As a cosmopolitan Indian, to me, Japan’s most striking feature is this:
Blue collar work ethic, combined with white collar pride in their work.
The Japanese are “Pro” at whatever they do.
You’ll see a woman security guard or police officer standing at attention for hours, even in the quietest of neighborhoods.
She will not lean against the wall, or look around for distractions. Being at attention is her work.
She is dressed sharp and keeps a stoic face (even though she’ll happily return a pleasant smile if you say お疲れ様).
The Japanese cashier at IKEA will not check his phone when there are no customers waiting in line.
You see the same attitude in a Starbucks barista, an usherer, a garbage collection worker, or an engineer or investment banker.
How much of this is healthy vs unhealthy, natural vs forced, etc is immaterial.
What matters in the end is that it has made a big impression — not just on me, but on the whole world, for many years — and it doesn’t cost anything.
What I’d love to see more of in Japan today is ambition. There seems to be a pervasive sense of “life is good, we have enough.”
There is a shortage of leaders (like founders of Sony, Uniqlo, or Softbank) who want to conquer uncharted waters.
But with SO many people with an exceptional work ethic and the ability to take pride in their work, who want to be led, there is a HUGE opportunity for young leaders who have creative ideas and a killer mindset.
It would be really hard to compete with a Japanese leader who has a big vision and the mindset needed for running through walls.
For foreigners especially: there are barriers of language and culture, but if you can bridge them somehow, you could build some incredible companies in Japan.
But I’m also open to believing in many things that are supposedly supernatural / pseudoscience / woo-woo.
Eg: visualization / manifestation, certain yogic practices, Ayurveda and other ancient Indian concepts.
To me, this isn’t a contradiction at all.
To be a scientist means to be a lifelong heretic.
1. Question information that doesn’t align with your understanding.
2. Question your understanding when it doesn’t align with observations.
3. Test things for yourself as much as possible.
(Isaac Newton studied alchemy and the occult for 30+ years — it’s unlikely that him and thousands of other scholars throughout history would stick to it for so long if it was BS and they didn’t make any progress.)
What you do NOT say:
“This is incorrect because Wikipedia says so / my school textbooks said so / there are no studies to confirm this.”
Such statements are intellectually dishonest in nature.
Being close-minded and surrendering your beliefs to authority — even the “scientific authority” of your current times — isn’t scientific.
Eg: some people believe that Covid was a hoax. Now, MY experience tells me that in India, during the second wave:
Hospitals around the country ran out of oxygen cylinders.
Cremation grounds in Delhi were so full that people had to be cremated on the streets
Even firewood for cremation became extremely hard to find — you had to go procure your own.
I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose any family member to the virus within that short span of time.
Some of my friends who did catch Covid, said that it was the sickest they’d ever been.
Since each of these occurences are statistically significant (i.e. they almost NEVER happen) and there is a strong causation in play, I believe that Covid was as real as the earth under my feet. “It’s just the flu” doesn’t explain my observations and evidence, so the statement is untrue in my book.
At DenseLayers, we’re taking on some interesting problems.
The first one, which you are already aware of, is to accelerate frontier sciences.
The second one is to build something that will live for at least a thousand years.
In fact, most of the value of DenseLayers will be realized centuries into the future. All we’re doing as the founders is to stand up a few dominos, kick the first few, and nominate other people to place larger and larger dominos in the front, and continue to pass the baton through generations.
Our mission is to make DenseLayers into a train that travels eternally in the right direction. It’s fine that as mortals, we will never see most of the destinations it visits. Such is life.
In fact, if you join DenseLayers, the stocks aren’t to make us rich, they’re to make our grandchildrenricher. The joy of the journey and eternal glory is for us.
The challenge.
Now, it has come to my attention that building a thousand year company may not be very easy.
So let’s sit down and figure out what needs to happen for this train to keep rolling for a millennium.
Let’s start with defining the basic problem here, such that even a 5th grader could understand.
There are many conditions that, if met, would cause an organization to live for 1,000 years.
But there is only one condition that can ensure it:
If the organization dies along the way, it regenerates and continues with its original directive.
The other condition would of course be that it never dies in the first place. We’ll get to that later.
As a systems engineer with a background in failure-tolerance, I prefer to assume that the worst WILL happen, and simply build for the ability to recover.
With that, let’s reframe the challenge:
Do everything we can to increase the odds of regeneration, as well as the odds that the original directive will be followed.
