U PSTREAM E FFECTS #9: A DHERENCE AND M ASTERY

THE WAY

If you dive into traditional Japanese works, they frequently speak of “The Way.” 

If you’re trying to have a maximally rational and cohesive definition of everything, “The Way” can be frustrating and elusive. 

There are various Ways — the Way of Music, the Way of Farming, the Way of Poetry — but greatest of all is simply The Way . 

For some people — particularly martial artists and certain types of athletes — this will just click and resonate instantly. 

For others, it would take repeated exposure, study, and training. 

It’s worth it. 

I dare say, The Way is the greatest thing. 

*** 

UPSTREAM EFFECTS: THE FINAL CHAPTER

The idea is a simple but critical one: who you are and how you’re living, right now, is a result of the decisions you’ve made upstream in the past that have flowed downstream to you right now. 

The decisions you’re making right now will flow downstream — and in some distant future, you’ll be living better or worse, doing more or less, being healthy or less healthy, being engaged or less engaged… 

… it’s obvious enough, but often frustrating to driven people. “Mind over matter!” Well, fine, but the person who is well-hydrated, well-prepared, with a clear plan, and who slept well last night has the ability to outperform the dehydrated, unprepared, unplanned, poorly rested person. 

I’ve done lots of tracking and stats around this. It’s basically bulletproof. No matter how hard I try, I produce better work when I’m healthier, planned, and my environment is set up correctly. 

Yes, you can will yourself to perform on bad days. But if you had set yourself up better, you still use that will — and reap even greater gains. 

This is a powerful view of the world: instead of being frustrated and flailing moment-to-moment, you think: “What do I want? What serves my purposes? How do I set up the future for myself?" 

*** 

This has been the entire thrust of this book so far.

But let’s address the hardest aspect of it: many of the best practices go against our nature. 

The difficult ones for you will be different than the ones for me. 

Doing basic math calculations like “use cost” comes intuitive and is obvious to many people; for others, it’s pure torture. 

Some people love to go out and jump into projects and collaborations with good people to find future colleagues, collaborators, friends, and allies. For other people, there’s immense anxiety and shyness around asking someone to work on a project together. 

And yet, from time to time, there’s something that’s clearly important that we’re not very good at. We try to get better at it, and initial attempts don’t pay off. 

Try to get on a fitness plan, fall off in 5 weeks with a little injury. 

Try to do a weekly review, forget to do it after the 3rd week and have it die. 

Get on a new diet… break the diet and binge eat junk and get back on the old way of eating. 

Decide to do an entrepreneurial project… start procrastinating, let the project get buried, and move on with a gnawing sense of disappointment. 

This happens to all of us. What do we do about it? 

I’ve got seven guidelines that I think will be very powerful for you, that I think it very likely you’ve never read before. 

But first, I want to share a section of Minamoto Musashi’s 1645 manual of swordsmanship, “ The Book of Five Rings .” 

*** 

The Way of Carpentry 

Here’s Musashi, likely the greatest swordsman of an age of great swordsmen, writing on strategy… and carpentry — 

"Comparing the Way of the Carpenter to Strategy

     The comparison with carpentry is through the connection with houses. Houses of the nobility, houses of warriors, the Four houses, ruin of houses, thriving of houses, the style of the house, the tradition of the house, and the name of the house. The carpenter uses a master plan of the building, and the Way of strategy is similar in that there is a plan of campaign. If you want to learn the craft of war, ponder over this book. The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.  

  Like the foreman carpenter, the commander must know natural rules, and the rules of the country, and the rules of houses. This is the Way of the foreman.  

  The foreman carpenter must know the architectural theory of towers and temples, and the plans of palaces, and must employ men to raise up houses. The Way of the foreman carpenter is the same as the Way of the commander of a warrior house.  

  In the contruction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the innter pillars. Timber of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction. Timber which is weak or knotted throughout should be used as scaffolding, and later for firewood.  

  The foreman carpenter allots his men work according to their ability. Floor layers, makers of sliding doors, thresholds and lintels, ceilings and so on. Those of poor ability lay the floor joist, and those of lesser ability carve wedges and do such miscellaneous work. If the foreman knows and deploys his men well the finished work will be good.  

     The foreman should take into account the abilities and limitations of his men, circulating among them and asking nothing unreasonable. He should know their morale and spirit, and encourage them when necessary. This is the same as the principle of strategy. "

*** 

SEVEN RULES

1. Statistics apply to me.

Start here: “Statistics apply to me.” 

If you’re not in an office where you’d be odd to say it out loud, say it out loud. 

“Statistics apply to me.” 

I’m dead serious. “Statistics apply to me.” 

This is liberating. 

What do I mean by this? 

I assume I’m completely regular and not-special statistically. 

People hate uncertainty, so they like to make definitive statements. 

So if they smoke cigarettes, they either get optimistic (“I won’t get cancer”) or fatalistic (“I’ll probably get cancer”). 

