0:00
This LNO effectiveness framework, which is, effectively there are three types of tasks that you could do.
Search this video
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L tasks are leverage tasks, N tasks are neutral tasks and O tasks are overhead tasks.
0:13
So with L tasks, you put in X and you get 10 X or a 100 X back in terms of whatever the goal or metric is.
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Neutral tasks, you basically, they're break even, you get one or 1. 1 X back.
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And overhead tasks are ones where you get less than what you put in back, in terms of the return.
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Now it turns out that for any individual, at any level you have to do tasks across the board.
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You can't just completely avoid O tasks.
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Sometimes you have to do them.
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But what I realized is that I was attacking each task with the same degree of attention, perfection and without discriminating between tasks in terms of when my energy is high versus when it's low.
0:55
And so a simple tactic I used when I used to maintain a to-do list, I still do, a simple tactic I used to put this insight into action, is that every task that I had on my to-do list, I would just prefix it with the letter L, N or O, depending on my analysis of what kind of task it was.
1:14
And so just that simple gap between deciding to do a task and just forcing myself to think, "Wait, what kind of task is it?
1:25
Oh, it's an L task or, oh, it's an N task."
1:25
Really made a difference in terms of how I attacked that task during the day.
1:32
And also when I attacked it and the degree of perfection I pursued for it Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
1:44
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
1:49
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
1:56
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
2:14
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2:26
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
2:34
With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
2:46
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
2:56
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
3:02
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3:12
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3:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
3:19
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another edition of Infinite Loops.
3:19
Today's guest Shreyas Doshi is one of the coolest guys I've ever come across.
3:27
I'll tell the origin story of how we got to know each other a little bit later.
3:36
But as I went to kind of look at him and what he's achieved, this guy is one of the, what the tech guys say are the elite programmer, the elite designer, he's up there.
3:49
And he is worked with companies such as, I don't know if you've ever heard of any of these?
3:55
But I had never heard of them, but Stripe, Twitter, Google.
3:55
It sounds like kind of the B team there, Shreyas, just kidding.
4:02
We have so much to cover, so welcome.
4:09
Shreyas Doshi: Thank you, Jim.
4:11
It's an honor to be talking to you here.
4:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I want to start out, I mentioned origin story.
4:14
I think it would be helpful for our listeners and viewers, if you just give kind of a brief overview of the trajectory of the journey of your career.
4:30
And I also know that there's a really interesting point that I want you to hit as well and how it contrasted with what younger you saw as what you really, really wanted to do.
4:42
I think that's helpful for a lot of our listeners, who tend to be young. So please. Shreyas Doshi: Yeah.
4:46
So growing up, I grew up in India, in Bombay, Mumbai, and I grew up in a family of businessmen.
4:50
Every male in my family, for many generations, had started their own business.
4:59
And usually from scratch because they had ups and downs.
5:06
So they did not have really the ability to get a whole lot of capital, necessarily from their father or grandfather.
5:11
And so I just grew up in an environment where the assumption was that, yeah, you're going to start a business, you're going to start your own company.
5:26
And so that's what I thought I would do eventually.
5:26
In terms of the chosen field, for a while I thought I was going to be a French professor and do something with French.
5:38
I don't know what, but I ended up being good at mathematics and science and whatnot.
5:38
And again, in India, at least during that time, if you were good at mathematics, you did engineering.
5:49
So I picked computer engineering, I loved computers and enjoyed programming.
5:55
So that was a natural choice for me.
5:55
And then at some point of time, after I finished college, I moved here to the United States.
6:02
So for PhD in computer science and then rapidly realized that academia and research wasn't for me.
6:09
And so, one month into my PhD program, I decided to actually just drop out.
6:17
And I sort of exited college with a master's, grad school with masters.
6:25
And I couldn't wait to work in the industry.
6:25
So since then I have worked at various technology companies.
6:32
I started my career as an engineer at some startups and larger companies.
6:32
And at some point I decided I wanted to get into this thing called product management.
6:38
And so, around 2006, I got my first product management role at Yahoo.
6:44
If folks remember, back in 2006, Yahoo was still in its better days.
6:52
It's not the Yahoo of today.
6:52
Google and Yahoo were kind of neck and neck.
6:52
And I was very excited to work on consumer internet products.
6:57
And so, thank you Yahoo for giving me my break and letting me into this amazing, wonderful field of product management.
7:06
And then since then worked at Google and Twitter and most recently at Stripe.
7:06
And over the last year, so I left Stripe last year, and over the past year, I have basically been spending most of my time advising startups, founders.
7:17
So, I have kind of informally advised more than a 100 founders, usually growth stage companies.
7:23
I'm a formal advisor for about a dozen companies.
7:29
So, and that's been a ton of fun as well.
7:29
Now, going back to what you asked earlier, Jim, the younger me and how things worked out.
7:33
During my sort of years at Yahoo and Google also, I was kind of obsessed with eventually starting my own company.
7:41
I had some visa issues or whatever, so I needed to wait for those to be resolved.
7:45
But when those were resolved, one thing I actually realized is, one, I was now much older. I was 35.
7:49
And so I was just thinking about it a little more holistically, life wise than just like, oh yeah, of course, the only purpose in life is to start my own business, which was me in the twenties and certainly in my teens.
8:06
So that sense of purpose grew much broader.
8:06
But the other thing I realized is that part of what I'm seeking, a large part actually, of what I'm seeking, I was already getting, which is that mindset of starting my own business.
8:19
And like, that's why I've been put on this earth, forced me or compelled me really, to just think like an owner at every company.
8:28
Every company I mentioned, I just thought like an owner.
8:33
And it sounds ridiculous but even at Google, I thought and operated as though I owned Google.
8:39
And I wasn't an employee of Google, I just owned Google.
8:46
And kind of again, I can take no credit for that myself.
8:46
It's not like I decided one day I'm going to do that.
8:53
It's just how I was wired.
8:53
And so I got a lot of satisfaction from that, which then, again, in my mid 30s and late 30s, I was like, "You know what" It's okay if I don't start my own company, if I don't start my own startup."
9:05
Raise a bunch of funding, et cetera, all the things that I thought I wanted to do.
9:10
Because I am getting to think like an owner, I'm operating like an owner, I'm working on early stage products usually, with great teams.
9:15
And what more can a person ask for? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow.
9:22
So as somebody who has started, now four companies, you must realize how rare that mentality is.
9:34
If I could employ only people who thought like owners, it's literally night and day and we're going to get into this further with some of your great threads on Twitter.
9:42
But this idea that I always see as, if you can learn how to retain maximum agency, you can put a bunch of different names on it.
9:59
But if you can retain maximum agency, you're going to get so much further, no matter what your vocation or avocation is, right.
10:06
It's such a critical part of not just succeeding, let's call it, financially, but succeeding in life, succeeding with your family, succeeding with your friends.
10:22
I know that you and I have talked about, the care that you put in to your son, who we were just talking about, which is really great.
10:29
And those things aren't hacks, there are no hacks in understanding that it really does come down to having the ability to self-assess, which is something almost none of us can do accurately, but then kind of learning, like you did.
10:51
Like, "Huh, I've got all of these things that kind of make me happy.
10:58
Maybe I can just let go of that."
10:58
That's evolution and I applaud it.
11:04
I want to talk specifically about your technique, the LNO effectiveness framework.
11:04
As you go through it, you're like, "Number one, brute force works early, but then really stops working."
11:20
And, you can, if you're a brute force thinker, you're going to start out of the gates really, probably really well, but you're not going to, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint.
11:34
And at some point in that marathon, your brute force isn't going to work.
11:34
The second thing you've said that I really enjoy because I am always the exception to all of these things, I don't know what you would make of me, but that is your calendar speaks more truth than a to-do list.
11:53
So I don't maintain my own calendar, first off.
11:53
I don't make to-do lists.
11:53
So you're going to educate me about both, I hope.
12:00
And then this other one, which I've seen so many times, tasks are not created equally.
12:07
And it amazes me in the various companies that I've started or worked for that were not my company, how that sort of thing gets lost very easily.
12:23
So if you would, for the benefit of our listeners, just take me through this because I went through it, it seems like an incredibly straightforward and amazingly helpful method of being very, very productive.
12:35
Shreyas Doshi: Well, Jim. Yeah.