In other words, build a company that can keep showing up and live to fight another day.
This framing gives us a lot more room to play with, and a lot more room for mistakes. We no longer have to rely on a silver bullet for longevity, but rather devise a myriad of fail-safe measures that we can “stack” on top of each other.
It’s a classic engineering problem. You simply design a system for resilience and recovery above all.
As a trained systems engineer, and also a former safety engineer for self-driving trucks (in charge of functional safety and designing fail-safe protocols etc), it’s as if this is what I’ve been preparing my whole life for.
Brainstorm
First, let us look at certain organizations that have already cracked the code on longevity:
Universities
Family-run businesses
Religions
Countries / Kingdoms.
…and so on.
By studying what’s already worked in the past, and combining it with new technology, we can craft a realistic, compelling plan for ourselves.
Here are some examples of features (or bugs) we can build:
A clear directive that can be followed for eternity, regardless of how the human species and our culture evolves over time. (“Accelerate frontier scientific research”)
Make it so the data/information contained in DenseLayers is incredibly hard to destroy; as long as a single copy remains, it can respawn the entire network. (Blockchains? Distributed database?)
We have a system for recruiting people that continues to attract people to the cause. (Content marketing / Books / Referrals)
Even if the number of members dwindles to zero, a new individual can join and both get and create value. (YouTube)
If the company fails in one country, it still has roots elsewhere. (PirateBay? Yahoo Japan?)
The company allows disruptive innovation from within. If someone comes up with a technology that makes the current tools obsolete, the company must pave the way for new methods to be successful. (Eg: 3M, Nintendo)
The company’s funds don’t run out — i.e. do not depend on a single source of revenue, always save a portion of income and invest it elsewhere such that the principle remains unharmed and also earns a regular interest. (Universities)
There is a robust system for succession. (Nobel Prize committee? University Leaderships? Democracies?)
Members need as few resources to join and benefit as possible — even the remotest humans can plug into the scientific network with primitive devices. (Facebook?)
…and so on.
On the other hand, we can also do things to reduce the risk of death in the first place. In that respect, I have a simple philosophy:
Always offer the best deal that your customers could find in the market.
I often look at the Japanese industry for examples galore. Kawasaki, Toyota, Honda, Nintendo (one of my faves), Sony, Panasonic, and so on.
In the west, you have companies like Disney and Apple.
What I love about the bolded ones above, is that they tried to diversify (not betting the future on a single product), while still being focused on a single purpose.
They were also product-leaders: we keep buying from them mostly because they make really good shit. They even inspire other companies to step up their quality.
An example I love is that Nintendo, after their Game Boy was a massive hit for 11 years, lost dominance to Sony’s Playstation, then made a comeback with the Nintendo DS, and later again made a huge hit with the Nintendo Switch. And this company was founded in the 1880s, with paper card games!
I also like Apple’s example — even though I don’t think much of the new iPhones, the Apple Watch and AirPods (launched after Jobs died) are each multi-billion dollar businesses in their own right. You gotta give the team credit.
I want DenseLayers to similarly keep building amazing tools for scientists and innovators of all ages, forever, and always offer the best wares in the market. The goodest shit, always. If we can build a culture where offering the best products for scholars is more important than anything else, then we should be good to go.
***
Here’s a thought I had this afternoon, after a bathroom break while walking back to my desk:
Imagine if (after we’re successful) we plant hundreds of time capsules all over the world, with each capsule containing instructions for how to regenerate DenseLayers (the scientific network), rebuild it to success, and once again plant new time capsules that last a century or two.
We could design the content of the capsule such that it becomes the talk of the town, and also makes a pretty compelling case — enough to inspire one crazy person to take the idea and run with it (which is all we need really).
The most valuable trait or habit that I’ve developed as an engineer is to “focus on the problem, not the solution.”
Sounds very counter-intuitive. Don’t we usually say the opposite?
The context here is that most people love to complain about problems and then hasten to slap solutions, as opposed to STUDYING problems and trying to investigate why they’re there in the first place — and solving the root cause.
Most engineers are guilty of this. They love to rush to coding as soon as they see a requirement, as if they’ve been bit by a rabid dog and can’t keep their hands still.
The product you end up with is a “well-made piece of crap.”
The best engineers I’ve ever worked with, and those I’ve read about in history, are more interested in solving the problem than in finding a solution.
