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Self-Improvement in 10 Short Steps

There may come a day, perhaps soon, when robots take our jobs. All of them. It is not a question of for the consensus view, but of how many jobs and how soon. Familiar ways of life will fade as entire occupations — lawyer, doctor, pilot — disappear altogether. “Even in a benign situation,” Elon Musk recently said at the Code Conference, “we will become like a house cat.” Not the end of the world for us, exactly — fed, pet, let in and out, litter box cleaned — but we wouldn’t really contribute much value to the world either. if We don’t have to go to the Great Age of the Pink Slip before confronting other vexing problems. Since the early 1970s, we have seen growth in wages decouple from the growth of the economy as a whole. It used to be that as the pie got bigger, so did everyone’s slices. Recent history has not been so equitable: same old crusts for some, but more and more fruity filling for the fattest. Thus some venture capitalists have turned into venture socialists. They hope the Age of the Pink Slip coincides with the Age of Abundance. While robots may put everyone out of work, nations will grow so rich that they can pay every citizen to do nothing more than live out Karl Marx’s dream of fishing in the afternoon and criticizing poetry at night. Concerned, the president of YCombinator, Sam Altman, a research program into the issue. The startup accelerator plans to run guaranteeing income to a small set of people in Oakland. Altman hopes the money will “give people the freedom to pursue further education or training, find or create a better job, and plan for the future.” is starting a pilot test Opposed on other issues, a chorus of scholars and authors, left and right, have now gathered on a hill as in a Coke commercial to sing the joy of a universal basic income, or UBI for short. Erik Brynjolfsson, a prof at MIT and author of , foretells the coming of a “ ” where we will be free to debate philosophy and practice painting because industrious robots will make everything we roustabouts would ever need. Charles Murray, the libertarian social scientist, wrote that a universal basic income would lead to a rebirth of civic virtue, a “restoration, on an unprecedented scale, of a great American tradition of voluntary efforts to meet human needs.” The Second Machine Age digital Athens in the Wall Street Journal And on the left, a progressive Dutch author, Rutger Bregman, has a written a bestseller in the Netherlands that is now gaining popularity around the world — . The book calls for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour workweek. The Finnish government — just to see what happens — is testing a pilot program in which a randomly chosen 10,000 adults will get 550 tax free Euros per month for two years. Utopia for Realists So these are the cards on the table. Is this an idea whose time has come in the America? If robots do everything better than we can, will a weekly Venmo payment through the government provide sufficient consolation? I don’t think so for a few reasons, which I’ll sketch here before moving on to the bigger difficulty. In short, it would bankrupt the country. We are not rich enough yet. Second, it would be very hard to get from here to there without dragging along many of the poorly designed, complex programs a simple universal basic income is designed to replace. The idea also raises troubling questions about immigration, nation states, and who would receive the benefits of citizenship. The stronger the social services, the more fearful nations become about sharing it with strangers and newcomers. But I want to leave aside alternatives and feasibility counterarguments, and instead focus on one of UBI’s weaknesses in particular: handing out money for nothing will make few happier and will stunt human flourishing. Many proponents, particularly the futurists, make erroneous assumptions about what makes people happy. The truth is many people prefer work to leisure, even if they have money. They don’t want to be well kept house cats or children on generous allowances. Replacing meaningful work with checks for all will bore a gaping hole where many find purpose and have fun. What is the evidence? It starts with indirect, but similar ideas. Let’s get wonky. “Giving an allowance is statistically associated with diminished financial literacy, lower levels of motivation and an aversion to work.” ( ) Time Ruut Veenhoven, a prominent Dutch sociologist, has looked into comparing how people feel about their lives across different social systems. “Contrary to expectation,” , “there appears to be no link between the size of the welfare state and the level of well‐being within it. In countries with generous social security schemes, people are not healthier or happier than in equally affluent countries where the state is less open‐handed.” he writes What about people who get lots of money from the government and none of the stigma of being on welfare? A classic, admittedly old, 1978 surveyed three groups — lottery