Learning through gamma radiation

“I’m optimizing for learning.” A lot of young ambitious people say this, and quite a few of them mean it. But that doesn’t make your next steps obvious.

If you’re looking to learn quickly but aren’t opinionated yet on what you want to work on, two things are generally good to optimise for.

1. Quality people
2. Growth

Quality of people can be broken down into two dimensions:

1. You are thoughtful about why you do what you do.
2. You bias towards action.

These people usually enact change. This is probably because there are a lot of issues in the world and they want to nudge the future into a path they prefer. Although my guess is even in a world without serious problems, these people would still be drawn to enacting change. Regardless, they are stifled by places that don’t let them make change.

As a result, they usually end up in places that encourage change, or create those places for themselves. This can be within art, research, sports, finance, or business.

Since I’m in the Bay, I’ve been exposed mostly to the subset of the people trying to enact change through software.

For this subset of people, growth comes when that change hits a nerve with a group of people and solves something they’ve really wanted solved at a price they’re happy to pay. If you find repeatable patterns, things move very quickly. The concise but somewhat confusing term for this is PMF.

Growth is painful. It’s messy. There are a hundred problems to figure out, and a surprisingly high proportion of those problems are people problems, not tech problems.

You are usually playing a game of synthesis. Which cases of precedent can I synthesize to come up with a solution to my specific problem? Great artists steal, and similar to art, this synthesis requires and builds creativity. But due to the pace of challenges thrown at you, this process can be painful. This pain is like gamma radiation. For most people, it’s not healthy, but for a few mutants, they can absorb it and turn into superheroes. ^[1]

To make sure this gamma radiation is given to you in the right doses, you need the right people around you. People who push you by leading through example, absorbing more radiation than you are. But also people who support you through the pain to increase the chances you show up for another day. This support requires a level of shared vulnerability and mutual trust, which is hard to find.

Sometimes, you can find these people organically and build upon each other’s shower thoughts to find and iterate upon direction. If you’re the right people, you can survive the radiation long enough to start reaping the rewards of PMF (see the PMF game).

Then you start translating personal growth into economic growth.

Sometimes you find an existing pool of people who can help dose you with and support you through the gamma radiation. Jump in. It’s hard to find these people, but follow your gut and have a high bar and it happens.

Great companies create a lineage of other great companies, because that pool of changemakers survived the gamma radiation to go off on their own and form other pools of changemakers.

So where are those companies today? I’m compiling a subjective list right now, will post soon.

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[1] Inspired by Shyam Sankar's thoughts on this.