But now, you could farm as much as you wanted, trade it for coins, and bank the coins for future usage, even if nothing was for sale that you currently wanted or needed.
And again, I can’t emphasize this enough – this was the first time in 200,000 or so years of human history that this was true.
***
TEMPORAL CONTROL #2: A UNIT OF ACCOUNT
Aside from being interesting background on how modern money came into existence, it is my hope that this chapter triggers one obvious big takeaway, and one non-obvious big takeaway.
The obvious one I’ve already beaten you over the head with.
Obvious Big Takeaway: Before modern money, things ran much more messily. There was much less ability to trade and cooperate. There was nearly infinite less opportunity, with nearly infinitely more corruption, domination, and nepotism. The ability to work, to generate work, to measure work, to cooperate with strangers, to engage in complex projects, to save and invest for the future – really, a whole lot of aspects of civilization – were not possible.
That’s the obvious one.
We’ll get to it in a minute, but if you feel like challenging yourself, do you think you can guess what the non-obvious one is?
***
CONSIDER: PRICE =/= VALUE
We have readers from a variety of walks of life. And a common factor is that this readership is definitely a couple cuts above the mainstream. (And I don’t think that’s even such a cocky thing to say, what with much of the world falling prey to a constant bombardment of, “One Weird Trick, From An Unemployed Truck Driver, To Lose Belly Fat!”)
And yet, some of us like math more than others.
I like math. I’m not super math-y, but I use arithmetic to my advantage pretty well. I feel like most of using math well is just that – doing some quick adding, multiplying, and dividing when you want to get things done.
The monetization of things gives them all a price, but price doesn’t always match value.
For instance, oatmeal – you know, just plain ol’ fashioned oatmeal – is considerably cheaper than processed sugary cereals which are less satiating, more expensive on a per-calorie basis, have less fiber, and otherwise ruin your energy levels and make you fat.
We’ve talked about this in the past, and will undoubtedly do so in the future, but there is much gain to be had from breaking things down into Component Parts, and buying the components at the best price you can find.
For breakfast, you’ve got the three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fat), you’ve got micronutrients, you’ve got fiber, you’ve got taste, you’ve got convenience., you might have some “enjoyment” separate from those other variables… and that’s about it.
So now you can go optimize for each one of those. For breakfast, for the last six weeks I’ve been stirring boiling water into whole oats (takes under 60 seconds), then stirring in plain yogurt, one scoop of chocolate-flavored whey protein powder, a spoonful of spirulina (gives it an unpleasant swamp-like color, but tastes fine and good for you), and then one or two of cinnamon, dried raisins, frozen blueberries, or dark chocolate to keep it entertaining.
This is not so expensive, has a good macro and micronutrient mix, etc.
Monetized prices mean the cost of things and their value don’t necessarily match, at all. Oatmeal is much cheaper (price) than its components-gained for breakfast (value). Break down into component parts of what you want, and put things back together to get them as cost-effectively as possible.
***
CONSIDER: SELF-SUFFICIENCY
An approach to consider taking – one I don’t do myself, but is worth considering – is getting away from the standardized modern view of hyper-specialization and starting to produce, manufacture, and perform more of your services yourself.
Jacob Lund Fisker was able to cut his costs to as close to zero as possible, and can do everything from mixing his own chemicals and repairing his own engines, to navigating the tax code and even doing basic dental work on himself.
He called his website “Early Retirement Extreme” for a reason, and I’ll just say outright – it’s not for me. I have no inclination to learn how to make cleaning products from scratch to save a few dollars.
But nevertheless, it’s inspiring. He’s offering a pre-modern alternative and greater self-sufficiency. And despite the fact that I’d rather specialize in my core skillsets and then deploy surplus time to nonprofit and creative work, I still periodically look back on Fisker’s book and website as inspiration and to not take reliance on consumer goods for granted.
***
CONSIDER: THE BIG ONE
Here’s the big one.
Before money, there was gigantic amounts of friction, confusion, and inefficiency in everything.
People could not coordinate work effectively without people who had deeply trusted kinship networks already.
It was hard to store value for the long-term.
There was a lot of oscillation between heavy toil and idle periods with nothing valuable to done. Ineffectiveness all around.
The invention of modern money changed things immensely, almost overnight. Suddenly, more work could happen. More production could happen. More cooperation could happen. Lots of good things could happen.