winners, a control group, and paralyzed accident victims — on how they felt about their lives. Survey says! The lottery winners weren’t any happier than the control group. The surveys also revealed that the lottery winners didn’t appreciate the small pleasures in their day to day life as much as the quadriplegics and paraplegics did. And while their overall happiness was higher compared to the accident victims, it was not by a whole lot. ( arrived at similar findings.) Manna from heaven — given, but unearned — does not lead to fulfillment. study in social psychology A 2008 Dutch study Much more anecdotally, we arrive at P. Diddy’s profound truth, “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.” Winning the lottery can accelerate downward spirals. A forklift operator named Mark Metcalf won $34 million in the Kentucky lottery in 2000. He had to split half of it with his estranged wife. He quit his job, bought a 43-acre estate, enjoyed his leisure, collected vintage cars, and rounded up some horses. Within three years both he and his estranged wife were dead from complications due to alcoholism and drugs. Metcalf’s first wife , “If he hadn’t won, he would have worked like regular people and maybe had 20 years left. But when you put that money in the hands of somebody with problems, it just helps them kill themselves.” told a New York Times reporter This sort of story has become its own genre, even with listicles — “ .” And found that winning the lottery does not make the lucky ones or their children healthier. Nineteen Lottery Winners Who Blew It All one study By and large, however, these tailspins are rare for lottery winners who have well-paying careers. Winning for these folk means doing more of what they love — they work. found that 85.5 percent Americans continued to work after winning, many in the same jobs; found 62 percent of Swedish winners continued to work. It would not be better if robots took their jobs while they received checks and leisure, since we know their preference now, even when they expect a torrent of guaranteed income. A 2004 study a 2009 study Admittedly, lottery winnings represent more money than the typical basic income proposal suggests. And sometimes winners take a lump sum instead of a twenty year payment plan. But how can more be worse? It would be strange if people grew happier receiving a little but not a lot. keeps us running. The hedonic treadmill The Rich Rat Race Since 1950 the American economy has grown quite a bit. Now sure, we didn’t start the fire, but we are much, much richer than we used to be. And yet! The number of hours worked per person since then has risen. Which presents a puzzle: why haven’t technological progress and economic growth lowered the number of hours worked per week? The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in 1931 forecasting the century ahead. It was called “ .” In the depths of the Great Depression, he wrote that technology was advancing so fast that due to automation, by now we — his grandchildren — would have a fifteen hour work week and in our off-time, we could finally confront the “permanent problem” of how to use our freedom and spend our leisure. Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren But Keynes was wildly wrong. Despite getting richer and having more labor saving devices, we don’t work any less than we did in 1950. Much like today’s UBI proponents, Keynes envisioned a future in which we would live the life of a Cambridge Don, debating philosophy over a pint and punting on the River Cam. But the opposite has come to pass, especially for the top one percent of earners. Contrary to Keynes’ expectations, at higher and higher wages, people don’t work fewer hours; they work more. “One of the big lessons in economic data,” economist Tyler Cowen says , “is that people really like work.” in a recent lecture Consider zoo animals who fear neither hunger nor violent predators: many have shorter life expectancies than their friends in the wild. Perhaps this is why Musk isn’t satisfied with being a house cat. People need simulating experiences. They need to feel engaged and the stakes have to be real. To exercise their bodies and minds in challenging tasks that make a significant difference to something larger than themselves, something valuable — this, it seems, is to be fully human. Venmo payments alone will not suffice. The Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl wrote about how he survived a Nazi concentration camp in his memoir, . It wasn’t a stoic quietism that helped him survive. It was meaningful work: Man’s Search for Meaning “On the fourth day in the sick quarters I had just been detailed to the night shift when the chief doctor rushed in and asked me to volunteer for medical duties in another camp containing typhus patients. Against the urgent advice of my friends (and despite the fact that almost none of my colleagues offered their services), I decided to volunteer. I knew that in a working party I would in a short time. But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate or finally lose