12:39
So, at some point in our careers, what we find, no matter what we're doing, what we find is that we can no longer just mess with time because as the cliche goes, time is finite and everybody has the same time, right?
12:57
So at work you can roughly do three things with your time, even in life.
13:03
You can, number one, elongate it.
13:03
And what that means is you work more hours.
13:11
Second is, you save it and what that translates to is you work efficiently.
13:11
So you use tools and productivity hacks to become more efficient.
13:17
And the third is, you leverage it, which is you work on stuff that matters most.
13:24
And, so one of my observations, especially after I became a parent, is that having kids is great because you just rapidly hit the limits of the first two, right?
13:41
You rapidly hit the limits of elongating time because you cannot work more hours possibly.
13:47
You have a human being to look after and you've already tried all the time management hacks for being more efficient.
13:54
So you can no longer save time. Right?
13:54
So the only choice you're left with is leveraging it, which is working on stuff that truly matters. Right?
14:01
And so out of desperation, becoming a parent forces you to get really good at the third one, which is leveraging it.
14:15
And as I was kind of starting out in my product management career early years, this was at Google.
14:24
I had, my son was born three weeks into my tenure at Google.
14:24
So I joined the company and then I was like, "Okay, bye, bye everybody.
14:31
I'm going to go on a couple of weeks paternity leave."
14:36
And, so it was the first year of my child's life.
14:36
First year as a parent, for me.
14:36
And first year at this very high performing company where, frankly in the early days, I just felt like I was out of place.
14:48
Everybody was just more intelligent than me.
14:48
They just knew more than me, et cetera, et cetera.
14:54
And yet here I was, an extremely ambitious person who wanted to do really great work, very conscientious.
15:01
And so I had an extremely stressful couple of years during my time at Google because I was constantly feeling behind and I was working very hard, but I just did not feel like I was accomplishing enough, either at work or at home.
15:20
Now, of course it turns out, during those years I was constantly getting promoted like much quicker than most of my peers.
15:25
And yet, that external signal somehow did not really make any difference to my own score of how I should be doing and how I was falling short of the expectations that I had of myself.
15:37
So every day I would come back home and I'd chat with my wife and I'd just tell her about how stressed I was.
15:47
And incredibly stressful, was sleep issues, various other issues.
15:47
And the LNO framework, which I read about the ideas behind it in some blog post, which I can't actually, unfortunately can no longer find, but it kind of form the basis.
16:00
The ideas in there formed the basis of this LNO effectiveness framework, which is, effectively there are three types of tasks that you could do.
16:11
L tasks are leverage tasks, N tasks are neutral tasks and O tasks are overhead tasks.
16:19
So with L tasks, you put in X and you get 10 X or a 100 X back in terms of whatever the goal or metric is.
16:24
Neutral tasks, you basically, they're break even, you get one or 1. 1 X back.
16:30
And overhead tasks are ones where you get less than what you put in back, in terms of the return.
16:36
Now it turns out that for any individual, at any level you have to do tasks across the board.
16:43
You can't just completely avoid O tasks.
16:43
Sometimes you have to do them.
16:48
But what I realized is that I was attacking each task with the same degree of attention, perfection and without discriminating between tasks in terms of when my energy is high versus when it's low.
17:01
And so a simple tactic I used when I used to maintain a to-do list, I still do, a simple tactic I used to put this insight into action, is that every task that I had on my to-do list, I would just prefix it with the letter L, N or O, depending on my analysis of what kind of task it was.
17:20
And so just that simple gap between deciding to do a task and just forcing myself to think, "Wait, what kind of task is it?
17:26
Oh, it's an L task or, oh, it's an N task."
17:33
Really made a difference in terms of how I attacked that task during the day.
17:39
And also when I attacked it and the degree of perfection I pursued for it.
17:39
And again, I was, the strong, inner perfectionist who resisted doing a less than perfect job on something.
17:52
But rapidly as I kind of started putting this framework in place, I was able to get myself to be less of a perfectionist with N tasks and O tasks and therefore save time.
17:59
One thing I say is, for people like me, you should try to actively do a bad job on N tasks and certainly O tasks.
18:16
Because you're actively trying to do a bad job will actually be a pretty decent job, anyway.
18:23
So, by doing that, what you end up doing is, you end up focusing yourself on what really matters and you end up creating more time for that.
18:29
So the point here is not just work fewer hours.
18:35
It's the point here is, as you understand what the N tasks and O tasks are, and as you attack them with the kind of quality that they require, and they warrant, you end up saving a lot of time.
18:47
And that time you are now free to apply to doing an even better job on the L tasks.
18:54
And of course, this wasn't an overnight thing, but as I put this in place over a year or two, that was life changing for me.
19:00
Because the stress was gone because at the end of the day, I could keep a scorecard of like, did I get my L task done? I was still ambitious.
19:05
So I had a lot more things to do than I had time for.
19:10
But the satisfaction of having checked all my L tasks was just freed me to go home and not have to stress out about the job I did and the job that's ahead tomorrow.
19:18
And just help me to also be just much more present in the evening with my family and whatnot.
19:30
So those are some ideas around the LNO framework that, as I put in practice, it drastically changed the way I approached my work and really ended up increasing my effectiveness. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
19:40
I think that one of the things that I admire about that is, any thinking that you can bring to a task or a problem you're facing, that can clarify sort of automatically is useful, or at least I have found.
19:52
Because what happens in your case, you're devoting all of your energy to the leverage tasks.
20:02
Sometimes we don't even think about these things.
20:09
So, number one, I applaud the fact that you did give it some thought, but you had, another thing that I've just flipped to, I was going to talk about it later, but this seems like a good time to talk about it.
20:20
There's a big difference between being smart and wise.
20:26
And there is a, almost in human OS, our base programming says, default to authority, if it's consistency without questioning it, that's always been done that way, et cetera, all the bromides.
20:43
And, you did a really great piece on it, talking about how you need to be the antithesis of yourself when dealing with yourself, but that you need to also understand that isn't the way the world perceives things.
20:57
And I kind of smile because in it, you were talking about charismatic people have undue influence and you're absolutely right.
21:03
And it's not an obvious thing to try to disambiguate how much of the charisma is actually getting the focus put here how much is the vision or the idea.
21:20
So talk a bit about that, if you will, because I think it's also just such a refreshing, at least to me, way of understanding that, A, I've got to understand how the world works, as you delineate in your presentation of it.
21:34
But I've got to figure out a way the antithesis of not getting blown away by these charismatic people.
21:49
Please elaborate my poor execution of it.
21:49
Shreyas Doshi: The antithesis principle, once I understood the idea behind it, through just introspection, it really changed my approach to a lot of things, particularly leadership.
22:04
And I think it is best explained via an example.
22:10
So let's take an example.
22:10
So I think everybody's heard of this statement that, I don't know if it's true, but people say that people will form an impression of you within the first seven seconds of meeting you.
22:24
And so, again, I don't know whether or not that's true, but for the sake of discussion, let's assume that within the first seven seconds of meeting you, people form a solid impression of who you are.
22:43
Let's assume that's true now.
22:43
What are we to take away from this?
22:43
One of my observations is that, when we encounter a statement or a hypothesis, the foolish one will likely learn nothing from it, the smart one will learn one thing from it, and the wise one will actually learn two things.
23:09
Let's put it in practice here.
23:09
Foolish one will likely not really change anything or address anything when they hear about this, about the first seven seconds.
23:19
If you're smart, then you will say, "Okay, in order to be effective, I should consciously try to create a good first impression on other people."
23:27
That's the obvious conclusion, I'm smart, so I'm going to try to create a good first impression on other people.
23:34
But that's where most people stop.
23:44
It's interesting to observe that actually, there is one more conclusion we need to make from this, which is we should not be a person who forms a fixed impression of somebody based on the first seven seconds.
24:00
That's the non-obvious conclusion.
24:00
That's what the wise one will also conclude and absorb.
24:10
There is this kind of antithesis here, there is this kind of polarity here, around what do you need to do in order to succeed out there in the world.
24:16
Sometimes you have to accept certain truths about the world, about the way the world operates, the world is not perfect and people have biases.
24:29
At times, in order to be effective in the world, you need to recognize those biases.