Here’s that Weatherford quote we opened with, again –
“Humans have found many ways to bring order to the phenomenological flow of existence, and money is one of the most important. Money is strictly a human invention in that it is itself a metaphor; it stands for something else. It allows humans to structure life in incredibly complex ways that were not available to them before the invention of money. The metaphorical quality gives it a focal role in the organization of meaning in life. Money represents an infinitely expandable way of structuring value and social relationships – personal, political, and religious as well as commercial and economic.”
So again, think back on the lack of rigor people had in kinship societies and dominance societies before money.
Think, too, of the confusion on how to make things, store things, cooperate, even to accurately value the things you’re doing.
Should the farmer grow more wheat or raise more chickens? How can he know?
He couldn’t know, not really, pre-money.
This is easy enough to understand.
Now consider… has anything changed recently?
***
WHAT’S YOUR UNIT OF ACCOUNT FOR EVERYTHING ELSE?
I think – and I don’t think it’s too controversial – that “more money” is no longer perfectly tracking as the only unit of account for success and thriving any more.
Consider that “throwing money at the problem” is not a solution if your competitors are in the caliber of Amazon or Toyota.
Their ability to convert money into results is (1) no longer totally captured in monetary terms, and (2) means that other people can’t use raw monetary power to get the same results.
We live in a time when there’s a lot of powerful intangible resources that have not been legible-ized, codified, and certainly non money-ized.
There’s plenty of good stuff, right now, you simply can’t buy.
And in the past, maybe you could kind of hand-wave that away, because increasing standards of living and increasing money at least pulled you in the right direction.
As with any resource, diminishing returns kicks in.
And yet, if you believe the ancient historians about how rich Lydia got, and how fast it got rich, you’d be pretty well-justified to wonder if you could get some huge gains if you could manage to figure out an alternative “unit of account” for things that don’t convert well into money.
***
EXAMPLE: "CYCLES" AS A STANDARD UNIT OF ACCOUNT FOR WORK
For years, things took me a variable amount of time. Projects would randomly stall out, fail, or take too long.
I had no unit of account for project completion.
Enter: the 30-minute Ultraw
orking Cycle.
Kai and I developed these together for Ultraworking, and they worked far better than expected.
Before every 30-minute block of work, you answer these questions on a spreadsheet –
PLAN
What am I trying to accomplish this cycle?
How will I get started?
Are there hazards present? (Yes/No)
Energy/Morale (High/Medium/Low)
These take under 30 seconds to answer if you know what you’re doing already. And if you don’t know, you really need to do it.
You work for 30 minutes, and then fill out the closing tab –
REVIEW
Goal completed?
Were there any distractions?
Things to improve for next cycle?
Energy/Morale (High/Medium/Low)
This means, that at the start of a Cycle, you’re always clarifying and asking yourself, “What can I do in the next 30 minutes? What am I trying to accomplish?” A good question, too often neglected on ambiguous work.
Okay. Just following that process – fill out those boxes before every 30-minute cycle, and take breaks – just that alone is highly effective.
But the magic comes as your estimates of what you can do in 30 minutes eventually start correcting and matching reality.
As you train in that method, you’ll eventually hit a level where you can reasonably accurately estimate how many of these cycles it will take to complete a project milestone.
Here’s a few things I did last week –
Project: Release Progression
4 3 Write Book intro.
3 1 Get 5x testimonials.
4 4 Other 80/20 "discovered work" minimum viable
The first number is my estimate of how many deliberate cycles would take to complete. The second number is how many it actually took.
When I thought about it, I budgeted 2 hours (4 focused 30-minute cycles) to get the Intro to Progression done. It actually took 3.
I thought it’d take longer to get testimonials, but to my surprise, I had a good selection in a file I started a while ago. Budgeted 3 cycles, it took 1.
I knew there’d be some “discovered work” – in my case, it was fighting with a formatting issue – and it actually took 4 cycles exactly.
You can also do this for synthesizing little unrelated things –
Project: Get Admin Under Control
10 9 TIZ Push (19 emails, a few are 1+ hour)
4 2 Sweep: Paper Notebooks
2 1 Clean up physical workspace, etc, much better.
2 1 80/20 clean up digital workspace
When I looked at those 19 emails, if I hadn’t estimated beforehand, I never would have budgeted 5+ hours (10 cycles) to do them. I would have just started working at them until getting tired and annoyed that they weren't getting answered.