my life as the unproductive laborer that I was then.” Money for nothing threatens us by systematically leveling our purpose. People may not starve, but they will feel useless. Perhaps the government — or whoever owns the robots — will need to launch the greatest make-work project in history. Pyramid building where the robots watch humans stack stones incompetently and more slowly. Or, perhaps, with all of us strapped in Oculus Rifts, virtual reality can suspend disbelief long enough to create a sense of accomplishment. Or maybe humans will invent businesses to create new engaging and adversity-themed experiences for others. But then the robots haven’t taken all the jobs….whatever the case may be, advocates have identified a problem, but they should admit universal basic income alone is not the answer. Miscellaneous In the last season of the , in the episode “Chasing It” (written by Matthew Weiner), one of Tony Soprano’s men tries to explain to him what the fate of Rocky Valentine tells us about happiness. Rocky Valentine is a fictional character in the , a gangster shot dead in the first few minutes of a 1960 episode called “A Nice Place to Visit.” After dying, Rocky Valentine awakens to discover a world where he is unable to lose at gambling. He can have any woman or any other pleasure he wants. Naturally Valentine believes he has died and gone to Heaven. But the twist comes when it is revealed he is actually in Hell. He is condemned to get everything he wants forever. The hollowness of Valentine’s guaranteed winning echoes in Tony Soprano’s life. Having killed his nephew, Tony flies to Vegas where he wins at roulette, takes psychedelics, and has sex with a stripper who knew his nephew. The episode ends with Tony staring at the sunset, saying “I get it.” Sopranos Twilight Zone A note on one notorious study: In the late 1960s and into the ’70s, the US government funded a few social experiments to test the effects of a negative income tax (which acts like an UBI). Participants would receive a certain level of income no matter what, getting topped off if they made less than the predetermined threshold, or receiving the whole amount if they didn’t work at all. (For example, if not working, they received $8k; if they made $4k working, they’d receive $4k.) The trials took place in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina, and in Seattle and Denver. Unfortunately there’s no record for its effects on participants’ happiness. Moreover, the outcomes tracked were fuzzy. In New Jersey, , the participants still received welfare checks and benefits from the already existing government programs, consequently muddying the effects. Overall, though, it’s safe to say people slacked off working a bit. And it is disputed, but in Denver and Seattle, it appears as though the rates at which families dissolved picked up. this was a statistical error, but says so in the passive voice, hiding who discovered the “error” and what is was. The FiveThirtyEight writer also refers to “divorce rates” but cohabitation as marriage and separation as dissolution, not the actual legal event of divorce. the separation rates were not that dramatic, if you excluded couples without kids. Still, you had people breaking up. As I said, fuzzy. for instance FiveThirtyEight claims the study counted One overview found

Money For Nothing, Kicks For Free

After a successful start to his career in investment banking, Francisco decided to change course and start a software startup, which has now grown to over 50 employees. What’s your background, and what are you working on? So my name Francisco Homem de Mello, and I’m the founder of Qulture.Rocks. We make software that helps teams implement one-on-ones, OKRs, feedback, and performance conversations. I actually didn’t come from HR nor was a team leader before founding the company. My background is in finance. After I worked for 10 years in big investment banks, I took a sabbatical to explore other options in my career. I ended up writing a book called , that unpacked the management style and culture of the trio that owns 3G Capital, a major stakeholder in Anheuser-Busch Inbev, Kraft Heinz and Burger King. That’s where I fell in love with performance management and, connecting the dots with my previous experiences as an employee at big companies, decided to found Qulture.Rocks. The 3G Way The company was founded in 2015, we went through Y Combinator in winter 2018, and we currently have more than 30 thousand users in more than 10 countries. What motivated you to get started with your company? It’s interesting. It started with my experiences of being someone else’s direct report, in investment banking. I was really frustrated with the lack of feedback, the lack of one-on-ones, and the general lack of perceived purpose in what I was doing. When I wrote the book and had a glimpse of what great management could look like, and it all clicked. That’s what got me started and gave me the domain expertise I needed to start. But I hadn’t really been a manager up until that point. I didn’t know the other side of