Wednesday, 30 June 2021

Seth's Blog : The market is a listening device

It's the most resilient, most granular technique available for us to figure out what people want. When individuals have the freedom to choose, they often do. At the same time that markets enable choice, large-scale industrial capitalism works overtime ...
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The market is a listening device

It’s the most resilient, most granular technique available for us to figure out what people want.

When individuals have the freedom to choose, they often do.

At the same time that markets enable choice, large-scale industrial capitalism works overtime to remove it. The main job of most big company CEOs is to figure out how to lock in customers, because customers without choices stick around longer and pay more.

Some organizations exist to satisfy market demand.

Some work hard to create market demand.

And some are focused on capturing demand and then eliminating the market itself.

The internet has created changes in both directions. We have dramatically more choice when it comes to ways to spend/waste our time, but we also have to deal with the natural monopolies created by the network effect and the hidden levers that drive toward lock in.

If we’re not alert, many of the choice-driven markets we depend on will disappear.

   


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Tuesday, 29 June 2021

Seth's Blog : Luck is not a strategy

Advice from people who have gotten lucky is a tricky thing. Perhaps they did x, y and z, and then got lucky. As story telling creatures, it's natural to assume that x, y or z had something to do with it. Which can lead to bad advice. Consider the guy ...
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Luck is not a strategy

Advice from people who have gotten lucky is a tricky thing.

Perhaps they did x, y and z, and then got lucky. As story telling creatures, it’s natural to assume that x, y or z had something to do with it. Which can lead to bad advice.

Consider the guy who smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and lived to be 100. It’s not clear that his habits helped him get lucky.

Luck might not be a strategy, but setting yourself up to be lucky might be.

Luck is a tactic. An unpredictable one, sure, but if it works, it works. A useful strategy might be: I’m going to establish a pattern of resilience and apply information and testing to discover what works. And one of the tactics to support that strategy could be showing up in places where luck can help me out. If I can persist long enough, I’ll get lucky.

But that’s very different than the false correlation of past behavior with lucky outcomes.

   


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