Hello there,
I’ll be honest, I’ve read a lot about systems but I have never come to really appreciate how vital they are in my personal life.
The word “system” has always felt so distant, objective as if describing the mechanical part of a car.
And for a long time, the word success never brought to mind the word systems.
Rather goals. Ambitious goals.
I was gravely mistaken.
Survivorship bias leads us to concentrate on the winners’ goals and rarely examine the losers’ who had the same objectives.
But it’s systems that ultimately served as the differentiator.
I’m mainly able to write this newsletter weekly because of my decentralized writing system – that allows me to write in bits, bits anchored to systemic properties that help me produce Bits by Muigai.
If I didn’t think in terms of a decentralized system, rather the goal, I would feel overwhelmed rolling out this newsletter week in week out.
Over time I have come to appreciate and rely on systems as a guide on the road to success.
Here we go!!
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The Invisible Hand
A system is a way of looking at the world.
We instinctively build systems. We are nurtured through the education system. We understand our bodies through biological systems.
Heck, if you watched Narcos, you will remember Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo building one of the biggest drug cartels through the Plaza System.
Systems are everywhere and they are a very big deal.
Here is where the problem comes in.
Few of us truly understand how systems work in life. More so in our own lives.
The idea of having a mapped out life OS. A personal Knowledge Management System seems rather odd.
That branch of individual systems is not congenial to us.
Paradoxically we go to work – and there is a clear and cut system. Why? Because we understand that systems scale.
But you know what we know more of?
Goal setting.
Among the challenges of being a first goal-oriented person are:
Goals focus on the output (the result) whereas systems focus on the input (the costs you will have to pay in order to reach the goal).
That’s worth re-reading.
To use an analogy,
The upright ape with the spear who misses his target is likely to trample the spear to bits in a rage or to blame the erratic flight on malevolent spirits. He is much less likely to undertake a critical analysis of hand-propelled missiles.
A homo sapien [sapien] who understands systemic thinking, would likely take a step back and examine the entirety of the activity. Why? Because the world is a series of interconnected ecosystems orbiting and interacting with each other over time.
Next Saturday I’ll dive into how systemic thinking works.
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What I’m Reading
1. People Problems vs Process Problems
The conflict between Gerald Weinberg and Toyota:
Gerald tells us that Whatever the problem is, it’s always a people problem. […] The Toyota Way states that Whatever the problem is, it’s always a process problem.
Reductions in a system‘s productivity occur because of the structure and behaviours of that system. Randomly switching people around might cause different incidents to actually occur, but in every case, it is the system that permitted those incidents, and the system’s attributes that ultimately caused them. It seems to me that looking for people problems is about as smart as blaming the laser printer for a badly spelled document. People are not the problem. Ever. (740 words).
2. Be Like Water
Be like water — Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself.
Never assert yourself against nature; never be in frontal opposition to any problems, but control it by swinging with it. (859 words).
3. Everything You Should Know About Sound
The absolute faintest sound detectable to the human ear is, by definition, 0 dB—we call that “the threshold of hearing.” The loudest a sustained sound can possibly be on Earth’s surface is 194 dB – we call that “the threshold of sound.”
Here are some famous 194dB+ events:
- Saturn V launch.
- The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
- The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption.
There can be louder sound than 194 dB—just not on the Earth’s surface. There can be louder sounds in the ocean, in the land, or on other planets. (2667 words)
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What I’m Watching
Some interesting insights:
- Collective risk doesn’t scale linearly from individual risk, if one person doesn’t wear a mask and they have COVID, they can put the lives of many others at risk.
—> It’s just like wearing a mask. I wear a mask not for myself, but because a person I’m going to infect will infect maybe 10 more. - Science is not about evidence. Science is about properties.
—> E.g: There are no clinical data on whether it’s unsafe to jump from an airplane without a parachute at 35,000 feet, but since we understand gravity, we don’t need a clinical study. - Averages and forecasting are a lot less useful in science than people think.
—> A river that is on average 3 feet deep, can kill you because it can have sections where it’s 60 feet deep
—> That means you have a representation of reality, but it’s not describable by an average, nor can it be captured by testing people’s forecasting.
—> Forecasting works best for thin-tailed distributions like flipping a coin, you’ll likely get in the ballpark of 50% heads and 50% tails. - The Golden Rule of Societies: Treat me the way you want to be treated when you’re older, and respect that.
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Feel free to shoot me an email anytime with comments, critiques, and open-ended questions.
Till next Saturday, take care.
Happy weekend ?
Solomon Muigai.