the story. And that came with founding Qulture.Rocks and managing our team, which is currently more than 50 people. I now can fully appreciate the challenges both sides of the table face, and I can say it’s much more nuanced than an individual contributor can imagine. That certainly gave me a gigantic boost in motivation for solving these problems. When I started Qulture.Rocks, I had a pretty solid financial standing, having some savings from my investment banking career. So I could, at the time, go for a year or two with no earnings and be ok with it. But it all came crashing down when my savings became dust when a private equity fund I had invested almost all my savings in blew up. That really spiced up my journey, and added a lot of urgency to getting to revenue and paying myself a salary. What went into building the initial product? The product got going when I was already fully committed to Qulture.Rocks. I didn’t really know how to code, so I started taking courses on Codecademy, Code School, and so on and so forth. I also took an HTML + CSS course in person at a local school, and there met a guy who was a CS dropout learning front end to build a CRM tool. I asked him for intros to former classmates that could give me private coding lessons, and that thread led to my meeting Qulture’s first two engineers, Fred and João, who joined me as interns, helped me build the product’s first iteration, and are currently Co-CTOs of the company. Since we were building software for companies that already had quite high expectations for performance management software, we couldn’t really ship an MVP. We had to skip that phase and deliver a quite polished product to start with. So our team, which basically was comprised of myself doing sales and customer development and two engineers writing code, spent almost 6 months just building an initial feature set, with no users. At the time, a former colleague who was a designer freelanced an initial UI we could use, and that’s where we started from. On the other hand, the initial specs were pretty clear, so we didn’t have a lot of discovery work to do. I was basically visiting customers, asking what performance review features they needed to use our product, and heading back in the building to build it. So our initial scope was really to get a number of companies to use us for their performance reviews. How have you attracted users and grown your company? I’d be hard pressed to say the answer is hustling. When I decided Qulture.Rocks was on, I started taking meetings with anybody who would meet me. Some examples of early meetings were a friend of a high school classmate who was an entrepreneur and could introduce me to the HR department of the company that had acquired his startup; my best friend’s wife who worked in HR; a friend’s coach who had headed HR at a startup. It was basically a meeting a week at best, and furious networking to book more meetings with anyone that would say yes. Those first three meetings generated six, which generated twelve, and so on. They compound. Content marketing was also a huge part of our journey. At that time I also started writing for our blog, shipping very opinionated pieces around people management practices, and people started to notice and look forward to taking meetings with me. I studied these things hard, and very quickly became sort of an authority on performance management and leadership, producing high quality pieces that really stood out from marketing department boilerplate. I sent these blog posts to a weekly email list I built with a mix of acquaintances, former customers, friends, and HR people. Finally, I started early on to do events. Our first Qulture.Con, with about a hundred attendants, took place before we had launched our beta. That also helped gain the trust of those early prospects who ended up becoming customers. What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue? We have a pretty straightforward SaaS business model, so we charge a subscription fee per seat being used. One thing that really helped our start was that since the early days we took in customer revenue. I had a really hard time raising family, friends, and angel money (that only changed after YC) and thus revenues were critical to our survival. So we could never really afford to burn a lot of cash. I hired people with the amount of customers we closed, and cash was controlled on the back-of-the-napkin until very recently when we started scaling. pari passu What are your goals for the future? We live and die to unlock the potential of people and organizations. We want to make a big impact on how people relate to their professional growth, on a global scale. We’ll know if we are getting there if in ten years we get to a couple hundred million dollars in revenues, a hundred thousand organizations using us, and ten million users. Our plan is to get there by focusing our efforts on the tools people use to grow at work: feedbacks, one-on-ones, goals, and performance reviews. The stuff of that toolkit is something that isn’t going anywhere in the coming