Hello there,
Earlier this year, I was pondering on the question “What’s the world’s hardest job?”… and even got to share in the opinions of friends and random strangers.
While it is possible to triage the commonly cited answers, you can always almost find that whomever you ask the answer is always completely different. Which is only right.
People have a varying assessment on what is easy and what is difficult.
Based on my own “research”, the answers seemed bounded from three main categories. ACCOUNTABILITY. RISK. CONSTRAINTS. With a few mentions on FUNCTIONAL FALSITY and BARRIER TO ENTRY.
Accountability in the sense that pressure is both introspective and extrospective- in a pond full of both realistic and unrealistic tides.
For example, the UN Secretary job is hard in an “impossible way” because you have to be the “world prefect” or the “world moderator” when manning a howling toothless bulldog.
To put it into context,
In life, there will always be a scapegoat. And if you so happen to be on the wrong side of the accountability lens, you will end up as the ? with the scape.
Take an assistant of a dictator. If the dictator does not kill you, you’re going down hard in the overthrow.
Which leads me to…
Risk is what makes people consider jobs such as the military hard because it’s dangerous. Or roofers because you know – heights. Or a police officer. A Sherpa…. Risk quantifies the likelihood that a known outcome will not occur. In this case, the outcome is [career] [literal] death.
Constraints are limiting and restrictive factors in our universe. They play themselves out in every area of our lives. Restrictions can take place in the form of many shapes – inertia, knowledge gap, analysis paralysis…
Once bundled together, they form a strong concoction of hard.
Take the President:
- The position is a subset of numerous other positions. Yet the buck stops with them. They also have to succeed even in things that are beyond their own control. Public Accountability.
- The monumental consequences of decisions they have to make. Tail Risks.
- The volume of information they have to continuously process, and the variety of constituents they must consider. Constraint.
What do you think is the most difficult job in the world? And why?
Here we go!!
What’s The Weakest Link?
Whenever we mention, constraints, it is impossible not to think of Eliyahu M. Goldratt Theory of Constraints (TOC) in his 1984 book titled The Goal. The TOC adopts the common idiom “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”
If a factory has an assembly line with three sections and two of those sections can produce 100 units per hour while the third can only produce 50 units per hour, any investment outside of improving the third section won’t improve the outcome.
Likewise, I think of life as an aggregation of stages (rites of passage), each with unique inputs needed to achieve certain outputs. What stands in our way, is our ability to overcome the constraints.
That’s precisely why the heuristic “What got you here won’t get you there” is so powerful.
Now imagine if you could see your life purpose through the TOC lens aka thinking in limits.
This involves:
- Identifying the constraint(s).
- Re-allocating the grade A energy to address the constraint(s).
Which translates to
- What is my [current] limit?
- How do I go beyond my [current] limit?
What if we viewed life through the limit lense?
Would it increase inertia or lead to a clearer path to our destination? Remember: You are only as strong as your weakest point.
Best Stuff I Read
1. Curators Are the New Creators.
We’re experiencing a content overload.
With more creators, more content, and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis <— Constraint.
The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention. When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet, find the people who can do the curating for us.
This article perfectly sums up my worldview on “the role of curators” in disaggregating signal from noise in content.
Online content consumption seems to exist on a pendulum of sorts: we love content to the extreme — Unbundle!! Give us more! — until we are overwhelmed with choice and analysis — It’s too much!! Bundle it back up again! — and swing to the opposite side. In the end, we always end up somewhere in the middle… but it’s a lot of swinging back and forth on this creation/curation pendulum until we get there.
2. Sweet Darkness
Poem:
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
You know how we are so obsessed with our Uber Driver ratings? Why aren’t we the same with doctors? Yes, that’s it. There are no ratings.
It used to be assumed that differences among hospitals or doctors in a particular specialty were generally insignificant.
If you plotted a graph showing the results of all the centers treating cystic fibrosis—or any other disease, for that matter—people expected that the curve would look something like a shark fin, with most places clustered around the very best outcomes.
But the evidence has begun to indicate otherwise. What you tend to find is a bell curve: a handful of teams with disturbingly poor outcomes for their patients, a handful with remarkably good results, and a great undistinguished middle.
We are used to thinking that a doctor’s ability depends mainly on science and skill. Even doctors with great knowledge and technical skill can have mediocre results; more nebulous factors like aggressiveness and consistency and ingenuity can matter enormously.
What I’m Watching
In a dystopian society, single people must find a mate within 45 days or be transformed into an animal of their choice.
Interesting Unrelated Did you Know?
- Lobsters, like snails and spiders, have blue blood due to the presence of hemocyanin, which contains copper. (hey, WM ?)
Feel free to shoot me an email anytime with comments, critiques, and open-ended questions.
Till next Saturday, take care.
Happy weekend ?
Solomon Muigai.