How do we prepare for a world that often changes drastically and rapidly? We can preserve our optionality.

We don’t often get the advice to keep our options open. Instead, we’re told to specialize by investing huge hours in our passion so we can be successful in a niche.

The problem is, it’s bad advice. We live in a world that’s constantly changing, and if we can’t respond effectively to those changes, we become redundant, frustrated, and useless.

Instead of focusing on becoming great at one thing, there is another, counterintuitive strategy that will get us further: preserving optionality. The more options we have, the better suited we are to deal with unpredictability and uncertainty. We can stay calm when others panic because we have choices.

Optionality refers to the act of keeping as many options open as possible. Preserving optionality means avoiding limiting choices or dependencies. It means staying open to opportunities and always having a backup plan.

Ultimately, preserving optionality means paying attention and looking at life from multiple perspectives. It means building a versatile base of foundational knowledge and allowing for serendipity and unexpected connections. We must seek to expand our comfort zone and circle of competence, and we should take minor risks that have potentially large upsides and limited downsides.

Paradoxically, preserving optionality can mean saying no to a lot of opportunities and avoiding anything that will prove to be restrictive. We need to look at choices through the lens of the optionality they will give us in the future and only say yes to those that create more options.

Preserving your optionality is important because it gives you the flexibility to capitalize on inevitable change. In order to keep your options open, you need diversity. Diversity of perspective, thought, knowledge, and skills. You don’t want to find yourself in a position of only being able to sell something that no one wants. Rapid, extraordinary change is the norm. In order to adapt in a way that is useful, keep your options open.

-Charlie Munger 2008

Notes:

• We buy a book, we know what we’re getting. There is no other “business model” at play. No other information being (necessarily, relatively) sold. This clarity of contract is especially lucid in physical form. The book has edges. The transaction has edges. The transaction completes. Given time, we complete the book. It has an ending. Contracts are clear. Usually, there’s no tracking.

• The immutability of printed books is their superpower. Remember this, because it’s from this immutability that books derive their dead-simple “contract.”

Attention Monsters: Things that Eat Attention

• The main adversary of books and book publishing is: Anything that eats attention.

• A simple heuristic for determining if something is an attention monster: “Free” apps built around advertising models tend to become attention monsters.1 Especially if they’ve taken on a lot of venture capital, a tendency even further exacerbated if they’re a public company.2

• Instagram is a great example. The more you scroll, the more money they make. Consider the “agreement” into which you’ve entered with the application the next time you find yourself mindlessly scrolling. What’s keeping you there? Why are the algorithms showing you what they’e showing? What benefits are you accruing? What do you feel the need to post what you’re posting? For what are are you trading your time and mental energy?

• over time, attention monster methods of consuming user attention become more aggressive the larger the user base becomes. A once simple contract (“connect with your friends online,” “post photos with cool filters,” et cetera) into which we may have entered with a free app begins to change by small degrees when that app or publication is pushed to increase profitability

• Publications are another example. Most legacy or incumbent news organizations like The New York Times fall into this bucket.

• In contrast, publications like The Information or Stratechery or The New Consumer — recently founded publications — are entirely subscriber based, and thereby shed themselves of attention gorging.

• Netflix is another example, which stated “Sleep is our competitor”. Their internal doctrine might be like - Netflix must become a downtime habit humans cannot live without. The service must become a teat, an irreplaceable and inexhaustible binge conveyance.

Contracts and habits

• Here are two big takeaways that are relevant to our contracts, attention monsters, and books discussion:

1. True behavior change is identity change.
2. “Motion” is the act of researching; “action” is getting your reps in. Never mistake the two.

• Carrying a Kindle and blocking most media on my phone are two core pieces to my system of maintaining, believing in, and strengthening my identity as a “reader

Reading and Attention

• A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.

• The critical insight is that deep reading is an active exhaustion, the result of burned calories, not the passive exhaustion of an underused body and mind.

” and maintaining what I consider “healthy” contracts with apps and media.

There are two big problems that plague rescue efforts at big companies: history and trust…

All of which helps explain why technology rescues at bigger, older companies are so difficult. One is constantly fighting against history…To a large extent “be agile” is almost synonymous with “trust each other.” If you’re wondering why large companies have trouble being agile, it is partly because it is impossible for 11,000 people to trust each other the way 5 people can. That is simply reality. Until someone can figure out the magic spell that allows vast groups of people, in different countries, with different cultures, speaking different languages, to all trust each other as if they were good friends, then people in the startup community need to be a lot more careful about how carelessly they recommend that larger companies should be more agile.