24:35
Another example I'll use here is, I think a lot of us have seen or heard, that if you want to help people learn something, people learn something much better if it's entertaining and engaging, right?
24:49
Again, let's assume that's true.
24:49
Then again, the smart one will take away one thing, which is, if you want to help people learn something, look into making it engaging and entertaining.
25:02
If I want to teach something, if I want to help people learn, better make it entertaining, engaging, because that's going to increase odds of effectiveness.
25:13
But again, there is that second thing we need to learn from this, which we should apply to ourselves, which is somewhat the antithesis of the first thing.
25:24
Which is, it is actually not in your best interest to be the kind of person who can only learn from entertaining content, right?
25:31
Nor should you be the kind of person that needs any sort of entertainment as a prerequisite for learning.
25:36
Because if you can absorb that and implement that, then you will be way ahead of 95% of the people, because you'll just end up learning more.
25:51
You'll end up learning from these amazing books that nobody's read because they don't have a great title, or they were not written by a very famous person, as just one example.
26:03
I find this antithesis principle keeps coming up in all sorts of scenarios.
26:03
One last example I'll use is, it is well known and you'll read on Twitter all the time that, to set the foundation for a good career, you should seek a great manager.
26:15
A great manager is really important for you to make a great career, so in your next job you should always seek a great manager. Well, yes.
26:29
So from that, the two conclusions I draw, if I stay true to antithesis principle is that, if you are a manager, you should try to be a really great manager, because then others will want to work for you.
26:45
Great people will want to work for great managers, so you should try to do that.
26:50
But if you are looking for a role, and especially once you've reached a certain level and a certain level of proficiency in your craft, in your profession, you should actually not make having a great manager one of your top criteria.
27:02
Now, Jim, if I wrote this on Twitter, people would just completely destroy this tweet.
27:09
It's like, "What do you mean? No.
27:09
Great manager is so important, et cetera, et cetera."
27:16
But people miss that actually life is about trade offs.
27:23
When you reach a certain level in your career, a certain level of proficiency in your craft, a great manager actually should not be among the top five criteria for why you take a role.
27:28
Now, the other thing Jim is most people are binary thinkers.
27:34
When I say you should not necessarily seek a great manager as the main criterion for the next role you take, they automatically, they don't hear that.
27:47
What they hear is that terrible managers are okay to work for, that's what Shreyas is saying.
27:51
But I'm not saying that, because there is an infinite set of points between a great manager and a terrible manager.
28:02
What I am saying is explore that unexplored infinite space, instead of just fixating on finding a great manager for yourself, because odds are that maybe you end up then working for a company that doesn't grow as well for whatever reason.
28:12
Instead, look for culture, look for company growth.
28:18
In some cases, when you find those things, you may have to sacrifice on the manager stuff, and that's okay.
28:23
Anyway, those are just a few examples of where...
28:30
The way I describe the antithesis principle overall, effectively what I say is, you need to understand a certain thing about the world, apply it so you can be effective, but you may need to adopt the antithesis of that to yourself, so you can be a wiser, kinder, happier, more effective person to yourself.
28:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: A absolute agreement for me.
28:54
You hit on so many of my favorite points, that I guess we could spend the rest of the podcast just talking about this.
29:00
I was very interested in the pacing that you gave it, because I felt like I was reading a verse from the [Tao Te Ching].
29:08
The stupid person will laugh at this, the smart person will get this, and then the wise person gets this.
29:14
We'll get to the Tao Te Ching a little later, because I think that we share a great love for that body of knowledge.
29:26
I started reading it when I was 18 and finally started figuring out what it was saying to me about 30 years later, so it is sort of an endless fascination with me and with.
29:42
What I like about you Shreyas, is that you are very good at taking that extra step.
29:51
By that I mean, to realize, "Now if I put this on a Twitter thread, people are going to go nuts."
29:59
Because for the most part, unfortunately, people are label thinkers.
29:59
They default to the, whatever your base programming is.
30:05
I have tried to contribute with things like the thinker and the prover and a whole variety of trying to get people to understand that we live in a probabilistic world and it's neither yes or no.
30:18
I always joke that between a yes and a no, there's always a huge maybe.
30:24
I think that having that default as your worldview can be very helpful to you.
30:34
But you had another thing which I particularly like, because you hit on some of my little hobby horses that I want to take a flame thrower to.
30:41
That are these, you call them the Apple Pie lesson.
30:48
Briefly, if I'm interpreting you correctly, it's like these positions are staked out like motherhood apple pie, and you just never ever question them because it's a planted Axiom in the world of logic.
31:06
But I like yours better, because I think people get that, [inaudible] that better.
31:11
Go through a couple of the apple pies, where I believe, and I think you believe, you should put up a huge stink, you should put up a huge fuss because it's like the not invented hear syndrome, right?
31:26
People aren't aware of how persuasive, or pervasive rather, that attitude can actually have on an entire organization.
31:33
I love the apple pie, you don't have to go through all of them.
31:41
I'll tell you if you don't hit the one that I would love to see a flame torch taken too, I will bring it up, but maybe talk a little bit about that. Shreyas Doshi: Yeah.
31:51
Jim, I want to mention Rory Sutherland, and both of us are huge fans of Rory's thinking and his work.
32:01
I think one of the things I recollect him saying was that, oftentimes an individual ends up making way better decisions than a group does for the same decision.
32:08
I think Rory's point there was that, as an individual we are making a decision, we are using instinct, we're using various experience, various inputs, but we don't necessarily have to then reframe it in terms of completely rational viewpoints.
32:31
Whereas in a group setting, there is immense pressure to boil everything down to the rational logic.
32:40
If it cannot be bulletproof, then it is not a decision that we want to make, so therefore groups end up making, at times, much worse decisions.
32:58
At the root of this in organizations, I'm a huge student of just organizational behavior, so I've often noticed that very capable companies and extremely capable teams, these apple pie positions come up.
33:12
Which are positions where the personal risk for an individual of pushing back on what is said is so high, that in a meeting everybody nods, yes, even though it may not actually be the right answer for the team or the company or your customer.
33:33
Let's take some examples.
33:33
Before I take the example, I'll make the observation that when an organization gets sufficiently large, one of the chief implicit goals of nearly every participant or employee in the organization is to sound smart in meetings.
33:56
The way that starts manifesting is Jim, imagine you and I are having a conversation about a difficult, a very intricate problem related to a customer or a business problem.
34:08
Obviously each of us has a model, we build a model in our head of what the world is, what the reality is, what the truth is, then based on that model, we advise solutions to address the problem.
34:19
Then you have a different model than me and we use our models to come up with different solutions perhaps.
34:26
Then we discuss the solutions and we converge or arrive at what seems like a compelling solution.
34:31
Now that's a conversation between you and I.
34:37
Now let's add a third person in to the mix, and let's say there were 10 other people listening, including some really important people at the company.
34:44
This third person, if this third person wanted to sound very smart, they can ask a very simple question, which is, do you have any data to support that? That's it.
34:58
Now, all of a sudden by asking that question and stating those few words, this third person has elevated themselves in the eyes of the group.
35:16
And all of this happens under the surface, we are not even aware that this is going on.
35:19
In fact, you and I will feel a little stupid that we don't have a bulletproof answer readily available for this question.
35:35
So it affects everybody, everybody concerned.
35:35
That is an apple pie position.
35:40
The reason it's an apple pie position is, I'm not saying data is bad, but I'm saying that oftentimes these questions that are essentially aimed as making us look smart and seem smart, are unnecessary.
35:53
In fact, if we address them, we might actually be harming the mission, then helping it.
35:59
Because the fact I, you cannot produce data for every single thing. That's specific to this.
36:07
Few other apple pie positions is, we need to define the success metrics for whatever is being discussed.
36:13
Again, you and I are having a discussion, we agree on something, then if a third person wants to sound smart, they can just come in with, "So what are your success metrics for this?"
36:21
Another one is, oftentimes people use executives as the shield, which is I don't want to...
36:32
I'm not in agreement with what you're saying, I don't want to express that agreement very directly, so what I will say is something like, "Oh, well all that is well, but we need executive buy-in before we can execute on this."
36:46
All of a sudden, a decision that was going to get made at this level amongst us peers, what I did is, I just said we need more executive buy-in.