Instead, I did the estimating, the estimates came out to 10 cycles (5 hours)... and then they took… 9 cycles, 4.5 hours, to complete. Instead of feeling like torture, I was mildly pleased they got done a little early.
Most people are too optimistic, so I try to be slightly conservative/pessimistic about how long things will take when I do planning, so that I can pleasantly surprised instead of wind up in a “not enough time urgent urgent urgent!!!” situation.
Like anyone else, though, complex things will often take longer than expected. For writing Temporal Control #1, I’d slotted 2 cycles for outlining, 12 cycles for writing a first draft, and 3 cycles of editing.
It actually wound up being 19 cycles to write it. So, it took 12 hours total to get done and out, instead of 8.5 hours. That’s the type of under-estimating you can’t get away with doing too much.
(It would have been fine for it to take that long, but I would have scheduled less other things to do during the week.)
***
FOR TEMPORAL CONTROL, STANDARDIZE UNITS
We’ve talked about and we’ve talked around it, but in plain English –
In important areas, you need to standardize units.
Money is the standard unit of account for everything that can be handled with money, and often for things that aren’t even well-served by handling with money.
But there’s important points beyond money. I gave you a single example – using “cycles” as the unit of account for completing project milestones – which has been terrific for me.
And that doesn’t even begin to fully cover it. Start thinking through what your units of account ought to be, for more “meaning” oriented things.
How do you do that?
Well, it’s hard.
I personally believe that utilitarianism is a fatally flawed ideology for a number of obvious reasons, and most people’s conceptions of “happiness” in the modern sense are far more about pain avoidance than about doing things that matter.
But it can be done. My friend Nick Winter, who wrote the terrific book The Motivation Hacker, tracks his experiential happiness every day on this scale –
“Here is my happiness tracking scale:
1: Suicidally depressed.
2: Majorly depressed or in tons of pain.
3: Frustrated or annoyed or sad or hurting or generally unhappy.
4: A little down.
5: Okay, I guess.
6: Happy.
7: Happy to the point of smiling or rocking out.
8: Excitedly happy; awesome.
9: Everything is just perfect.
10: Contender for best moment of my life.
I like to think of it as a logarithmic scale, or rather two logarithmic scales, where each point above five doubles my happiness and each point below five doubles my unhappiness.
You can make your own scale with the bright lines that most clearly delineate different moods for you. The most useful one for me is that a 7 requires me to be smiling or rocking out or something like this--if I'm not physically reflecting the happiness, it's a 6 at best. My scale is nothing special, but having some sort of scale helps prevent drift.”
– entry from the Beeminder blog
Nick is a wonderful guy who has done a lot of terrific things in his life – and I think a big part of that is that he actually has a good unit of account for his happiness-over-time is.
Seriously, think of that! Winter developed a scale that works for him to account for precisely how happy he is!
It’s realistic, too – his “highly ambitious goal” during a summer project was to “…try to raise my average happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10.”
Personally, experiential happiness isn’t very important for me – I keep it high enough that nothing starts breaking, look for equanimity regardless, and then keep directing my energy to raw output in terms of more “World Impact” in my nonprofit work, creative work, science-ish work, and commercial work.
And yet, I marvel at how Winter thought this through. It gives him a compass and standardized way to ensure he's happy, and gives him guidance to become happier.
Isn't that marvelous?
***
GETTING STARTED
So, I firmly believe you’ll be much more effective if you can find a “unit of account” that maps well to whatever is important in your life; it lets you really see the infinite tradeoffs and get what you want.
Money is a unit of account for everything monetizable, but what besides?
“Cycles” is a pretty good one for deploying your time. Life, after all, is just a long and constant passage of 30-minute blocks of time.
You could try Nick’s happiness self-rating periodically through the day to capture the quality of passing time. For relationships, Kai and I explored it in Gateless pretty thoroughly – Relevancy and Intimacy being a quick way to assess where your current relationships are at and figure out which ones you want to develop.
For standardized accounting, we’re missing a piece of the puzzle and talking around it, some, because we don’t have the mental models from double-entry accounting yet – but we’ll get there in a coupl
e chapters.
First, though, we need to find out what happens to old Croesus next chapter.
Next chapter is also, umm, something of a warning against measuring and optimizing for the wrong things…
The warning?
Well, one of the greatest heroes of all time – Cyrus the Great, Founder of the Persian Empire – makes his first appearance next.
Temporal Control #3: Training and Hardening
CLOGS TO CLOGS IN THREE GENERATIONS
MACHINA Page 23
