Decades

The Unit of Underestimation

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Source: Steinberg

In 1995, Bill Gates was 40 years old and had been running Microsoft as a public company for just 9 years. The company was worth $50 billion. That same year, he wrote a book called The Road Ahead. If you were to read the 1995 edition of that book now, you would notice that there was one glaring thing missing: the internet.

At the time, he believed that "the technology for 'killer applications' was inadequate to lure consumers to the Internet." By 1995, there weren't even a million websites yet. However, he quickly realized his mistake and adjusted course. In 1996, he heavily revised the book to include a whole chapter on the internet, front and center.

At the end of the 1996 edition, he acknowledged the rapid shift in a new afterword he included. The very first sentence of that afterword has been very much on my mind this week:

"People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten."

I've been thinking about decades because this week marks the end of a particularly meaningful decade for me, and that has caused me to reflect.

My Decade: 2014 to 2024

This week, my wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. The last 10 years have encapsulated the vast majority of defining moments in my life. Getting married, selling my first company, discovering my career (figuring out what a VC is), having all my kids (last one is coming in 3 weeks), and starting this blog (last week I passed 360K words written, or roughly 4.5 books).

My conscious life has been made up of three different decades.

• From 2 to 12 I was setting myself up. Establishing habits and behaviors, social ticks and biases. Many of the characteristics about myself; my sense of humor, my interests and dislikes, were all shaped when I was a kid.

• From 12 to 22 I was pressure testing myself. Figuring out what actually mattered to me and who I wanted to be. This decade included my formative high school years where I started to look like myself and more importantly my mission. Two years of talking to people about my faith that defined a lot of what I choose to believe and how I live my life.

When I look back at those first two decades, they feel like a sprint. I did so much in what felt like so little time. But I feel the implications of those choices every day in who I am now, for better or for worse.

• From 22 to 32 I was settling in for the long-haul. While my first two decades would establish things that are difficult to change, but not impossible, my third decade was setting in stone certain things about me. I am a father, a husband, and a Christian.

As I look at my peers, whether people I grew up with or got to know later in life, not everyone sees those same things as concrete. They've changed what they believe about God or family. Changed religions, gotten divorced. They might have drastically changed careers or personalities. And don't get me wrong, change is always on the road map. But I don't intend to change any of those things about myself. I want to stay a husband. I want to stay a father. I want to stay a Christian.

My 20-Year Hill

By 2014 I had started college, dropped out, started a company, and gone back to school. I was in the process of studying pretty hard to try and finish college, teaching classes in the BYU business school, and stumbling my way through the process of selling my first company. As a result, I found myself in the BYU library into the wee hours of the morning. When I would walk home in the dark, I would stop at the top of a hill that overlooked the bulk of Provo and stare out into the twinkling lights and get a little pensive.

I started calling that hill my "20-year hill" because I would think about all these choices I was making: what should I do after school? Should I sell the little company I had built? Who should I marry? And I would think about the consequences of those choices 20 years from then. I imagined myself coming back to that hill 20 years later, and wondering who I would be by that point.

Well, now I'm 10 years deep into those 20 years. Who am I? Maybe I'll save the details for my non-public journal.

But I will say that, reflecting back on the last 10 years, I would have done well to spend more time thinking about my life, plans, and goals in 10 year scopes instead of 1-year scopes. I look back at an old "bucket list" I wrote from 2020 and it had things like "finish personal finance spreadsheet" or "organize boxes in closet."

...C'mon Kyle. Get it together.

I'm sitting here at 7 AM chuckling to myself as I write about this, thinking how dumb that is. "Oh, a bucket list of things I want to do before I die? Sure would love to organize those closet boxes."

If I were better at analyzing my life in decades, I would certainly have a better barometer for the things that are actually worth having. The things that are worth spending decades working towards.

Anything Worth Having Is Worth Waiting

I recently read a great book called The Idea Factory about Bell Labs in its golden age. In it, there's a great line about the point where the people at Bell Labs realized they were building for the long-term, not the quick buck:

"The company’s executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: 'Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed. [They] would measure the company’s progress in decades instead of years.'"