36:58
Again, it's very hard to push back, because you don't want to be the person that says, "No, we don't need our CEO's buy-in," because you are thinking, what if the CEO hears about that?
37:08
Now you're organizing a stupid meeting, which maybe you didn't need with the CEO, and wasting the CEO's time.
37:15
It keeps going on and on, we have too many meetings.
37:22
I've seen this at many fast growing organizations, we say we have too many meetings.
37:27
Then when we remove some of the meetings, then people say, "Well, we need to sync more often, because we feel like we're out of sync."
37:31
So you go into this endless cycle of more meetings and then cutting the meetings and then starting them again.
37:36
Those are just some examples of apple pie positions.
37:42
Like I said, the personal cost of pushing back is so high, that almost nobody does it.
37:48
The only solution that really exists here, and I've actually implemented this on a couple of teams that I managed since I stumbled upon this observation is, you add this to your team shared vocabulary.
38:06
You make it okay to respond to somebody when they say, "We need more metrics before we can make a decision here."
38:13
As, "Well, that sounds to me like an apple pie position."
38:19
Because the moment it's sanctioned part of your shared vocabulary, it all of a sudden reduces that embarrassment, and reduces the fear of pushing back on an apple pie position.
38:33
Then we can discuss, is it really an apple pie position?
38:40
Because I didn't say it is an apple pie position, I said it sounds to me like an apple pie position, so perhaps we can talk about it.
38:45
Perhaps we don't need metrics here, because it is not such a substantial decision and trying to collect metrics for something that is just inherently hard is just going to create more onerous process and basically more work for us.
38:55
That's really the most effective technique I've found, where a leader can get through to the organization how to avoid some of the [inaudible] here.
39:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What I love about this is, you have effectively reframed what is happening everywhere, every organization, and given permission with acute name, the apple pie name, which I think is great.
39:29
You've reframed it, such that now it's okay.
39:29
You've given that permission explicitly, and it's so important.
39:37
For example, my son and I are very similar in certain regards, we're very different in other regards.
39:44
One of the areas where we're very similar is, we would nuke every meeting that we can replace with a text or a zoom or a phone call.
39:50
One of the things that I have observed in my anthropological mode of human OS is that, you mentioned it, when a company gets too big, what happens if the person who's ultimately in charge doesn't notice it and prevent it, is the executives of that company end up being in competition with each other and not with, "Let's make a better product for our clients.
40:22
Let's give them a better answer for a consultant.
40:29
Let's do better in terms of the asset management," and it just works for every category.
40:35
Then finally, Patrick, again, my son, this week had Ken Stanley on, who makes an impassioned case for the problem...
40:44
There's a reason why everyone knows or most people know the old saw about a camel being a horse designed by committee.
40:52
What he points out is, it actually gets more dangerous.
40:52
It gets more dangerous, because if we're looking at most of...
41:02
Let's keep it on science or medicine.
41:08
If we're looking for funding for our project, our experiment, our thesis, what we have now is essentially a board of worthy's who are highly credentialed, most of whom happen to have very, very specific points of view about what is good science and what is bad science and they probably tend to overlap somewhat.
41:30
You as the researcher try to come up with a radical or different or out there idea are seeking funding, we've got a mismatch here.
41:38
Because it conversions to the group, the committee, as opposed diverging.
41:47
Which is, if you really want to find really interesting stuff, you've got to be willing to go much further out on the tails, in my opinion. That's risky.
42:01
It's risky for all of the reasons that you cite the apple pie. I love it.
42:01
It's one of the oldest argument forms, planted axioms.
42:08
If all men are blue and Socrates is a man, Socrates is blue. Well, okay.
42:17
If we accept the axiom that all men are blue, then logically that follows, right?
42:25
But all men are not blue.
42:25
You see this time and time and time again, not only in business, not only in presentations from people who want funding, you see that planted axiom and then you say, What about this?"
42:42
And I've often just seen people fold, because they had so thought that was right.
42:49
Another thing I learned in my many years in this business is, anyone I'm asking questions from, if they have an answer to every single one of my questions, something's wrong and I will not invest in them. I really mean that.
43:02
Shreyas Doshi: That resonates so much, because I've made this observation in the past about certainty theater.
43:18
Because a lot of what's going on around us, and this is not just in the business world, this is so common in news and current events, where we are basically engaging in certainty theater.
43:29
Everybody is certain about everything.
43:36
In business for instance, if I am at a high stakes meeting, making a high stakes proposal, my competence in most organizations, the vast majority of organizations, is measured by the degree of certainty I express for everything that I'm proposing.
43:58
But the fact is, there are so many things that we just don't know.
43:58
It gets back to your point about, if you ask somebody a set of questions and they have a well packaged answer for everything, you've got a question what's going on there really? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
44:18
This idea, and I love that wording too, the certainty theater.
44:18
I was very, very fortunate to learn that at a relatively young age.
44:25
Because I was horrible, I was a real proselytizer.
44:25
"This is the only way, this is why it's great, this is why it's going to be the best thing you ever did," and then I found myself in one of those kind of confrontational situations where the guy was really nailing me with a bunch of questions.
44:46
They were good questions by the way.
44:53
He finally got to one and I did something that I had never done before, I guess I was 38 maybe when I did this, I looked at him and I said, "I don't know, but I will find out."
45:12
When I was driving away from the meeting, I had this tremendous sense of this huge burden coming off of me.
45:19
Then I really got into it because, I don't know, is sometimes the most powerful thing you can say in my opinion.
45:26
Because I don't have opinions on most things, and Twitter, we're going to get into some of your cleverness there in a minute, but it's like, "I don't know. I don't know.
45:38
I can find out or I think I can find out."
45:38
I love this idea of certainty theater.
45:46
I'm having Will Storr on, the poor guy.
45:46
I've now read all of his back lists, because I read his one's Scientific Storytelling, then I read his, The Status Game.
45:58
Here is a man who has done deep dives on this stuff and the interviews and everything, we are basically...
46:07
Well, let's put it nicely, we are domesticated primates.
46:15
Essentially, we have programming in us that we spent a long amount of time in a tribe, and it's been only a recent phenomenon where we haven't done that.
46:24
So those tribal instincts, certainty theater.
46:31
Because people believe, "If I don't come off as certain, I'm going to come off as wishy washy, or I'm going to come off as not committed."
46:36
You see it most in politics, which is an area where I won't even look, because they've all descended in this emotional mind virus to their various camps.
46:51
And all they're doing is they're non-player characters.
46:51
They're just repeating the slogans that AB tested the best.
46:56
And I say this for both sides, by the way.
46:56
But you see it in business, you see it in when you're getting pitched on an idea and the ...
47:04
listen, I know just from my own life, there's a lot that's uncertain.
47:13
There's a lot that you have to try to control for the variables, but there are some things that you've got to learn as they happen.
47:28
And I often say, and then I want to have you continue with this, because it's a great topic, but social media, I personally, I hold two opposing beliefs on it.
47:40
The belief number one is that it's going to create the world's first 24 hour global intelligence network, the likes of which we have never seen because it isn't so much how smart my brain is or your brain is.
47:52
It is the networked effect of all those brains that I find very, very intriguing and I think becomes a massive variance amplifier.
47:59
And we're doing a series on the whole thing and I'm developing companies that are based on these principles. So it's a big deal.
48:12
And yet I also believe that social media unproperly curated, it can be just a cesspool.
48:18
And the unfortunate part of it is, it becomes a cesspool for the people who haven't gone through the ... like you iterate.
48:26
They haven't thought, "Oh, well this ... maybe this is wrong.
48:31
Maybe I shouldn't have an opinion on this."
48:31
And because we're appealing to the emotional part.
48:38
And my day job is all arbitraging human behavior and human behavior is at its fundamental core, emotional.
48:46
Most explanations are given post hoc and they are given with a veneer of rationality.
48:54
And so yes, social media can be a horrible, horrible place, but I keep doing it because I think directionally, this is going to be really amazing, a worldwide intelligence network.
49:01
Plus it's everyone who works for Infinite Loops, I've only met one of them in real life.
49:13
And it was all proof of work.
49:13
I didn't care where they went to school.
49:18
I didn't care where they lived.
49:18
I didn't care what color they were, or sex, or what their sexual preferences were.
49:22
We make all of these things their litmus.
