On Skill as Efficiency

2024.11.10

LXXIII

Or how I’m going to get away with talking about literally everything in terms of efficiency for the rest of my life—what’s more efficient than only ever talking about one thing?

Efficiency Worldview

Last week, we talked about the Efficiency Worldview, built on the following three axioms:

1. All currencies, means of trade, and anything of “value” represent stored energy. 

2. Efficiency is a measure of how little energy it takes to achieve some end. 

3. The natural order of things is to decay. 

We’re going to expand the world view a bit with another axiom:

4. The more skilled someone is, the more efficient they are at achieving some end. 

Now, if we were to drop in our definition of efficiency, the sentence would expand to something like this:

The more skilled someone is, the less energy it takes them to achieve some end. 

Skill simply becomes a measure for how efficient someone is at a given task. As you become increasingly skilled at something and persistently store the energy expended during training*, it is easier for you to do that thing with less energy in the future.

*Not storing energy in a loose hippy way, damnit, storing energy by altering the structure of your brain.

Accrued Effort And Energy

We’ll go back to one of my favorite apocryphal anecdotes:

A woman sees Picasso, perhaps in his early 50s, doodling on a napkin at an outdoor café. Eventually, Picasso stands up and crumples the napkin, about to throw it away. The woman, in a frenzy, stops him.

“Please, can I buy the napkin from you?” 

Picasso grins. “Certainly… it will be $20,000.”

“What!? It only took you 5 minutes to make it.”

Now, Picasso looks up to the sky and around him, as if he’s actively seeing the tens of thousands of hours he spent on his craft. “No, Madame, it took me 40 years.”

In terms of our Efficiency Worldview, Picasso spent 40 years expending energy and effort on his craft, art.

That energy and effort doesn’t go away. It’s stored in a persistent fashion in what it’s done to Picasso’s knowledge base and brain. He has more “skill”, in that now, an image of the quality it would take a mediocre artist weeks or months to draw, he can effortlessly construct in 5 minutes on a whim.

In line with the post about binary outcomes from a few weeks ago, you’re not expending energy to only get something at the end; the energy expended can be made to be valuable in itself. 

Learning the Hard Way

There is the hard, classic way of learning by doing, through many hours and concentrated trial and error. 

It took me 1.5 months to land on BirdDog’s current database interface solution. I had tried at least four different things over that period, and learned a lot. The current solution, for our use case, is much better than the other solutions we tried, or at least my implementations of them.

Really, when we started BirdDog, I didn’t know anything about databases. Had I been a more experienced engineer, I likely would have gotten to the solution we have now in a few hours of toying with the problem. Instead, it was long, drawn out, and painful. Which is fine, because severe inefficiency is the tax we pay as we overcome inexperience. 

Now, it would take me significantly less energy to come to this solution if I had this exact problem again. Much more importantly, it will take me less energy to come to a solution for most general database problems; after all, I now have something of a functional understanding of the tools. 

All of that trial and error has been distilled and stored in the altered structure of my brain.*

*Axiom 1 of the Efficiency Worldview allows for this interchangeability between energy and physical things. Yes, there is certainly a quip about homoiconicity to be had here.

Learning the Easy Way

There is a much easier and lower cost way to become more skilled than expending your own energy. That’s simply by borrowing the knowledge that other people expended great energy  to “discover” and store. 

Back at my last company, when I was trying to close a deal, we were going to double the price of a contract but add on 8x as many users for the customer.* 

I thought this would be a no brainer for the customer. However, I talked to a sales mentor of mine. I explained the situation, and he told me exactly what the prospect was going to say: 

“Noah, they’re going to say, ‘I know you’re offering a lot more users, but we had budgeted for $n, not for 2x $n.’”

He also told me exactly what I should say in response:

“I understand that it’s more than you had budgeted for, but I also know that we discussed your average closed deal is worth about $x, which is three times what we’re charging. Based on the results we’ve already seen with one user during the trial, do you think that with eight members of your team on the platform, there’s anyway that the investment doesn’t pay for itself?”

He told me to do this to refocus on the value the software would provide for the team, not the price.

And I said those things, as instructed, and we closed the deal. 

If the mentor had not told me that, in all honesty, I have no idea what I would have done, but it likely would have involved negotiation and a lower price.

By listening to a skilled salesperson, I was efficiently able to close a deal at a higher price than I otherwise would have been able to. If I never listened to mentors or read books, that piece of wisdom could have taken months or years of expended energy for me to find it on my own.

*We valued feedback from more users more than we did fixing on a steep per user price we had quoted three weeks ago.

Learning the in between way

The above example made me feel like the mentor was a literal wizard. 

That being said, if I was not already learning to sell and getting reps in, the advice likely would have fallen on deaf ears. 

As an example, one piece of advice it’s taken me a very long time to appreciate the nuance and power of is “Listen to your users.”

Despite “knowing” this advice for a long time, it wasn’t until I started getting reps in talking to users that I could even begin listening to them. Even with reps, it’s still hard. Sometimes, your users will complain about the lack of features when really, the core functionality or even just user workflow is the problem.

Knowing this information certainly gave my entrepreneurial skill set a boost. However, to get really skilled at building a good product, you also have to expend energy trying to implement such advice and seeing it in action. 

Perhaps in a year I’ll be an expert at the skill of listening to users and it will become second nature (low energy expenditure), but, right now, I’m still applying a lot of energy to improve the skill, along with learning from experts.

*Information is technology

Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. It’s all energy, bro.

Live Deeply,