The New Normal

“We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that.” - The Truman Show

In 2012, I was fortunate enough to spend more than half the year living outside the US. Following a five-month study-abroad program in Suva, Fiji, I traveled west until I made it back to the US East Coast, traveling through the cheapest places I could find along that route. That led me through Indonesia, Nepal, Jordan, and Morocco, before I arrived back in "Western" society.

Upon this return to the West after over six months away, I was shocked. Can you believe what people wear?! They're showing so much skin! The advertising world uses sex to sell just about everything. I was not prepared to experience culture shock in my own country.

I had become accustomed to more socially conservative cultures without even realizing it. In the Muslim & Hindu countries, everyone is simply more covered up despite the full heat of Summer in the desert. When one spends more than a few weeks in this type of environment, this becomes the new normal. The idea of seeing a woman on a billboard in a bikini becomes genuinely scandalous.

Of course, the culture shock of being back in the US wore off within a few days, and the culture here quickly became my "new normal."

Ten years later during the first couple years of the Covid pandemic, I experienced the same type of culture shock traveling between Oregon, California, and Florida. While life was proceeding roughly as normal in Florida, California and Oregon cities were locked down, and everyone accepted this as the way the world works now. At the height of it, you would get dirty looks walking down a nearly empty street in Berkeley if you didn’t have a mask.

It is remarkable how quickly humans adapt to an entirely new reality, and it's important to question the "rules" of reality if you want to live life on your own terms.

If you're not satisfied with an aspect of life, consider genuinely asking yourself:

Is that aspect of life is necessary, or is it simply normalized by your local culture?

Is sitting in traffic really an unavoidable part of life?

Tips for questioning reality

Don't just think about life, take action. Go out and physically place yourself in different situations. As Jerry Sternin said, "It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, then think your way into a new way of acting"

Travel regularly.

Physically change your surroundings. Visit friends and family in distant places, and slow down enough to see what life is like where they live. If you live in a "Blue Team" area, find an Airbnb in a "Red Team" area - and vice versa.

Connect with a wide variety of friends.

Since it's not practical to travel constantly, consider regular calls with friends who live in different places. If there are people from your past that look like they have a life different from your own, reach out! Everyone appreciates a call from a friend.

How to make things go fast

Advice from Elon Musk, from two of Tim Dodd / Everyday Astronaut's videos on Youtube.

Mostly, these videos are about the technical details of SpaceX's rockets, but they also include some valuable advice for anyone building things on a team. I wanted some notes on these points so I could refer to it later.

At SpaceX and Tesla, they have a five step process to make the production process happen faster. Whether it's physical manufacturing or technology development, these are relevant for any audience:

1. Make requirements less dumb.

All requirements, no matter who they're from and how smart that person is, are guaranteed to be wrong. The only unknown is how wrong those requirements are. If you don't accept this, the counterpoint is that the requirements are perfect, which is even harder to believe. Question the requirements.

In a related point: attach names to requirements, not departments. You can't ask a department a question, you have to ask a person. When a name is attached to requirements, that person takes responsibility for ensuring those requirements are as good as they can be, and they own the success or failure that results from their requirements.

This isn't taught in school. You don't get to question whether the professor is asking the right question, you have to answer the question they give you. "In real life, the first thing you should say is, 'The question is wrong.'"

Another point is raised in both videos. At least on the engineering side of SpaceX, it sounds like they promote a culture where everyone is the chief engineer. That is, everyone should have a good understanding of how the other parts of the rocket work, even if they're not directly working on that part. If you have the technical knowledge to know how all parts of your product work, you won't request something that is not feasible nor a good use of everyone's time. In other words, your requirements will be less dumb.

2. Delete the part or process.

"The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist."

Project scope expands to unnecessary levels when product managers start adding functionality for "just in case" scenarios. You can make "we might need this in case" requirements for everything, but you will never finish and never launch your product.

When you're stuck trying to develop or optimize something difficult - first ask yourself and your team if the thing you're optimizing is necessary at all. Can it be removed? If your requirements are less dumb, you will encounter this less often.

"Delete 10% of your product every release. If you're not occasionally adding something back, you aren't deleting enough."

