Different, But Same
Different, But Same
In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.
-Gianni Versace
Film, startups, politics, chess, poker, comedy, sports, and games are all similar. At the highest levels of competency in each field, there are horizontal patterns.
I read a lot of business books in my twenties. More than was necessary to understand the patterns that work and the anti-patterns that don’t. To be fair, there are tons of things that are different, e.g., culture and the corresponding org structures. The largest tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook) all have different org structures, tech cultures, and personalities who reign. Yet, they all work. Valve, one of the most successful gaming companies, has a massive open floor plan and desks with wheels on them so people can more easily collaborate. This would be a massive faux pas at a company like Amazon where escalations to management are formalized or at Apple where secrecy is paramount to product launches.
Each sector has patterns and anti-patterns. One can be successful if following an anti-pattern (e.g., not working hard), but it’s rare. Deliberate practice is a horizontal pattern to achieve success. Read Born Standing Up by Steve Martin to understand what it takes to become a top comedian. Watch episode 100 of the Day9 Daily to understand what it takes to become a professional Starcraft player. Spoiler alert: seemingly infinite reps in different settings, with different crowds and practicing every opening, middle, and end game while at different temperatures and chair heights against different pros over and over and over again lead to success. Iteration and deliberate practice. Talent and extreme resilience are a horizontal pattern.
To be a competent generalist, one needs to have extremely deep knowledge in at least one area. Once we learn the intricacies of one area, we learn how to go deep in other areas. The frameworks one learns going deep in one area are actually horizontal frameworks that can be applied elsewhere.
This is why advice from the most successful people in completely different fields are shockingly similar. Spielberg, Phil Knight, and Steve Jobs all had a similar framework for managing– hire smart people who care about the mission, tell them the problems, and trust them to find the best solutions. Directing, shoes, and technology are somehow the same.
Another popular horizontal framework among builders is meritocracy. Meritocracy means wanting something done as well as possible. Do you want a shitty product/service, a mediocre product/service, or a great product/service? Of course meritocracy wins.
Horizontal frameworks apply to soft skills as well. We can learn a new area quickly by reapplying knowledge and patterns from other areas where our knowledge is deep. This, more than anything, makes me bullish on humanity achieving AGI within my lifetime.
When you understand that this is how our brains work, it’s not magic. It’s simply reapplying frameworks to new verticals. Test the framework, understand use cases, create new frameworks, apply others, and configure existing frameworks for the vertical. The process of how to create frameworks based upon first principles and infrastructure lock-in is always a similar pattern.
To apply the correct, horizontal frameworks, we need the correct primitives. Primitives are the fundamental assumptions of things we know to be true. An example of a horizontal primitive that applies to all areas is that people are driven by incentives. The laws of physics are another. A primitive when running a political race could be that you need to get more legally counted votes than your opponent to win. But depending on the race, you may need the majority of votes, not just a plurality. Next, you’d think of what incentivizes someone to vote and what levers you can pull to get them to vote for you. When problem solving, start with the primitives and apply frameworks on top.
As long as the correct primitives are identified, horizontal frameworks can be configured and applied to each area. This is what our brains do when we learn a new discipline.
I’m currently upgrading my pickleball skills. There are similar frameworks as tennis but most are slightly modified, e.g., similar to tennis, you want to be on the same plane/height as the ball during your swing, but you don’t want to do microsteps like in tennis as there’s less time to get to the ball and less time to react to the next shot.
The most common reason people are wrong is that they have the wrong primitives. The second most common is having the wrong frameworks. We weren’t trained to think in primitives. Our culture often treats our primitives and frameworks as religious idols to not be touched. This needs to change.
Learn one area deeply. This is one of the most important pieces of advice among others, I’d give to someone younger. Discuss and debate your primitives and frameworks and what they mean. Your perceived primitives aren’t you. Your frameworks aren’t you. They’re ideas that are meant to be challenged.