49:22
"I have an opinion on that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
49:29
And you're excluding what are you looking for? Do you want talent?
49:34
Or do you want someone who looks just like you?
49:39
So reality theater is, I'm stealing that directly from you and you're going to hear me saying that a lot, because it is such a great phrase for what's going on.
49:45
The news, it's a Potemkin village.
49:45
Have you ever seen the gif where the reporter is rowing along in the rowboat and the guys walk behind her and the water isn't even up to their needs. Shreyas Doshi: Right.
50:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And history people will know that Potemkin ran around in the USSR building all these village fronts, so that all the duke reporters that from the west would, when they sped by in their motorcade would say, "Wow, look at that. That's great."
50:20
So reality theater, TSA, reality theater.
50:31
As one who I am amazingly thankful for the fact that I I'm not running this podcast for anything but here are some ideas, these are great ideas.
50:39
Take the ones that you think you can run with. Reject the other ones. That's fine.
50:45
I'm not trying to sell you anything.
50:48
And what I love about you is you're not trying to sell anybody anything either, with the exception of you're saying you really might want to look over here, because it seems to me, this gets me to the another thing that I wanted to talk with you about.
51:07
And this is more under the life lessons, but I was really struck by this.
51:12
And you said, "When you're starting out, things like high return on investment are kind of great.
51:21
Have a talent stack, have high agency, have clear thinking, do deep work.
51:21
Do all of that stuff, but you are, if you're successful, you're going to get to a point in your career where you don't want to judge by just the return on investment alone, because you're going to be presented with a lot of things that have a super high or reasonably high return on investment.
51:49
What you want to do, is you want to focus on minimizing the opportunity costs."
51:49
Give us your thinking on that because I really thought that was quite brilliant, the way you put it.
52:04
Shreyas Doshi: Once you reach a certain, again, a certain level of proficiency, a certain level of understanding and reputation in whatever your chosen field of work is, what you find is there are many opportunities that can provide a positive return on investment.
52:21
And this applies to certainly to individuals, but also applies to teams of people.
52:28
And if we look at teams, most teams that I have encountered are essentially focused on creating that positive return on investment. Right?
52:43
And again, I have nothing wrong with ...
52:43
I want positive return on investment, obviously.
52:49
But then what I have seen consistently in action is that, that desire then gets these teams of people to focus on quick wins.
53:00
Things that I can do quickly, that will generate a decent.
53:11
And so as I started looking at that, the first thing I did was, okay, what is the formula for ROI?
53:15
And so that is ROI is value created minus the cost of your time or cost of your resources, that divided by the cost of your time. So let's just say cost.
53:28
So, with any ratio, if you want to maximize that ratio, you can increase the denominator or increase the numerator, or you can decrease the denominator.
53:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fun with math.
53:42
Shreyas Doshi: And us being human beings and the reality is that increasing the value of the numerator is usually significantly harder than decreasing the value of the denominator.
53:54
So of course we choose the path of least resistance.
53:54
And we say, "Okay, let's work on things that we can do quickly that will generate some return."
54:02
So because if you decrease the denominator, you're good. You have a high ROI.
54:07
And again, there's nothing wrong with that.
54:13
But what ends up happening is that many people and certainly many teams fill up their entire plate with these ROI tasks that provide you that positive ROI and they try to decrease their denominator, and then they work on things for months, years.
54:25
And you look back and you say, "Okay, yeah, we achieved something decent, but we are no longer the market leader or we wanted to be the market leader.
54:39
Why aren't we the market leader?"
54:43
And then in response to that question, the team says, "Yes, let us figure this out."
54:43
And they'll do some research and they'll talk to customers, and then they'll create another list.
54:47
They'll come up with another list in a spreadsheet, and then there'll be a few columns in the spreadsheet and one of the columns will be impact and it could be high, medium, low, or whatever.
55:02
And then there'll be another column which is effort, which is high, medium, low.
55:05
And then they'll sort it.
55:05
And then they'll end up again, working on the low effort stuff.
55:05
Again, they're trying to minimize the denominator to increase the ROI.
55:11
What I've found winning individuals and certainly winning teams do, is that they do pay attention to ROI obviously, but their main kind of objective function is to minimize opportunity cost.
55:30
And so an opportunity cost is effectively the value of the optimal option minus the value of the chosen option.
55:37
Because anytime you choose something, you're precluding many other things.
55:45
You're not going to work on many other things when you choose to work on something.
55:45
And so by trying to minimize opportunity cost, we force ourselves to think about what is the optimal option.
55:59
And I don't mean to say that you should do the calculation.
55:59
It's actually not really possible to do an actual calculation.
56:03
Sometimes people will say, "Okay, so should I create an opportunity cost column?"
56:07
I'm like, "No, don't do that.
56:07
It's not possible to do it.
56:07
How are you going to do analysis of the value accrued over the next five, 10 years?"
56:12
Whatever number you come up with is going to be ridiculous and useless.
56:17
But we all know, we all know the optimal options we are not pursuing.
56:24
And the reason we know those, is because we know, if we are talented, we know what's going to create massive value for the business or for our effort.
56:29
But we are scared to take it on. We're afraid.
56:34
We're afraid because it's ambiguous and it is big.
56:34
And we haven't yet taken the time to break it down.
56:43
In fact, again, human psychology gets in the way of it.
56:47
And we don't want to break down this big ambiguous goal, because we might find that we don't know enough.
56:54
We might find we don't know enough about the business.
56:54
We might find we don't know enough about our customers.
56:58
And we are just afraid to take that challenge on.
57:07
So that's why I say that in order to maximize your impact, your default thinking should be to minimize opportunity cost.
57:14
And yeah, there will be certain other parts of work you do, where you are also addressing ROI and you are working on quick wins.
57:20
But if you're simply working on quick wins, if you're not looking at what is the best use of your time, and instead just asking yourself what is a good use of my time, then you're not going to achieve the outsized impact and returns that you're hoping for. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
57:39
And what I love about you is that you obviously have thought these things through very thoroughly and then your explanation is one with which even just regular folks can go, "Oh yeah."
57:52
You gave the example of, that you're going to get the other Excel line.
58:01
And I was off camera, but I was snickering, because I have seen so many of those brought into my office.
58:07
I'm like, "Oh God, no, no, no."
58:17
And you also touch on something that I've been thinking a lot about recently, because I've been helping with some people and in terms of their careers and things, and it's this idea of courage.
58:32
And I never thought that I was being courageous writing books.
58:32
I never thought I was being courageous putting my name on a firm.
58:39
And I did that because of the psychology of it.
58:45
If your name's on that firm, you're making a bold statement to your potential clients.
58:53
And that is, I will risk my personal reputation on this.
58:53
And yet the more I studied, the more I understood, truly understood that we're not bad at assessing other people.
59:01
We're horrible at self-assessment, myself included.
59:10
And so, I didn't even start thinking about that, "Oh, maybe some people could be afraid."
59:20
And then it kind of like flooded over and it's, in terms of, I'm kind of trying to look at these things from the mode of the infinite games going on down here.
59:34
And that's a huge one of them, is this idea that how many great ideas get killed in their cradle by the creator themself?
59:46
That they don't even say, "Hey, what do you think about this now?"
59:54
Now, I think there's some solutions for that.
59:54
I think I can offer some assistance with people like that, but it's truly ...
1:00:00
if you really, really, really want to do well in life, and in your career, and in your family and all of these things, study human beings, because nine times out of 10, you're going to see these things. They're going to be ...
1:00:19
they're going to scream at you when you're looking at other people.
1:00:24
Tony de Mello has this great line, which is, "If you want to find out what you hate about yourself, look at what irritates you in other people."
1:00:29
And there's a lot of truth to that.
1:00:29
But there can also be a cynicism that creeps in, because you know another thing that I, that I like and really resonated with me.
1:00:43
And it's this school verse life.
1:00:50
And I have a degree in economics because I promised my mother I would have one.
1:00:50
That's the only reason I have a degree in economics, because I saw all of these things that school wanted to teach me.
1:01:04
And I was just the guy in the back with my hand up all the time, because I didn't believe any of it.
1:01:12
And then you read guys like Robert Anton Wilson, and he goes, "Look, society tries to program a correct answer into your brain.
1:01:17
And it tries honestly, to wipe out your creativity."