In reality, if there’s a 24.4% chance of developing lung cancer as a smoker, I tend to assume that if I smoke, I’ll have … a 24.4% chance of lung cancer. 

Well, this is all reasonably obvious, right? 

But where it’s less obvious is in how fast it’s possible to change habits, patterns of action, business success, etc. 

The wrong reply to this is, “I’m different. I’m better. I’ll work harder. Statistics don’t apply to me.”

No, no, no — that could all be true, but it merely means you’re in a different statistical cohort.

If you’re starting a business that’s almost guaranteed to be able to get acquired for its tech even if the business side fails, that’s a great way to floor your success… and yes, it means you shouldn’t compare yourself to the average business that starts (that includes everything from undercapitalized coffee shops to major public/private partnerships, none of which apply to you). 

But then: if you’re building a company to push the frontiers of Computer Science and develop new working tech, you’ll then get normal statistics within that cohort.  

If you have a special advantage — industry connections, a really prolific partnership with a great cofounder, whatever — then you’ll get normal statistics within the cohort of people like that.  

I can’t stress how important this is, and how liberating. 

Your results in a new discipline will likely be the baseline results of that field. If you take up running, you’ll get injured at the rate that new runners get injured. If you’ve been incredibly durable in the past, then you’ll get injured at the rate that incredibly durable people get injured. 

Why is this important? Because it sets realistic expectations, and then you can mitigate the risks and improve your statistical odds.  

Weekly Reviews tend to fall off as a habit. They’re great, but people tend to get busy, miss one, and fall off. 

When that happens, you need to not get upset and whine and cry or beat yourself up because it’s totally normal and part of the process.  

Then you start researching and taking actions to increase your adherence rate here. (For Weekly Reviews specifically, the first and biggest one I’ve found is being able to do a “mini-Weekly Review” that takes under 10 minutes to reset things.) 

“Statistics apply to me.” Bank on it and plan around it. 

*** 

2. Adherence rate increases are more important than perfection.

Perfection is a fool’s errand. Nobody  ever goes a whole lifetime without missing a gym workout, meditation session, or whatever else. Things happen. Statistics apply to you. 

So you start with a baseline of how often a habit or practice atrophies or breaks down, and then you start stacking up advantages to increase your adherence rate . 

Adherence rate is doing what you want to be doing. 

If you eat like junk most of the time, and you’re able to cut that in half without making the other half of the time totally out of control, you’ve done better. 

Best advice I’ve read from a nutritionist on eating better is to cover half of your plate during every meal with vegetables. 

Why is it good advice? Because you can’t physically eat all that much junk if you fill up with half vegetables. It increases the adherence rate of eating well. 

The goal is not to be perfect , it’s to be better and get the results from being better. 

3. Impulse Control is trainable.

So we’ve looked at two ways of seeing the world — first, assume statistics apply to you; second, work on increasing your adherence rate to what you want to do. 

Now, let’s talk about one of the key skills: Impulse Control. 

Impulse Control is a trainable, generalized skill. We’ll do a full issue on Impulse Control in the future (or you could read up on it in  Gateless , which I coauthored), but the basic idea is this: due to the way our minds work, impulses arise. The process of noticing them, acknowledging them, deciding what to do with them, and acting — this is a trainable skill not particularly different from driving a car or cooking food. 

People sometimes exaggerate the specialness or uniqueness of the human mind, mood, emotions, etc. 

I think that section from Miyamoto Musashi on carpentry and warfare covers much of life — use strong wood where it needs to bear weight, use weak but pretty wood where it’s visible but doesn’t need to bear weight, use crooked wood as scaffolding and then firewood. 

Likewise, Impulse Control isn’t magical — it’s just applying the process to a variety of situations. 

Mindfulness meditation is of course the easiest and most direct way to train this, but many exercises can be developed around athletics, creativity and writing, facing one’s fears in any area (making sales cold calls, public speaking, etc), pushing through negative emotions to do the right thing, or whatever else. 

I recommend meditating to everyone; it’s an easy way to give your mind some training in this ability. You close your eyes and concentrate on your breath, and when your mind wanders, you simply note it and re-concentrate on your breath. 5-10 minutes a day of this goes a long way to observing how your mind works and practicing controlling your attention. 

Then — start generalizing it out to everyday life. Doing the right thing means controlling one’s impulse. Like how carpentry and swordsmanship are so different but share underlying principles of applying the right thing to the right purpose, likewise, there’s nothing magical about performing under stress or anxiety or unhappiness — they’re just slight variants of the fundamental skill. 

4. Operations are the coordination of tactics over time.

It’s not enough to have moment-by-moment mastery — it only gets you so far. 

To really thrive on a grand scale, you need to start developing operational skill. 

My definition of operations: the coordination of tactics over time. 

Tactics are individual actions. For running: long runs, short runs, speed work, walking, leg strengthening, stretching, hydration, foam roller, keeping your stats and making a running plan, active recovery, cross-training. 

