Weekly Mix #194 - Optionality, Influencers, Big Oil & Effortless

Weekly Mix #194 - Optionality, Influencers, Big Oil & Effortless

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Happy Monday Tuesday!

For whatever reason, optionality seemed to emerge as a theme this week, and it's been a topic I've been thinking about for a while.

This quote is a great entry point:

"I’ve come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of my generation: keeping our options open. The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has a great phrase for what I’m talking about: liquid modernity. We never want to commit to any one identity or place or community ... so we remain like liquid, in a state that can adapt to fit any future shape. And it’s not just us—the world around us remains like liquid, too. We can’t rely on any job or role, idea or cause, group or institution to stick around in the same form for long—and they can’t rely on us to do so, either. That’s liquid modernity: It’s Infinite Browsing Mode, but for everything in our lives."

— Pete Davis in Dedicated (from the Farnam Street newsletter)

Optionality is simple: it's about having options—multiple paths.

Investors literally buy options, often as a hedge against another investment.

We keep options all the time: when we don't stop talking to our ex, when we rent instead of buy, when we keep our day job while trying to build our dream company on the side—any time we fail to truly commit.

There's a delicate balance between options and commitment.

Commitment is "burning the boats"—it gives us no other option, and as a result, we dive in with some desperation and high effort.

We buy a house and start caring about the decor, and the neighbourhood, and that our local amenities survive.

We go all-in on our business, and do whatever it takes to make it profitable and successful.

Spurred by a number of new technologies, optionality is becoming easier and easier to buy.

We can Airbnb an apartment in a different city every month. We can date endlessly using Tinder. And it's never been easier to start a new business, or a new project.

The problem is, too many options means that sometimes you never give something enough attention to see it succeed.

Or you always feel like there's a better option available, so you're never happy with what you have (see the influencer piece below).

I don't have the answers, but balancing optionality and commitment is becoming harder and harder.

What I Worked On

Book Notes: ​Effortless by Greg Mckeown​

Twitter Course: I finally finished my course on how to use and grow your following on Twitter. You can sign up here to get the full email course.

Have a wonderful week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Book Notes: Effortless by Greg Mckeown - I loved Greg's first book, Essentialism, so I was excited for this one. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. You can listen to this podcast and get most of the key principles.

📖 The Anxiety of Influencers - Barrett Swanson, Harper's - "To say that I am flooded with despair in this moment is to describe nothing...Because mostly what I’m thinking about are my students, those bleary-eyed twentysomethings in sweatpants and hoodies who frequently appear in the doorway of my office, sad in a way they cannot explain, desperate for something they don’t know how to have. That the view of personhood produced by the economy of influence is the same brass-tacks thinking that has infiltrated the university might be the single greatest repudiation of the pixelated world that we’re now asking them to inhabit. Whether they’re ordinary undergrads or social-media celebs, they all strike me as unbearably sad, and it’s a sadness that seems more than casually related to the ways in which we’ve defined what it means to be a person."

📖 Why Big Oil should be worried after a day of reckoning - Vox - Exxon, Shell, & Chevron all suffered some kind of "loss" this week. Shell was ordered to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030, Chevron had 60% of shareholders vote to reduce emissions, and a small advocacy firm won 2 board seats.

📖 Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market - Derek Thompson, The Atlantic - The real estate market has been (very) hot for the past year, seemingly for a number of reasons outlined in this article. The main takeaway: if you can, it's probably better to wait and see how things shake out.​

10 Tweets​​

​How Andre Agassi knew where Boris Becker was going to serve (his tongue)​​

​A list of modern paradoxes from David Perell​

​A list of YouTube channels for entrepreneurs from Sahil Patel​

​7 common headline mistakes from Dickie Bush​

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