1:01:27
And there's a lot of reasons for that, but take us through some of your observations on the school verse life, because people need to hear this.
1:01:33
You are listening to a person who is very, very successful in what he's done.
1:01:40
And one of the things that I just immediately jotted down when I was reading it is ...
1:01:48
and I can't get anyone to understand this.
1:01:48
The Warren Buffet of 2040 is going to get there by a completely different path than our Warren Buffet got to where he is.
1:02:05
So tell us some more about school is teaching us the wrong things many times. Shreyas Doshi: Yeah.
1:02:10
And it's interesting that again, if you look at outsized returns in any endeavor or any type of endeavor in business, you need some unique insight.
1:02:24
And so by following other people's playbook, it's a playbook for a reason, it's published. It's out there.
1:02:36
So by following other people's playbook, at best you can hope for, if you don't screw it up is average or slightly above average results. Which is fine.
1:02:49
I'm not here to say that, that's failure, but let's not kid ourselves.
1:02:49
Let's not kid ourselves that just by following Elon Musk's Twitter account and dressing up like Elon Musk or Steve jobs, or reading the five biographies of any given individual, so you get an access to every angle of their life in early childhood.
1:03:10
That's not going to make you Elon Musk. I'm sorry.
1:03:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:03:19
I just have to interject, this triggers me and I can feel myself getting triggered right now, because you're articulating this so well.
1:03:25
And I came across something years ago, I think 2018.
1:03:32
Somebody was doing exactly what you just did, but they were trying to sell it. They were basically ...
1:03:38
and it was on the internet.
1:03:38
And it was like, "If you do these five things, you're going to be just like Elon Musk."
1:03:42
And I just lost it and typed the entire thread.
1:03:42
I'll put it in the show notes.
1:03:49
"No, you're not going to be like Elon Musk if you do these five things."
1:03:57
And it just really annoys me, because there are people like you out there who are willing to say, "Hey, that's bullshit.
1:04:03
Think about it this way."
1:04:03
So continue, sorry for my outburst. Shreyas Doshi: Oh no.
1:04:09
It's such an important topic, because and some of it is related to what gets taught in schools, that the schools are very generally fairly deterministic environments.
1:04:23
You do A, and then you do B, and then you do C and then outcome X appears. And that's documented.
1:04:31
Take the example of a rubric for some course you're taking.
1:04:38
Many students will get upset if the teacher does not publish a very concrete rub rubric of how your assignment is going to get graded.
1:04:44
And what does great look like?
1:04:49
What gets a 10 out of 10 on the assignment and what gets nine out of 10, and what's a five out of 10?
1:04:54
And Jim, I really like some of the ideas.
1:04:54
And I wrote a thread about this recently, but some of the ideas on this topic, I stumbled across as I was later in my career, as I was managing people who were much younger than myself.
1:05:07
And you know how they say every generation is worried, irrationally worried about the next generation.
1:05:14
I found myself in that place, and the prompt to really for me, was when folks would come to me, people I managed or people in my org, and they would say, "Well, I need a clear rubric for how my performance is going to be evaluated. And I'm here right now.
1:05:32
I want to be here in a year or two years.
1:05:39
And what is the exact path that I need to take?"
1:05:39
So that was one sort of ...
1:05:39
I heard that often enough.
1:05:45
I was like, "Ah, that's interesting."
1:05:45
I hadn't thought about it that way.
1:05:50
The other prompt for me, which made me stumble across these ideas that I shared, was that oftentimes, I found myself being asked for feedback, which sounds great.
1:06:04
A person is asking for feedback, but I saw something interesting, Jim, which is many folks who had just come out of school.
1:06:10
They were asking feedback on a very granular basis.
1:06:17
They said, "I want real time feedback."
1:06:17
Again, all of this sounds great.
1:06:17
It's kind of like an apple pie position.
1:06:21
Yes, give me real time feedback.
1:06:21
And so what they wanted to know after they presented at some meeting, how did it go?
1:06:28
And it's not even the meeting to the whole company or the CEO or anything.
1:06:37
It's just some meeting and how did I do.
1:06:37
Again, all of these things in isolation seem fine.
1:06:44
But here's one thing I realized, when they were asking for real time feedback, I realized they were looking mainly for real time positive feedback and reinforcement.
1:06:50
And the naive me, basically told them what I saw as in my eyes is the truth, which is, "I thought this was great.
1:07:08
This is what I would do better. Here's why. What do you think?"
1:07:08
and that's not what they wanted.
1:07:16
And they wanted that real time positive feedback.
1:07:16
And they wanted to make a connection between that feedback and that longer term trajectory.
1:07:23
How is this meeting and my performance at this meeting, or my performance in writing this document or influencing this decision, how is that going to make me get to the next level?
1:07:34
And call me old or old fashioned, but my observation is that, there isn't direct cause and effect with these things in the real world.
1:07:49
In the business world you do a number of things.
1:07:55
Some right and some might be mistakes, but you can't really try to extract value and signal out of every single thing you do every day, because you'd go crazy.
1:08:03
And that's when I realized why this was happening, it was because of the rubric. It is because of ... these were very ...
1:08:09
obviously these folks were very intelligent and they had mastered the system, the education system.
1:08:21
And so they were great at understanding the rubric, soliciting the rubric, and then following the rubric to a T. And that gave them A's.
1:08:26
That landed them at Stanford, Harvard, whatever.
1:08:32
But my observation is in business in life that is rarely a rubric.
1:08:32
And even if somebody's published a rubric and you follow it to a T, you will end up with average results.
1:08:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:08:45
Because you published it or she published it. Shreyas Doshi: Right.
1:08:49
And so what I started guiding folks towards is, "Look, if you follow a rubric, I can share a rubric with you.
1:08:56
But your trajectory's going to look like this.
1:08:56
My own trajectory has been like this."
1:09:01
And what that has meant is to operate in a state of ambiguity.
1:09:09
And sometimes to do things against the rubric. So do you want to ...
1:09:09
as your leader and manager, I'm really genuinely presenting you two options.
1:09:17
We can pursue this trajectory or we can pursue this trajectory.
1:09:21
And the choice is yours and I will manage you accordingly.
1:09:27
And obviously since these were ambitious, highly capable, intelligent people, everybody chose this.
1:09:34
What that did, is it gave me the freedom to at least share my perspective on when it makes sense to break a rule.
1:09:41
Because it's not okay to break laws, but it's okay to break rules.
1:09:45
And I was able to be a lot more candid with them.
1:09:50
And that's when I realized that a lot of these things that you kind of learn in school, you then have to unlearn later in life.
1:09:55
And that doesn't mean necessarily that school failed, because school serves a certain broader purpose than just optimizing your income or title or anything of that sort.
1:10:08
There are many goals to the school system.
1:10:08
So it doesn't mean that school did a terrible job necessarily, but it does mean that you have to be cognizant of it.
1:10:21
You have to just be aware of what you might need to unlearn.
1:10:21
Because I find a lot of people who've done extremely well for the first 22 years, 24 years of their life.
1:10:32
They struggle in the workplace, because ...
1:10:32
and for decades, they struggle and they have no idea why.
1:10:36
And so the question is, are you willing to unlearn some of these things? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:10:40
And Adam Grant has a good book about that I recommend highly, How To Unlearn.
1:10:44
I think unlearning over the next 20 years is going to become a much more valued and useful talent than learning, because things are changing so much.
1:10:57
And there's a lot of people ...
1:10:57
well, I wish there were more, but one can point to a fairly good group of people who are voraciously curious and want to learn.
1:11:09
It gets to be a much smaller segment and cohort about people who understand that they have to actively unlearn, because things that you learned maybe 15 or 20 years ago are no longer true.
1:11:24
And I love this idea that you have of the feedback thing.
1:11:24
What I would add to that though, is that I have in asset management, we call that temporal arbitrage.
1:11:40
Temporal arbitrage is exactly the made-up, this crazy word that you're supposed to impress people with.
1:11:46
All it means is, you're willing to invest over much longer cycles than other people. Guess what?
1:11:53
If you do, you're going to do a lot better.
1:11:53
You actually put it in your thing.
1:12:00
When you get these short feedback loops, it starts to affect how you think about things.
1:12:08
I think that for the most part, these smartphones are definitely...