Any of those can be good, but you can do a lot of damage by over-training or not healing enough. Too much unbalanced action and you can break down; not enough cohesion among your actions and you get middling trivial gains. 

That’s where operational skill comes in. It’s about those seemingly basic but utterly critical skills: scheduling, planning things out, communicating, checking and making adjustments periodically, etc. 

Much of our exploration of Upstream Effects has explored ideas for having better operations, but going a step further, I encourage you to see this as a discipline and train in it. 

It’s as simple as saying, “Ok, how do I ensure that all the right action happens over time? Over the next weeks, months, and even a year+?”  

If this way of thinking isn’t natural and automatic to you (it wasn’t to me, not at all), then learn from people who are naturally operationally skilled. I’m always extremely grateful I get to work on projects with Kai Zau, who is so operationally sound, and I’m constantly asking his opinion and learning from how he does things. Don’t try to just figure this out yourself if it’s not your forte; ask for guidance from people who are naturally highly organized and operational. 

5. Problems are normal and must be troubleshot and operationally fixed.

It blows my mind that people mention some problem that came up as an excuse for why they failed. 

“The stock market crashed.” 

“I got laid off.” 

“I got a foot injury.” 

“I got a sick.” 

Umm, yes, the stock market crashes, layoffs happen, injuries happen, illness happen. 

That’s part of the game.

You need to build your life so you can weather these types of events. Build safeguards so you’re okay even if the market crashes (no excessive leverage), even if you get laid off (savings + be in demand for your skill among good people), you get injured (have some cross-training ability and switch sports for a bit while healing), or illness (be ahead of schedule, not behind/frantic, so things don’t all break when setbacks occur). 

That quote by Peter Drucker is worth reflecting more deeply on –

  “Years ago when I first started out as a consultant, I had to learn how to tell a well-managed industrial plant from a poorly managed one—without any pretense to production knowledge. A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is "dramatic," a factory in which the "epic of industry" is unfolded before the visitor's eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine." 

This means troubleshooting problems when they come in, and put in long-term fixes . In other words, don’t just survive the layoff, analyze and figure out that the problem was exasperated by not having regular job and project offers (so get your skill up and increase your public profile) and a lack of savings (so build up savings). 

Problems are normal, but they don’t have to become crises. 

With skill, you convert crisis into routine. 

6. Defense matters. 

The forward-thinking aspect of “problems are normal and must be troubleshot” is “defense matters.” 

It’s easy for ambitious people to want to be expansionary, and to neglect to defend and consolidate what they already have. 

It’s hard to say, “I’m getting older, and I’ve had no health problems, but I should proactively put a stretching plan into place.” People don’t think that way; they’re caught up in their current problems… but then they rip their knee up, and now they’ve got to deal with the problem on a much larger and more unpleasant scale. 

As you take up new projects, hobbies, initiatives, and disciplines — do an analysis of what could go wrong, and put defensive measures in place.

We know diets fail, we know good habits get broken, we know about the variety of interruptions and nonsense can happen… all of these can be anticipated and defense measures can be taken. 

You can prepare verbal replies to well-meaning people trying to push junk food on you if you’re on a diet in advance. You can eat before you go out to a restaurant so you’re not hungry. Maybe you take up intermittent fasting and finish eating for the day at 2PM. 

The best CEOs I know all look for disruptions, interruptions, little risks, and existential risks and spend time mitigating them periodically. It’s not sexy and you don’t get hero points for nothing going wrong, but you do live a much better life. Defense matters. 

7. Mastery is a process. 

Blah blah blah, enjoy the process, blah blah blah — I won’t give you the speech, you’ve heard it before 

Frankly, I like to win and I like getting the outcomes I’ve been driving towards. I’m not purely in the “process” camp; I like results and sometimes being laser focused on results outperforms plodding along. 

But ambitious overdrive can lead to all sorts of self-hate and disappointment when it doesn’t work. 

And that’s when you remember it’s a process. 

Every time a habit falls off, or I spend my time poorly, or I backslide, or I neglect an initiative — and we all do it, don’t we? — I want to learn something and get a little stronger. 

I consider myself a student and practitioner of The Way, that elusive and grand thing, that encompasses everything. It’s not magical — it’s often as straightforward as choosing the right wood for the job in carpentry — but perhaps that’s almost all of life. 

Being “mastery-oriented” doesn’t cover The Way entirely, but it’s a good start. Statistics apply to me, problems happen, so I need to get better at my play over time — both personally (impulse control) and by setting the world up around me correctly (operations). 

And then — Adherence Rate. So much of Upstream Effects shouldn’t be seen as aiming for perfection, but of giving yourself more room and more opportunity to do great things tomorrow, next week, next month, and in the weeks and months and years beyond. 

Perfection isn’t needed. Do better than last week, last month, last year over time. Problems happen and deal with them. And never stray from The Way. 

Sebastian