Work In A Serendipity Economy
I’ve been reading One Summer by Bill Bryson (h/t Jim O’Shaughnessy) which is a book focused on a single year, 1927. It focuses on radical movements, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, and Charles Lindbergh’s first flight and the beginning of the aviation industry. It’s a fascinating book and I love reading stuff like this because it’s where I often stumble on surprising ideas.
In the book was the story of Edward Robert Armstrong who was trying to solve the problem of planes not being able to easily cross the Atlantic. While Lindbergh was able to cross the Atlantic in one flight, it was a borderline miracle and also took 24+ hours (planes used to be much slower!).
The solution was a bunch of these things, “seadromes,” scattered across the ocean:
He had some strong support at the end of the 1920s but this evaporated when the great depression started:
Unfortunately, that was the week of the stock market crash and his financing fell apart. Armstrong continued for years to try to get his plan launched, reducing the number of proposed platforms to five and then three as planes became more powerful. Eventually, of course, they were not needed at all and his dream was never realized, but his seadromes did form the basis of modern offshore oil platforms. Armstrong died in 1955.
When you look at a modern oil rig you can clearly see the connection:
Right solution, wrong problem, wrong timing!
This is something I think about a lot on my path. How do I figure out what to work on if I cannot figure out what the options are for my work several years from now?
I riffed on this with my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih where he initially got me thinking about this. He gave an example: Duane Reade in NYC. The company thinks like a real estate company instead of a retail store. This is only because the value of the property increased so much that it was worth more to the company than the value it was able to extract from its role as a retailer.
I sense more of modern work is becoming like this. You aren’t working on a manufacturing line where you can see the output of your effort. Instead you are working on something that doesn’t quite feel that important but may have unexpected value in the future. Except you can’t quite predict when and how that will take place!
A lot of work that went up in flames during the dot com bust led directly to tech successes in the 2010s and very few people predicted it.
This can be maddening and freeing. Within a company, it might drive you crazy to work on something like the metaverse only to see the company lay off half your team a couple years into it. But maybe eye tracking helps surgeons in 2028? Who knows.
Good for the economy but bad for the soul of someone trying to build a coherent career and work narrative.
My take is that this means we should be default skeptical of any path with a clear payoff. If the payoff or rewards are clear it suggests that most of the personal serendipity and potential satisfaction of the role have been eliminated.
In this kind of “serendipity economy” we will need to loosen our grip on the scripts we grew up with that tell us what to do. But we also must learn to trust ourselves. To have intuition about the things we can only do and then to commit to them no matter the lack of evidence about the payoffs in the short term.
For example, there was no obvious resonance with my writing on work for years. People laughed at me and made fun of me. Some people still make fun of me. That’s fine. But at my core I know there are things I can commit to and keep doing like writing.
Where will the writing take me?
I have no idea but I’m excited to find out.
Calvin Coolidge Quits
I cracked up learning a bit more about Calvin Coolidge:
By 1927, Coolidge worked no more than about four and a half hours a day—“a far lighter schedule than most other presidents, indeed most other people, have followed,” as the political scientist Robert E. Gilbert once observed—and napped much of the rest of the time. “No other President in my time,” recalled the White House usher, “ever slept so much.” When not napping, he often sat with his feet in an open desk drawer (a lifelong habit) and counted cars passing on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Reading a bit more it seems like he never really wanted to be President or at least got tired of it. Here is what Coolidge said in his memoir, deciding against running in 1928:
“The Presidential office takes a heavy toll of those who occupy it and those who are dear to them. While we should not refuse to spend and be spent in the service of our country, it is hazardous to attempt what we feel is beyond our strength to accomplish.”
The book is chock full of other random interesting ideas and quotes and makes me want to go down a Bryson rabbit hole.