You hear stories about companies like Patagonia setting up 100 year business plans, or businesses like the 33K in Japan that have been around for 100+ years (the most in the world). And you realize that centuries are a reality for businesses the way that decades are a reality for people. Companies like the New York Stock Exchange are 200+ years old, and still kicking.

Long-term thinking suddenly makes short-term thinking appear incredibly silly. I still remember some of the life plans I've white-boarded out for myself and how they were so very wrong. They were riddled with recency bias. I had met someone at a conference that I liked and thought "this will be my whole personality." Thinking back on that fact reminded me of what I wrote about in The Rising Generation almost exactly a year ago:

"Kids absorb what they get exposed to. Especially before kids get into their teenage years, ego and paranoia haven't set in yet, and so they are able to be uninhibited sponges soaking up everything they see, hear, and experience."

I guess I've still got that kid in me where I let recency and availability dictate what I think my future can entail. So how do you do it? How do you plan in decades? After doing a bunch of digging around, I came across two sources that gave me a lot of ideas.

First? Steward Brand and The Long Now Foundation.

Second? The Optimist's Telescope by Bina Venkataraman.

Some of the key takeaways:

Plan To Be Alive

One of the things that Venkataraman says in her book is that "Foresight is not about predicting the future; it's about taking responsibility for the future." If I want to be able to plan for the next decade, I have to take responsibility for that decade. And one of the first steps in seizing that responsibility is to ensure I'll be around.

While there are a lot of things I feel proud of over the last decade, from my kids to my marriage to my career, one of the things I'm not proud of is my health. In the pursuit of working a lot and having side projects, like this blog, my health has largely taken a back seat. I've been trying to change that over the last year or so, but I took years to let my body go, it doesn't just bounce right back.

I've also thought ahead to my latter decades. When I turn 50, my youngest kid (a son we're expecting in a few weeks) will be 18 years old. That means my wife and I will be empty-nesters with potentially 30-40 years left to live! But when I envision all the things my wife and I will do when our kids are out of the house, the daydream comes to a screeching nightmare if I imagine that my health is terrible and I can barely get around, let alone travel or live life to its fullest.

So before I can even start to envision what my life could entail over the next 10 years, I first have to take responsibility today for what my health will be like.

Invest In Relationships

A old proverb that the Long Now Foundation quotes frequently says "If you’re planning for a year, plant rice. If you’re planning for a decade, plant trees. If you’re planning for a century, plant people." I've written frequently about this idea of the natural selection of time, which effectively means letting opportunities have the chance to survive or fade away. But when I think back to what it means to "let opportunities survive," it always ends up coming back to people.

I started my first company because I kept in touch with a friend that had the original idea. I started my second company because I encouraged a friend who was trying to find an approach to social innovation he was excited about. I got my first job because I had kept in touch with some guys who were starting a club at BYU. I got my second job because I was willing to DM people on Linkedin.

I started writing this blog because I was willing to listen to advice from my friend Rex Woodbury, even though I was jealous of him! I work at Contrary today because I kept in touch with a guy that had cold emailed me 6 years earlier!

Keeping in touch with people, building relationships, and seeing what comes of it. That is the most powerful way to let positive forces start to take shape in your life. Without those relationships, you're left to your own devices. And lets face it... most of us are kind of mid on our own.

"We are Gods."

Stewart Brand's Wikipedia page introduced me to a great story I hadn't heard before:

"In 1966, while on an LSD trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, San Francisco, Brand became convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would change how we think about the planet and ourselves."

He campaigned NASA to release a photo of the whole earth, believing it would bring about "a sense of shared destiny." When those photos were eventually released, Brand put them on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog.

Source: Wikipedia

In that magazine's statement of purpose, Stewart Brand wrote something that is not only fascinating, but will perk up the ears of any Mormon readers as well:

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

Recognizing the unrelenting potential that each person has is a critical ingredient to planning in decades. If we shy away from what we're capable of then we won't aim for the stars or the moon, we'll just be happy with a half inch vertical.

Once, in 2017, I went back to my 20-year hill to reflect on the first few years of my journey. While writing in my journal about some of my thinking as a new parent at that time, I came across a quote from Muhammad Ali that I hadn't heard before:

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

Dreams are boundless not as a defect, but by design. What good are dreams if we bound them in reality? In current limitations? Thinking in days will always have bounds. Thinking in weeks will feel constrained. Even thinking in years will have limited cycles. But imagine your life a decade from now. There are very few limits to what you can accomplish.