1:12:08
they've added a ton, but generationally, I don't know many of my... I'm 62 years old.
1:12:17
I don't know many of my contemporaries who use this as their primary window into the world.
1:12:30
I think that's a generational thing.
1:12:30
I do it when I'm traveling, or I don't have an iPad or a laptop with me, but I don't scroll.
1:12:43
It's really interesting, if you want to dive into how some of these companies are optimized.
1:12:49
Not great, let's put it that way.
1:12:49
But what they're doing is, they're optimizing for that.
1:12:56
And if people aren't doing that, they interact with your app in a very, very different way.
1:13:03
One of the things that you point out and that I want to underline, is that if you're caught in a short feedback cycle, it becomes very easy to miss out on the idea that the things that you might be doing now and will be doing over the next, say five or 10 years, are often the things that lead to the massive impact 12 years from now.
1:13:34
If you have gotten hooked on this instant flywheel, and it's always for 15 seconds, okay, got another one, got another one, really, it's like one of the things...
1:13:46
You can think what you want about him, but one of the things that I thought was pretty cool about Jeff Bezos was that clock, the atomic clock that he's building, if he's still doing that.
1:13:56
Because it was underlining the message that these tiny, short periods of time on a longer-term objective, can lead you astray.
1:14:04
It reminded me of William Blake, who I like very much.
1:14:10
His quote was, "I must create a system of my own or be enslaved by another man's."
1:14:23
Not intending to, not intending to, so let's take malice or anything away.
1:14:30
Society itself, but schools in many of the institutions in society, without intending to, put the wrong lessons into people.
1:14:39
Thus, it becomes important to unlearn.
1:14:43
Thus, it becomes important to be curious.
1:14:43
Thus, it's important to say, I don't know.
1:14:48
Let me see if I can look into that.
1:14:48
Which leads me into, the reason I left this till last was because I knew if I started with it, we would just spend the entire show talking about the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.
1:14:59
But it's been a passion of mine since I was 18.
1:15:06
I cannot tell you the number of times that I've read it.
1:15:06
I own every single translation into English, I think.
1:15:12
I might be missing one or two.
1:15:12
But you did a great thread on taking lessons away from the Tao Te Ching.
1:15:22
I think that I'd just like you to highlight some of them, because you took away some that I hadn't yet.
1:15:30
I thought that that was very cool.
1:15:38
I've learned most of these, but A, how did you become interested in the Tao Te Ching?
1:15:38
And then B, were you always actively looking for, huh, I wonder how that could make me a better person? Shreyas Doshi: Yeah.
1:15:55
It's funny, what my experience has been with the Tao Te Ching.
1:16:03
Which is, I think I picked it up, maybe in my twenties.
1:16:06
I was a voracious reader.
1:16:06
So of course, I stumbled across it somewhere.
1:16:12
Jim, I read it and I'm like, I don't get it. I don't get it.
1:16:22
It was also at the age where I think if I did not understand something, I attributed fault to the other and not yet learned that, when the man or a woman is ready, the book arrives.
1:16:42
It's kind of like, sometimes you have to grow into the book.
1:16:42
The book doesn't owe you anything.
1:16:51
So it's like, ah, okay, people talk about it, but I don't know.
1:16:54
Then I went through my life journey, whatever it was, through my twenties, thirties and early forties.
1:16:58
Then I think it was maybe three years ago, I took another look at the book.
1:17:05
This time it was an entirely different experience.
1:17:12
I still don't pretend to understand all the 81 or so chapters or sections.
1:17:20
So, I think I still have a lot of work to do, but there was some that very clearly resonated.
1:17:24
They resonated because I learned about them organically, through hard experience.
1:17:36
No matter what translation you choose to read, it's so beautifully captured, in such compact ways.
1:17:41
So anyway, that was my experience with this.
1:17:41
I almost read it 20 years after I first encountered it and a completely different experience.
1:17:56
One thing I realized is that, a lot of what is said there is about contemporary leadership, actually.
1:18:03
But it sometimes uses language that may deter us from really paying attention to it.
1:18:12
For instance, it was written when I assume, kings and queens were ruling over large cities and countries and whatnot. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:18:21
Shreyas Doshi: I just want to highlight one specific...
1:18:23
I think it's chapter 17.
1:18:23
It's about invisible leaders.
1:18:23
But the way it's written is, it talks about rulers.
1:18:31
It says, if a ruler lacks faith, so will the people, and then it keeps using the term ruler.
1:18:39
I ask myself, I'm like, actually, what if I just replaced the word ruler with leader?
1:18:43
Then, that one chapter essentially encompassed about 10 years of my journey as a manager and leader, which is this idea...
1:18:59
I brought it up, just so I could just share it with the listeners.
1:18:59
It says, "Unworthy leaders are despised.
1:19:04
Common leaders are feared by their subjects.
1:19:04
Good leaders win the affection and praise of their subjects," or you can say people.
1:19:13
Substitute subjects with people.
1:19:20
But here's the most profound part, which is, "But when great leaders lead, the people are hardly aware of their existence." Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:19:30
The translation that I remember the most is, for that last line the people say, "Look, we did this ourselves," which is also a nice meaning. Shreyas Doshi: Yep. Yep.
1:19:42
I think it's just like that.
1:19:42
I started my journey as a leader, being a terrible leader.
1:19:48
I don't think I was a very good manager.
1:19:48
Only in the last five-ish years of an operating role, I think I became a good manager.
1:19:55
At some point, I was seen as among the best managers at the company.
1:20:02
People would come to me for kind of mentorship on management and leadership.
1:20:08
That journey essentially involved understanding this, which is, there are many different ways to lead.
1:20:13
You can be the visible leader, but the one that resonated most with me was that of an invisible leader.
1:20:17
I like to work behind the scenes and get people to align towards the vision.
1:20:23
When you do that and when you successfully do that, it looks like magic.
1:20:30
It looks like inception, because they think it's their ideas. They kind of are.
1:20:36
All I did is probe and prompt and ask the right questions, and then the right idea emerged.
1:20:41
All I did is kind of nudge them in the right direction, but now they own it.
1:20:44
Yes, I'm not going to necessarily get the same credit versus if I were a visible leader, but that's because our organizations are flawed today.
1:20:57
So, I don't need to necessarily change myself and my approach and what really resonates with me and what brings me joy, simply to yield to the imperfect way or the suboptimal way in which organizations operate today.
1:21:11
I would rather be an invisible leader.
1:21:16
Again, this was written, whatever it was, several thousand years ago.
1:21:16
Yet, these core principles remain the same.
1:21:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They absolutely are.
1:21:23
You've quoted a verse that I think very highly of.
1:21:23
Trying to get people who don't think like that, to understand, to certain things that I view as elemental, I'll give you an example.
1:21:36
When I rolled out of Bear Stearns to form my third company, independent, owned by me and others, we were coming up with trading systems.
1:21:50
The president of my company and a couple other high-ranking people were like, "We've really got to make a decision on all of these trading and information systems." I'm like, "Sorry. What?"
1:22:02
They repeated themselves, "We've got to come up with what we want to buy."
1:22:02
I'm like, "We're not coming up with anything."
1:22:08
I looked at one of them and I said, "When was the last time you traded anything?
1:22:12
It was probably the same time with me, and we used an Excel spreadsheet, because a bunch of money was coming into our new no-loan funds in 1998."
1:22:27
I try to get the idea that, push these decisions down to the people who actually are using the tools that you are trying to make...
1:22:34
that you, as the owner, want to make the most effective.
1:22:41
It blew me away at how many people...
1:22:41
senior people, and not just in what we do, but in a variety of endeavors, think that they should promulgate on high, the way this needs to be, which I think is absurd.
1:22:57
If we accept the idea that most systems that we're dealing with are complex adaptive systems, top-down doesn't work in a complex adaptive system.
1:23:07
Emergence comes from the bottom of a complex adaptive system.
1:23:17
You had another one on here, which I really, really resonated with, which you put it in a way that I hadn't put it.
1:23:23
So, I loved it and wrote it down.
1:23:23
Tight grip, weakest grip, fantastic.
1:23:32
Explain a little bit about that one. Shreyas Doshi: Yeah.
1:23:36
A lot of us think as a leader, we are supposed to just have control over everything and that's the way to go.