decades, and we’re still in day zero of what could be created in that space. What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? Wow. So many challenges. I didn’t really appreciate it when other entrepreneurs said it only gets harder as the company scales, but now I totally understand where it comes from. One thing we’re really struggling with is hiring. There’s always this tough tradeoff between, on the one hand, filling positions quickly, and on the other hand, keeping the bar high. We hired a number of false positives in the past that ended up taking time and energy from the team and giving out the impression that we’re losing talent when we’re actually even relieved bad fits are leaving. Looking back, I’m not sure we could have done anything better, given our constrained resources, but it’s certainly something we’re working hard to fix as we now can be more picky with who we say yes to. On the tech side, a poor choice we made was picking AngularJS as our initial frontend framework. We’re doing a lot of work to get rid of it and migrate our stack to React, which looks really promising. Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous? On the reading side: In particularly rough days, I usually pick up “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” by Ben Horowitz, and read a couple of chapters off of it. It reminds me of how much nastier my job could be. I’m also a huge fan of Paul Graham, whose essays are one of the main reasons we applied to YC, so I frequently reread some of his essays, particularly those that deal with the reasons most startups fail and doing things that don’t scale. Finally, I reread Sam Walton’s Made in America once or twice every year. It really inspires me on many different levels. I’ve also developed a healthy habit around keeping a pretty well-groomed to do list updated and on me at all times. I’m analog about it: it’s an Excel template file I print 30 or so copies every month, and keep them around. Once they’re filled up, I open another one. The template has two columns. On the right-hand side, I keep my to dos and follow-up items. On the left-hand side, my top three OKRs for the month, my top three priorities for the week, and some stoic journaling questions, like “three things I’m grateful for” and “three things I’ve learned.” These help put myself in a positive frame of mind. Exercising is really helpful, but something I’ve struggled with keeping a habit of. I’m a former Ironman triathlete, so it shouldn’t be that way, but since starting Qulture.Rocks my stress levels are much higher than back then, and when I’m stressed out I can’t seem to build up the courage to hit the gym. One thing that’s helped is to schedule personal boxing sessions. It’s really intense and, because of all the mental and physical effort it requires, I can stop from thinking about the company for a solid waking hour, which is impossible with weightlifting, running or swimming, activities that seem to only boost my thinking brain. What’s your advice for entrepreneurs who are just starting out? I’d like to answer that question further down the road, when it’s clearer I’ll have any credentials to do so :) Seriously though, only start a company if that’s your only option. Starting up is really hard. The challenges are endless, and you’re pushing a boulder up a steep hill. The only reason that justifies becoming an entrepreneur is if not doing so would constitute an even steeper hill to push a boulder up. Where can we go to learn more? Our blog, which can be found at , has many pieces I’ve written about OKRs, giving feedbacks and running one-on-ones. I also put out a weekly-ish newsletter called Unlocking Potential, , aimed at CEOs, executives, investors, and leaders at large, with stuff I’ve been reading and thinking about. https://qulture.rocks/en/our-blog/ https://1percentbetter.substack.com/ I’d love to answer your questions on the comments section below, so don’t be shy!!

Founder Interviews: Francisco Homem de Mello of Qulture.Rocks

Let's learn about via these 7 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. Davis Baer /Learn Repo 1. Founder Interviews: Stephen Tse of Harmony.one <em>A serial founder who sold a startup to Apple and worked on infrastructure projects at Google, Harmony.one founder & CEO Stephen Tse has raised an $18M seed round and assembled one of the top engineering teams to build a next-generation high-performance blockchain protocol.</em> 2. Founder Interviews: Lingke Wang of Ethos Lingke Wang and the Ethos team have recently raised over $46 million in order to simplify and modernize the archaic life insurance industry. 3. Founder Interviews: Joe Mahavuthivanij of Mythic Markets 4. Founder Interviews: Francisco Homem de Mello of Qulture.Rocks 5. Founder Interviews: David Karandish of Jane.ai 6. Founder Interviews: Jeremy Burton of Wonolo 7. Founders Interviews: Will Martino of Kadena Thank you for checking out the 7 most read stories about Davis Baer on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

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