3. Simplify/Optimize

"If a design is taking too long, the design is wrong. Therefore, the design must be modified to accelerate progress."

4. Accelerate cycle time

Go faster. In this context it's about manufacturing, where checks at various points in the process were slowing down the Tesla production line. The checks were passing, and the end testing was also passing, so the mid-way checks could be removed as long as the end testing was still passing. This, along with point 5, point to the value of continuous integration if your team can work that way.

5. Automate

If you find yourself doing this same repetitive task over and over, it can be automated.

How to use Entrepreneurship to hack the job market.

It's almost a joke at this point among new entrants to the job market. Job postings list an entry-level position, then request 3-5 years of experience. How is someone who is actually entry-level supposed to qualify for that when some candidates applying genuinely will have 3-5 years of experience?

Build something, and make your own experience! It doesn’t seem like it should work, and yet my career is proof that it does. I started this process while working at a coffee shop. One year later, I was hired as a product manager for a Y Combinator-funded travel startup.

Win-Win Entrepreneurship:

This is an overview of my system to create win-win entrepreneurship scenarios.

If you start a new company and it supports you financially, congratulations! You don’t need that entry-level job anymore.

If the company doesn’t succeed, make sure you learned enough to have real-world experience when interviewing for new positions. If you build things, you’ll have more interesting interviews and likely more success than a person who spent the majority of their time applying for jobs without building experience. As another benefit, you’ll try all different facets of the business world at once and have a better idea of what types of work you enjoy.

What to build?

Find a problem that you genuinely want to solve, and you think you’re capable of solving on your own. If you already know every step of the process you will follow, pick a bigger problem to solve.

What if I’m limited on money?

You need a rough idea of the resources you have available to you. Starting a business can be incredibly inexpensive, especially if you’re willing to do the work yourself. The type of business you choose will help determine start-up costs:

Technology:

If you’re interested in technology but low on funds, consider learning how to build a digital product. With no-code tools available today, this might not even require coding knowledge.

Services:

If you have some service you know you can offer, it’s possible to build a low-cost business around this as well. A service-based business could be anything from neighborhood lawn care to managing a social media marketing agency. Get creative here if you have some strengths that you believe provide value to other people or businesses.

Physical Products:

Physical products can be inexpensive, however organizing a production run can carry a relatively high cost. Crowdfunding is an option - but it may not be the best fit for this process. If your crowdfunding campaign doesn’t succeed, then your business never gets off the ground.

Make sure you actually launch it.

Almost no one will care about your hard work or even believe you’re doing anything while you’re getting started. It’s a cliché, but you have to believe in yourself. Everyone else will only believe you were actually working on something after you launch it. This is why crowdfunding can be a risk. If your campaign fails and you never go live with the product, all that work you put in to get started will not be recognized.

It’s imperative to get to the point where you’re selling a product or service to customers. Until you get to that point, no one will take your business seriously. It’s dumb, but that’s how it works. No one sees your hard work, they just see the finished product.

How to learn anything: start with the end in mind.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Free resources for learning to code are abundant online, and having a product in mind that you want to create will help direct you to the right resources. If you know you want to build an app, you would start by Googling “how to build an app” rather than “how to start a company.”

In my case, I wanted to build a watch company but didn’t know anything about watches. I Googled “How to build a watch” and went from there. When one of my suppliers emailed asking if I wanted an “AR Coating” on my watch crystal, I searched “What is an AR coating watches” which led me to a post in a blog called “Everything you need to know about watch crystals”, including a section on anti-reflective(AR) coatings.

Identify the things you need to know, then known them. Any information you want is out there for free if you search for it.

Conclusion
If you’ve done this right, you’ve built enough experience to at least get some freelance work. In my case, launching my watch company was only marginally successful. I could cover my costs with sales but wasn’t seeing the success I hoped for. However, I did manage to use this experience to get some freelance work consulting for e-commerce clothing brands in Los Angeles. Since I had already run a Shopify store myself, I could confidently work with a brand to help them solve their technology problems. By the time I was in interviews for full-time positions, I had real experience that allowed me to succeed in a product management role at a startup.