1:23:43
That's what you're supposed to do as a good leader.
1:23:52
Actually, it turns out that, that is not bad advice.
1:23:52
It might even be very good advice for some organizations.
1:23:58
But if you are creating an organization where you're actually doing what most organizations say, but never do, which is, you're hiring the best people...
1:24:04
whatever your definition of best is, and you're creating a great culture or a collaborative culture, whatever, your culture of creativity and mission-oriented work and progress, if you are in fact doing that, then the tight grip is giving you...
1:24:26
it's addressing your need, which is your need for a sense of control.
1:24:34
In some cases, if you go down to deeper psychology, insecurities and whatnot, it is addressing that, but it is actually not enabling you to fulfill the mission of your organization.
1:24:46
Because if you have these great people immersed in this amazing cultural substrate, then wouldn't the right thing to do, would be to give them the ability and agency to come up with the best ideas and to give them a lot of execution freedom?
1:25:07
Of course, again, as a leader, you will be best positioned to set a vision.
1:25:07
You will be best positioned to, perhaps even create a strategy that resonates with everybody, because you have that kind of holistic view.
1:25:22
By all means, have a very tight grip when it comes to the vision, but after that, let go and then magic happens.
1:25:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely true and very consistent with the Taoist idea of wu wei, actionless activity.
1:25:44
When you try to explain that to people who are not tuned into it, it's very much at odds with the way people think we ought to go.
1:25:50
Well, as I worried, I'm already 20 minutes over what my time limit is supposed to be.
1:25:56
The nice thing is, this is my podcast.
1:25:56
I can do whatever I want, but I also have another engagement that I have to get ready for.
1:26:08
A, I didn't even cover a full 50% of what I wrote down, which is always good.
1:26:08
That means that we've really had a great discussion.
1:26:16
But B, that also means that you're going to have to put up with me reinviting you to cover the other half, when we get an opportunity, Shreyas.
1:26:27
If you listen to us, you do know of my final question.
1:26:27
You even alluded to it earlier.
1:26:27
We're going to pretend that inception is true, and that I'm going to let you become an ear worm. You can't kill anyone.
1:26:39
You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but I'm going to hand you a magical microphone, and you're going to say two things into it.
1:26:48
The next morning, whenever morning comes to the seven plus billion human beings on the planet currently, they're all going to wake up and they're going to say, "I just had this great dream," or, "I just had this great idea, and I'm going to do that."
1:26:58
What two things are you going to incept in the rest of the population?
1:27:04
Shreyas Doshi: I love inception.
1:27:07
Number one, don't avoid books and discard books or reject books because of a title that doesn't resonate with you.
1:27:14
There's so many books, Jim, that I've encountered, that have what seems or is popularly referenced as, oh, this is a terrible title.
1:27:28
I'll give you one example, which gets cited a lot on Twitter, which is The Courage to be Disliked.
1:27:33
It's a book about Adlerian psychology.
1:27:33
It is one of the five books that were life changing for me.
1:27:39
Again, it was the right time in my life, that I read those ideas and drastically changed how I approached my life from that point forward.
1:27:45
A lot of people just have an allergic reaction to that title, because they think it's some self-help mumbo jumbo. It's not. It's really practical.
1:27:56
Those ideas are just profound, high impact and highly counterintuitive.
1:28:02
Yet, people just reject that.
1:28:02
So, that's an example of a book that doesn't necessarily have the most appealing title, according to some, but is just an exceptional book.
1:28:13
I'll share another one as well.
1:28:13
Which is, if you are interested in strategy, business strategy, product strategy, you've got to read, Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta.
1:28:22
Again, the title, Understanding Michael Porter, you probably saw it at a Barnes & Noble or a bookstore.
1:28:28
You probably wouldn't pick it up.
1:28:33
It's the only thing you need, to really deeply understand strategy. It's explained so well.
1:28:33
So, that would be my number one.
1:28:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Love it.
1:28:41
Shreyas Doshi: Number two would be, I think the best way I can describe it is, be more like George Costanza.
1:28:50
Seinfeld is [inaudible] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:28:52
I'm laughing because I was going to drop a Costanza thing on you. I love it.
1:28:57
Shreyas Doshi: Oh, I love it. Yeah.
1:28:57
Seinfeld is my favorite show.
1:29:02
I've watched it like six times, every episode.
1:29:02
George Costanza, although portrayed as the fool in the series, is actually the wise one, if you look at it in a certain way.
1:29:18
What I specifically mean, perhaps and what I might perhaps incept, if I were to incept with one idea there, which is, there's an episode of Seinfeld where George realizes that, basically he's in the pit of despair and everything in his life has not amounted to anything whatsoever.
1:29:36
Jerry Seinfeld suggests to him as his friend that, well, if every instinct you've had is wrong, then the opposite of that instinct would be the correct one.
1:29:46
That creates a mini epiphany for George Costanza.
1:29:46
So, for the duration of that episode, he does the opposite of what his instinct tells him to do, and he actually encounters great success.
1:29:59
The reason I bring this up, is because I think this is the best way to avoid binary thinking.
1:30:07
My message really is, learn to think gray.
1:30:07
I think the way you can start to think gray is, really sit with the opposite of your beliefs for one day a year.
1:30:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, such great advice.
1:30:21
Shreyas Doshi: What it might do is, it won't take you to the opposite. So, don't fear that.
1:30:24
Don't fear losing a sense of identity.
1:30:24
But I hope that it will take you from where you are here, which is the other end of the opposite, to somewhere in between.
1:30:34
I think that it's that empathy, it's that awareness that we need in the world today.
1:30:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I could not agree with that more. I love that.
1:30:41
I'm going to steal that from you too.
1:30:47
I was talking with somebody yesterday and Seinfeld came up.
1:30:47
I said, "You, I think, could develop a semester-long course using just Seinfeld, in whatever field you were teaching."
1:31:03
If you're teaching psychology, you can do it for Seinfeld.
1:31:03
If you're teaching investment or asset allocation, you can do it with Seinfeld.
1:31:08
We started laughing pretty heartily and that particular episode came up.
1:31:15
Just brilliant, brilliant.
1:31:15
They touched on so much of life.
1:31:23
For someone my age, what's even more fascinating to me, is they did that when it was still dangerous.
1:31:28
You didn't talk about masturbation on network TV.
1:31:35
Of course, one of the classic is The Bet. Right? Shreyas Doshi: Right. Yeah.
1:31:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They never say the word, but it's very obvious what's happening. It's just so funny.
1:31:41
Then I just made me start thinking about the fact that, really...
1:31:48
and of course, that's Larry David too, but they really, really mined some...
1:31:55
they were the first to put the hoe in the ground and pull up the earth, for a lot of things.
1:32:02
Well, listen, this has been more than fun.
1:32:07
You exceeded my expectations.
1:32:07
Do you want me to ask you where I think you're going to be in five years?
1:32:11
Shreyas Doshi: There we go.
1:32:13
Please, Jim, tell me all the steps along the way as well.
1:32:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Listen, how can our listeners know more about you?
1:32:19
We're going to have a lot of stuff in the show notes, but Twitter the easiest place for them to find you?
1:32:27
Shreyas Doshi: Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter.
1:32:27
I'm just @Shreyas, S-H-R-E-Y-A-S.
1:32:30
You'll find all sorts of thoughts there, around psychology, organizations, product management and life sometimes.
1:32:37
If you don't have Twitter, follow me on LinkedIn.
1:32:42
I'm increasingly posting more on LinkedIn as well, on that community.
1:32:42
So, that's a great place to follow some of my thoughts as well.
1:32:48
Then for those of you, your listeners who are in tech, later this year, I'm going to be offering some courses around how to make successful products happen.
1:32:58
I'm very excited about that because I'm trying to target this to folks who are fairly advanced in their careers and who are looking to create really outsized outcomes, through the products they work on and do so with non-consensus, but in my opinion, correct ideas.
1:33:15
That's something I'm actively working on.
1:33:15
So, just stay tuned for that as well.
1:33:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exciting. I'll have you back on.
1:33:22
We'll just talk about that and some of the things that I didn't get to. Thank you so much.
1:33:25
This was a delight for me. Thanks for coming up. Shreyas Doshi: Yeah. This was a blast.
1:33:32
Happy to have another conversation anytime, Jim.