31 chunks · 25 episodes
...ke it, then they won't share it. The number of people who read it will be tiny--capped downside. But if they do like it, then they'll share it, and more people will read it, in proportion to how good it is. Uncapped upside. All that it costs is ...
...ectations) which means when they do something useful it's a mindblowing moment. Capped downside, significant upside. Anthropic Artifacts are just interface sugar, but they make the feedback loop immediate and help give a gradient of learning. Bu...
Illegible + open gives you capped downside while retaining exposure to upside. Many times you don't know if a given feature that's being built is viable or not. One way to do that is to build ...
...rabbit hole, and decide if what's there is interesting or not. This allows more capped downside and continuous feedback during development.
...ls you on the weak argument, you retreat to the motte. This tactic is a form of capped downside (albeit a cynical one). You can grow your territory but be unlikely to be knocked out of the game. But if you're too powerful, sometimes the bit work...
Don't spend much time worrying about "did I pick the right acorns". No one pays attention to the acorns you picked that didn't grow (they are cheap and small and barely worth noticing). What everyone will notice is the acorns that did grow; the oak trees are impossible to miss. This has a nice self-
Something that is "like clockwork" cannot be a creative act. A creative act requires applying your agency without coercion. If it's like clockwork, the agent is delegating their agency to the machine, to the clock. They are just downstream of that, an automaton. You can cap downside with this approa
The way you mess something up is with failed execution. The way you have great returns (something above linear) is by picking the right curve. Execution can only cap downside. The right strategic insight sets upside. You need both.
People often tell me they aspire to start writing more. But they're often very embarrassed about the idea that what they write will be low quality. They want to make sure the first post is great, a bar that they never can muster up the surge of energy to clear. So they end up never writing anything,
Startups have an edge over large enterprises: self-capping downside. If a startup does something dangerous or creates a bad product, they tend to be self-extinguishing; they go out of business before doing too much damage. (Of course there are exceptions, e.g. a startup that creates a thing that ben
... meager profit)... but also a bonus lottery ticket. Each seedling is a bet with capped downside (mainly opportunity cost) and significant upside. To guarantee great returns, you'd need a big enough orchard to plant 1000 trees: 1000 bets.