Yes, there is a big difference between the two. You’re focusing on the right solution, not the first solution that came to mind.
The first approach takes a bit of investigation, thinking, and study — which takes humility that you don’t know everything — and also involves a time delay before you can get to implementation.
The second approach gets you going quickly, but in the long run, you end up having to throw away and redo too much work, writing off huge losses in both time and money.
Now, it’s not like you can’t succeed with “move fast and break things”; I may be wrong, but I’ve heard that companies like Facebook and Angellist famously cultivated and encouraged this kind of culture.
Unfortunately, most companies can’t afford to do so. And they don’t need to — there’s a better way, a best of both worlds.
The key to the conundrum is how well-defined the boundary conditions are.
“Let’s hack something” is a great next step for situations where the problem is quite simple or trivial, and the boundary conditions are clear.
But as soon as you come to a systems problem (such as a UX problem where even a human is involved), then you have to think about what the solution can and cannot do, which quickly eliminates many default solutions that you may have implemented in the past.
In systems engineering, we usually suggest 15% of the project timeline being spent up front on this, with the rest spent on implementation / hacking.
Or rather, I’d say there are plenty of people driving lamborghinis and flying private and consistently sitting on the front pages of newspapers whom people could listen to.
I remember flipping through a book by T Scott Gross, the author of “Positively Outrageous Service” as a kid (saw it at a bookstore and it got my attention), and it really blew my mind. Since then I’ve wanted to offer positively outrageous service in every business I do, both at the product level and the service level.
At my company, we do follow some “outrageous” business practices that I was reflecting on today.
1. Our products and services aren’t good or better or even “best” — they’re groundbreaking.
I’m not saying this for shits and giggles. In my career as an entrepreneur so far, I’ve only made and offered things that have either never existed before, or are on a completely different level than anything else on offer.
If it’s not 10 times better than whatever already is, I don’t do it.
The first project: the “Tech Fluent CEO” program, later made into a book. Yes, I realized later that other such products exist. But none of them accomplish anything remotely close to what mine does.
The same goes for both my podcasts — the content is both 10x better and unique.
It often makes it hard to market and explain what I do, and questions like “is there a market for this?” and “how does it work?” are constantly coming up.
Look, I was inspired by SONY when I was 19. In Akio Morita’s book “Made in Japan,” he said that Sony always wanted to look to the future, and build products that would shape the world as they saw it. Every product that Sony brought out, started as a dream — not a number on a spreadsheet.
I have the utmost respect for people who build businesses based on what people are already looking for and lots of demand analysis, but that’s not how my brain works. I’m in the innovation business. I’m in the future business.
We skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is right now.
2. I don’t offer 30-day or even 90-day guarantees. I offer a lifetime guarantee.
Back when I was offering the tech fluency program, the first ever person who signed up (and paid full price upfront), got busy with other projects midway through the course. He never came back.
I tried to contact him over time, to come back, but he couldn’t.
Finally, 4 years later (long after I stopped doing 1-1 coaching and was doing a different business), I emailed him again, saying that he’s always welcome to come back and finish what he started. This time, he did reply, and we will continue our relationship.
On the first page of my book, I say clearly — if you buy the book and realize that you aren’t the right reader for it, you get your money back, no questions asked. There’s no timeline.
50 years later, if you said, “you know, that book I read in my 20s wasn’t really worth my money” – I’d still like to give you a refund.
One reader actually tried to test this, because he couldn’t believe this was true. But I obliged, and this is what he said:
However, I must mention that recently I felt “whooped” by Andy Frisella’s company 1st Phorm, because they offer a 110% guarantee on their products. So we will start offering a 120% guarantee as soon as we are able to.
But hey — I did offer a guarantee on my podcasts too from the beginning – if you find another podcast that covers a topic better than we did, I will give you $20. Andy doesn’t. (Score: 1-1)
The next phase
While the above things are apparent in hindsight, I wasn’t even consciously aware of them when I was actually doing them.
But it’s clear to me that this philosophy needs to be at the center of the entire business; its energy permeating not just the product and service, but everything from marketing, to branding, to operations, to vendor relationships, employee relations, and so on.
Offering a positively outrageous experience to every person along the chain, makes for an indestructible business. And I want to build a company where this is in the very DNA.
What does it mean to be confident, or feel confident, or have confidence?
There seem to be so many contexts.
I had the insight recently that confidence is in how much knowledge your brain thinks it has of what will happen in the future.
