in life, and a certain balance to be made. I am happier when I believe I have struck the right balance for me.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

Simon Wardley in his stragegy maps is splitting the people working on a product into 3 categories - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-builders - kind-of-continuous-spectrum - as of their desires / attitudes / skills. And a product, in its respective phases from invention to commodity, needs different skills and attitudes. Those very well match with the scaling-to-be-done. And everyone, at certain time, in certain aspect, is one of those.

e.g. i prefer working as Pioneer and maybe Settler, and very little as town planner. Except for certain things, i reach directly into regular-planning-tooling instead of hacking-something-on-a-knee.

[0] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...

Nice.

As often happens with maths, it's funny how a rather arbitrary feature of our body, determines our mathematical understanding of the world so strongly. But I do prefer owning that arbitrariness instead of fighting it.

I had a similar though with respect to money, and it's also funny on that realm that different thresholds become crossable with time. So that even if you get stuck on one (let's say you can't hit 1 million), as long as you persist or remain static, the challenge will expire and you will automatically be placed in the next round.

Also if you decide to go with the linear scaling approach, (say, going from 100k to 1M by doing the same thing more often), each time the duration of each level will increase, until you retire.

Also works for precision (.1x to .0000001x)

Each .1x jump pushes knowledge/resources to logical limits, but a .001x jump disrupts all dimensions of your problem domain.

The wild thing about computers though is you can use the same materials for a 1 meter bridge as for a 10,000 meter bridge; the kind of scaling laws & economics pervasive in physical engineering apply very differently if you plan ahead and make very smart choices.

The Internet gives you global reach for free.

B-trees work for storing for 10 items and for 10 billion items.

Classic headline “whatsapp scaled to 1 billion users with 50 engineers”.

It’s a crazy lever.

I find this thought useful in reminding me how absurd it is that billionaires exist. It isn't just a few more zeros, it's an entirely different game.

Love it. Reminiscent of the book "10x Is Easier Than 2x" by Ben Hardy.

Also, I dig your blog.