How Surprising Happens (12/6/20)
Hey Friends,
Welcome back to Sunday School, a weekly newsletter to give you a boost in consuming interesting content.
And also, welcome to the final month of 2020!
Thanks to all of you who’ve spent a little bit of each week reading this newsletter. As we head into the holidays I’m planning to switch up the newsletter for a few weeks. Most of the content you receive here comes from reflections on things I’ve read or studied during the week, and over the holidays I’m planning to scale that back as I spend more time with family.
When I started this newsletter I made a commitment to myself to keep sending something every week, and I plan to keep that commitment. I’ll just have an adjustment in the format, and perhaps even a guest post for a week or two until the new year rolls over.
But it’s still early December, so let’s get to class!
Homeroom
I currently have a few essays in the works, but they’re longer ones that require a good amount of research, so as a result, I have nothing personal to share this week.
But I don’t come completely empty-handed. I want to share another newsletter, and really in a way, a movement.
Jamie Russo is a friend of mine and the author of Goodnote, a weekly newsletter sharing case studies and business strategies about companies that are a force for good. Recently he’s written about Bombas, Allbirds, Ben & Jerry’s, and others. Not only are his essays interesting, but they’re also part of a movement of positivity he’s behind that feels contagious.
Jamie has a book set to release next year titled The Underdog Paradox: Secrets to Battling Adversity and Stories of Real Life Superheroes. I’ve had a chance to preview a bit of it and have been so impressed with the stories he’s telling.
Beyond all this, Jamie is a member of Writer’s Bloc and has helped me along in my writing journey through conversations and sharing ideas.
I recommend Jamie’s newsletter, and you can follow along with all of his writing on his website or Twitter.
How Surprising Happens
Link: Same As It Ever Was - Morgan Housel
We’ve already established that here at Sunday School we’re BIG fans of three writers. Morgan Housel is one of those three (Tim Urban and Packy McCormick are the others).
No one combines history, psychology, and current events quite like Housel. He’s a master at contextualizing history and reasoning from it to determine why things are what they are.
In this essay, Housel shares a few words about this pandemic and it’s one of the most profound ways of looking at it that I’ve heard so far.
“The global economy shut down from March to May. Just stopped. It’s never happened before. It seems like we got hit with an unfathomable risk with a tiny chance of occuring, one that was never warned about in economic textbooks.
But we didn’t get hit with a one-in-billions risk. What happened – and I can only say this with hindsight – was a bunch of small risks colliding and multiplying at once.
A virus transferred from animal to human (has happened forever) and those humans interacted with other people (of course). It was a mystery for a while (understandable) and then bad news was then likely suppressed (bad, but common). Other countries thought it would be contained (standard denial) and didn’t act fast enough (bureaucracy, lack of leadership). We weren’t prepared (over-optimism) and could only respond with blunt-force lockdowns (do what you gotta do).”
If you break down all the contributing factors of our current situation, there’s nothing surprising at all. Each element, individually, really does happen all the time. People get sick, diseases are spread, governments…government.
It’s only when you stack this all up that it turns into the truly awful situation that we find ourselves in. On top of this, you add an election year in the most unstable political climate of our lifetime with the most bizarre candidates we’ll ever see.
I know we’re not out of the woods yet, but it feels safe to say that lightning has struck and started a blaze that’s been burning since March. The good news is that lighting doesn’t strike often, and we can all hold out hope that these normal events never combine in such a perfect stack ever again.
Living in Space
I know, you don’t think it’s possible. Our minds tell us that it’s crazy to think that humans are going to be living in space in the next 50 years.
And rightly so. Based upon the context of what our brains know, it’s an insane thing to picture.
Last week, I shared a bit about humanity’s progress and all of the things we’ve accomplished in the last few decades. We’re on the steep side of an exponential curve. A consequence of that is that we’re going to start experiencing a lot of things that really blow us away.
One thing that I think we all need to expect is a human colony on Mars. SpaceX is making unbelievable progress with this to the point that we can expect a trip in the next five years.
I’ve rambled about this stuff before, so today I’m going to provide an interesting visual to answer a key question:
Just how far is it to Mars?
That visual really puts it in perspective, but here’s a picture in words:
The International Space Station, where SpaceX recently launched a couple of astronauts to on a mission this summer, is about 250 miles away from Earth’s surface. The way the world watched this launch and celebrated its success, you would have thought it was thousands of miles away, but it's in fact sitting in low Earth orbit.
The moon is 1,000 times farther away from the Earth than the ISS at about 239,000 miles. That’s a significantly greater distance than the distance to the ISS. This is already super far.
With Mars, it gets wayyyyy more complicated because of its very different orbit. Long story short, if we’re launching to Mars, we only have a window every few months to execute the launch or it’s simply too far away.
Even if we were to measure the distance at the best timing for a launch, Mars is still 34 million miles from Earth.
Another fun way to visualize this is by measuring in light time. You’ve heard the term light-years. Well, the moon is a little over one light second away from Earth:
Mars, again at its closest point, is over three light minutes away from Earth.
Visualizing how far Mars really is puts greater perspective on the achievement that’s bound to happen. But still, you should come to expect this type of thing.
What a wild, wild world.
Process Variation
As much as everyone likes to think of themselves as an original thinker or trailblazer, it’s much easier to do things if we have a set of instructions from the onset. Creating from something is always easier than creating from nothing.
But it takes effort and creativity to think on your own path. Now working at a startup, I’m expanding on this way of thinking to the max.
Humans think in patterns, and it’s easy to fall into one way of thinking when you’ve been doing it for a long time. But I think something all of us believe at heart is that we operate better when we’re given the freedom to do things our own way.
Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, once gave this quote about leadership:
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results.”
If I’m thinking about characteristics I value in a leader, this would be right up there at the top. Freedom to operate on your own, to find a unique path to an objective, is equally liberating and satisfying.
I think the key in Knight’s language is the phrase “let them surprise you with the results.” While leaders are setting direction and probably expect and end result to look like what they picture from the beginning, letting others operate in their own style yields results you could never imagine.
This only scratches the surface of why diversity in groups is so important. I don’t just mean diversity in terms of what people look like (although I absolutely do mean that), but also in terms of how people think. As a leader, you can only try and think like others, but the diverse team you lead can think in their own unique way and can surprise you with results you’re literally unable to fathom.
Quote of the Week
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Russian rocket scientist)
That’s all this week, thanks for attending!
-Ryan Mulholland