Happy Monday!
I hope you’re doing well. I know this is a trying time for people all over the world, and I know that doesn’t exclude you. Please know that whatever you’re going through, I am thinking about you and would love to know how I can pray for you and help you.
Personally, I’ve spent the last two weeks immersed in the world of elite athletic training in the ALTIS Foundations class. Thanks to my friend Derek for helping me gain access to it.
I’ve been thinking about the meaning vs. efficiency tradeoff I wrote about last time while going through the course.
I think that the most meaningful signal surrounding online courses is to take the information and rework the material into something that is uniquely yours. That’s what I hope to do with the course, although I don’t expect it to be finished anytime soon.
While I wasn’t working for the Angels or going through the online course, I found some interesting things I want to share with you.
First, you should watch this video of a world-class violinist playing a $3.5 million violin in a Washington DC subway.
The video demonstrates the importance of matching the content of a message to the environment.
The men and women who walked by him missed out on one of the greatest free gifts they’ll ever be given. I bet there are a handful of folks who would pay hundreds of dollars to see Mr. Bell in concert but missed the chance of a lifetime to hear him for free right where they were.
Since a co-worker showed this to me, I’ve been thinking about how it applies to coaching and making sure my interactions with players are aligned with the environment.
Second, I resonated with this article on The Collector’s Fallacy.
As your curiosity grows, you’re likely to collect books, articles, podcasts, and other resources that address certain curiosities. Collecting the information makes us feel like we’ve already accumulated the knowledge and makes us feel good. Unfortunately, collecting the information has little positive effect. As the author wrote:
This is a first step to conquer Collector’s Fallacy: to realize that having a text at hand does nothing to increase our knowledge. We have to work with it instead. Reading alone won’t suffice: we have to create notes, too, to create real, sustainable knowledge.
Having more information saved on your hard drive won’t help you get where you want to go. Putting that information to use by creating notes and making something with it will unlock your future.
Which brings me to Marc Andreessen…
Third, you should read Marc Andreessen’s recent essay, IT’S TIME TO BUILD.
In case you don’t know who Andreessen is, he basically invented the web browser. He knows a thing or two about building the future.
The best way to summarize the essay is this: the future will not build itself. For the world to be better 1, 2, n years from now, we have to take action. Sure, 2021 will come whether we want it to or not (barring the return of Jesus), but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be the “future”.
This premise makes me think of Peter Thiel.
In Zero to One, Thiel introduces a different way to think about the future.
In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.
One thing that really stuck out to me from the essay was the final paragraph:
Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
The way forward for our nation is for people to create things that solve the most pressing problems we face.
Those who will inhabit the future have a present responsibility to lay its groundwork. We’ll only get there by building.
Those three links stuck out to me recently, and I hope they were valuable to you as well. If they weren’t, I’m sorry. Please forgive me for wasting your time.
I wish you and your family all the best. Like I mentioned at the start, please let me know how I can pray for you. I would be honored to hold you up in prayer.
Talk soon,
Tanner