In other words, “I know this is what will happen” or “I know this is the truth we will discover” is the only, fundamental source of all kinds of confidence.
You feel unconfident about driving a car in the mountains, or about going up to a beautiful girl in the subway and saying hi, or about a martial arts competition, because you don’t know what will happen. The more you know or think you know, the more confident you feel.
“I will steer the car and it will stay in control and I will get through the mountains without issue.”
“I will walk up to my opponent, and I’m most likely going to beat them because of X or Y.”
“I will say hi to that girl and we will have a lovely interaction; at worst, nothing bad will happen to me, I will feel safe and happy throughout the day.”
The different effective ways of acquiring confidence, whether it’s to manipulate your brain using visualizations and affirmations, or through sheer action and collecting practical experience, or through diligent study and preparation, all have the same basis.
They give you the sense that you can predict the future in that area. It also goes to show why confidence is so subjective. Nobody can be confident about everything.
You may be confident about going on dates women but not about picking stocks (or vice-versa), because with one you can predict the likely outcome, but not with the other.
You can become confident in your ability to do anything, by keeping your promises to yourself everyday. Over time, your brain thinks it has knowledge of the future: that what you say you’ll do will get done.
The word “ruthless” conjures for most people the image of someone who’s evil, brutal, and sadistic.
It’s real meaning, is someone who acts without any pity or compassion for someone’s misery. They are ruth-less.
Another way to see being “ruthless” is someone who acts without taking other people’s opinions and inconveniences into account.
The lines between ruthless, selfish, and egoistic get more and more blurred the more you think about it.
Does it take ruthlessness to win a world championship, when it means denying everyone else who showed up to the tournament, regardless of how much they and their families sacrificed for the opportunity?
Does it take ruthlessness to get selected for a job that only has one opening, when it means denying all other applicants who could have made something of their lives with the job you stole from them?
Does it take ruthlessness to go into business and prevail against a competitor — through better products and marketing — even though their competitor may have some wonderful employees with pregnant spouses whose livelihood depends on their consistent employment?
Does it take ruthlessness to take the life of another plant or animal, for the purpose of one’s own nourishment?
The very act of self-assertion – from smallest to largest — is ruthless.
The least ruthless man in the world probably cannot achieve anything in his life, out of fear that he may inconvenience someone else. He would carry a soul-crushing load of self-doubt to every aspect of his existence, living a pitiful life devoid of hopes or dreams. And in living that way, he is ruthless towards himself.
As we live in a society of other people, our ruthlessness is a reflection of how dependent we feel on others’ opinions for our happiness.
Perhaps “compassion” is, in the end, a front for co-dependence. Compassion for others is, in some ways, our way of saying, “I need to be more ruthful, because it furthers my agenda — being compassionate towards others is the way to be compassionate towards myself.” How much compassion are we inherently born with? Is it an evolutionary trait, or is it something that’s instilled into us? I’m inclined to think it is a bit of the former, but mostly the latter.
I believe that in general, as you become more compassionate towards others, it directly means being compassionate towards yourself. But there is an intersection, a tipping point, where your compassion towards others supersedes compassion towards yourself.
The key to healthy coexistence – with oneself as well as others – is to never cross that intersection of compassion.
Depending on the world you live in, and its unwritten social rules, that intersection can move greatly. In some societies, you can get away with a lot more ruthlessness.
Wow, this post is going longer than I thought… best to clip it here. じゃな！
Afer navigating the professional / business world over the last decade, I’ve come to realize that in general, people are nice.
I’ve made lots and lots of acquaintances, who have helped me in many ways. 99% of people want to do the right thing when given a choice. It doesn’t mean they’ll go out of their way and take personal losses to help you, but they’ll be polite and respectful even if they’re acting selfishly.
But I’ve also learned that quite a few people you’ll meet, including many in prominent, successful positions, are not nice. By which I mean, they’re downright horrible human beings that make you sick to your stomach. You’ll come across them once in a while, and you’ll want to stay clear of them.
Being a good human (or rather, not being a shitty human) is not a pre-requisite to being successful in our chosen endeavours in life.
What matters, is doing the work that’s required and giving people what they want. As long as we help other people get what they want, they’ll try to work with us.
I can recall many times in my life when I was overly nice to people because I felt like I had to be.
So if you’re a “nice guy/gal”, be so because you choose to, not because you feel an obligation to. And wear it with pride.
