Good morning from beautiful Deer Valley,
Every year, I try to go to a few places for big perspective shifts. I find I run out of interesting (to me) ideas when I don’t change my frame of reference every now and then. And I think there’s some science to support this but I don’t have it on hand right now.
There are many ways to achieve perspective shifts, some more dependable than others. For instance (ordered by dependability, not recommendations):
- Doing hallucinogens
- Living abroad
- Spending time in person with a niche community you’re not a member of
- Studying an online community you’re not a member of
- Reading a book
Sundance is one of those opportunities to spend IRL time with a niche community. Nobody here is talking about Bitcoin, which is a welcome change in environment for someone who is constantly surrounded by crypto talk. But they are interested in creating new and exciting things that will be beloved by the masses. So hopefully I’ll absorb some of that and bring it home with me.
On to the post:
Fake it until you make it (or go to jail)
If you’re a student evaluated on your test scores, you’re going to focus on doing well on those tests. If you’re an entrepreneur evaluated on your user growth numbers, you’re going to focus on increasing user growth. In both cases, you want to impress some evaluator who is using a metric–test scores, growth numbers–as a predictor of something else that is harder to measure (learning and probability of success respectively). These metrics are heuristics.
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