Eglon's newsletter

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Hey it's Marc,

In the industrial age, everything was optimised for well-rounded
people. Factories needed well-rounded machinists and well-rounded accountants to do standardised jobs over an over. It was all about predictability and consistency and everything we created during that time was designed with that consistency in mind.

We standardised the working day, minimum wage, annual leave, the school curriculum, University degrees, lunch breaks, pensions, yada yada. What this meant was that everybody, even the top 5%, fell neatly into a normal distribution. In the US, they even called it 'the normal school'.

But in the post-normal world we're in now, we don't optimise for standardisation. We take care of that with automation and outsourcing (to those who are still stuck in the normal model).

Now we need deep interests and weird combinations of skills that make us stand out.

We need to optimise for spiky.

To grow some spikes, you need to do diverse and interesting things. You need to read widely to get the big-picture stuff, but you need to go deep in 2 or more different esoteric areas.

Being spiky will give you much better models of the world. You'll join up the dots and realise that ideas from science (thermodynamics, entropy, Darwinism) extrapolate into other domains like economics, business, and weightlifting. 

Scott Adams wasn't the world's funniest comedian or the best artist, but he was good and knew what it was like to work in corporate America. So he took these 3 spikes and came up with Dilbert. 

Snarky comedy + sketching + business = mega comic strip.

Spikes unleash your inner polymath.

You can put an enormous amount of information and expertise into 1 brain. Before, it was really hard to do complex work without a team of experts. Now you can become the expert in a few different domains and do it all yourself. Which means automating most of it anyway.

There are still designers who need to hand-off their designs to a developer to turn into a website. All they've really done is drawn a picture of a website in photoshop.

But a designer who can build in html and css, then make it actually do stuff with javascript can make things that might change the world.

Writers can self-publish and do their own marketing.
Designers can code and build their own ideas.
Entrepreneurs can build products to sell.
Mountain bikers can be film-makers. 

The labels just limit us. They're a relic of the past and come pre-loaded with connotations of specialising.

That's why we need more Hackerpreneurs.

... Solid all-rounders with spikes that make you unique. School makes you well-rounded. It's the self-empowered stuff you choose to do on your own that makes the difference.

Some examples:
Ashley Baxter: Insurance + web design + freelancing
James Dyson: Moving air around + product design + business
Pieter Levels: design + code + nomading + opinionated
Justin Jackson: design + code + writing + product
Jimmy Chin: photography +film + adventure + rock climbing


Feeling spiky,
Marc 


. . .

Here's some cool stuff to feed your spikes.

Have a super weekend!