Dreaming the dream of your god-like potential allows you to raise the bar of your ambition. But then you have to bring that down into reality when it comes to what you do day-to-day. What do I have to do today to make my decade dreams a reality?

Components of Compounding

I recently read Ryan Holiday's Discipline is Destiny where he talks about the power of self-control. He had a line that struck me about the way the choices we make have the power to compound over a lifetime:

"It's the journey of a lifetime. In fact, that's the way to think about all of this: How much progress could you make if you made just a little each day over the course of an entire life? What might this journey look like, where might it lead, if each bit of progress you made presented both the opportunity and the obligation to make a little more progress, and you seized those opportunities, you lived up to those obligations, each and every time?"

Similarly, a key point in the mission of the Long Now Foundation has to do with the benefits of long-term thinking. The idea is that long-term thinking means taking seriously what might happen in the future, so that it might guide what we do in the present.

In my life, the ultimate example of the strength of compounding is in this blog I'm writing now. When I started in January 2022, I established a simple goal that I would adhere to: don't miss a week. All I had to do was write each week. Didn't matter if it was good or bad, long or short, relevant or not. Just write. Fast forward to today; this post marks 141 weeks of writing without fail. Never missing a week. Sometimes I wrote on Thursday or Saturday or Sunday. But I wrote.

And now, like I said before, I've written over 360K words. The average book is ~75K words, so I've written 4.5 books in the last 2.5 years.

Therefore, What?

Planning to be alive, investing in relationships, dreaming god-like dreams, and developing the components of compounding. It all sounds a bit fluffy, right? Planning in decades can feel very amorphous and like it will never come.

But back in 2014, standing on that hill on the edge of BYU, I thought 2024 would never come and it came. I can feel myself balking at the idea that 2034 will ever get here. But I can also see myself, in 2034, reading these words, thinking "and I still didn't buy Bitcoin?" 🙃

The question now is what will I do as a result of this reflection? What will the NEXT 10 years look like?

As many of you might know from reading my writing, I'm a big West Wing fan. There's an episode where President Bartlett is in a presidential debate, and his staff has been thinking about "ten word answers." Simple, pithy, memorable responses. In the debate, Bartlett's opponent responds to a question about taxes with just such a ten word answer: "the American people know how to spend their money better than the federal government does." Sure, not ten words exactly. But punchy.

Bartlett's response is, to me, a gospel song of reverence to the reality of nuance. Ten word answers are not enough:

"Here's my question. What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. 'How are we going to do it?’ Give me ten after that; I'll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while... Every once in a while there's a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that there aren't very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."

Embracing the nuance of life is what makes dreaming so much more important. There are going to be LOTS of things that come up that I didn't expect. But rather than shrinking from the complexity, I embrace it. I try and plan for my wildest dreams so that, even as things ebb and flow, I can be living a modest dream rather than a dreary reality.

In 10 years, it will be 2034. In September 2034, I'll be 42 years old. My kids will be 17, 15, 12, and 9. I'll have been married for 20 years! What will I hope my fourth decade will have entailed?

• I will still be best friends with my wife.

• I will have a unique relationship with each of my children.

• I will have traveled extensively with my family.

• I will be living up to the expectations of my religion.

• I will have built another business.

• I will have built publications in homage to the greats of the past, from Wired in its golden age to Scientific American, and beyond.

• I will have written a book (maybe two).

• I will have made a dent in my personal library and documented it.

• I will be healthy enough that concerns for my health don't limit any activity I might want to do.

• I will have control of my appetite, so that I eat to achieve the long-term health that I want, not the short-term satisfaction that I crave.

• I will wake up early every morning so that "I have time to turn my ideas into reality."

• I will be unafraid of interacting with anyone; my success will speak for itself, and my self-security will make up the difference. I won't be obsessed with posturing.

• I will be heavily involved with religious apologetics, both financially and functionally; making capable arguments for why I believe what I believe.

• I will have taken steps towards "building a city," whatever that means to me by then.

See you in 10 years!

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