#1 – Welcome to Scaling Metawork

Greetings, friend! I'm super happy you're here.

This is the very first edition of my newsletter, and it’s intentionally unpolished, because, after weeks of postponing, I finally remembered that in the beginning, quantity always beats quality.

SO! I decided to call the newsletter Scaling Metawork. What this means for me is searching for universal principles and tools for working, learning, and creating better, on the scale from individuals, through teams and organizations, to ecosystems and entire societies. To that end, I want to learn about the following 4 topics and share my findings and reflections with you:

• Personal metawork (i.e. topics like productivity, personal knowledge management, or effective learning) – This is something I've been interested in ever since my gaming addiction days, as I was looking for ways to get myself to work. 10 years later, I still love this topic, because I believe the most important and transferable skill is the ability to acquire and apply new skills.

• Collective metawork (i.e. topics like organization design, organizational learning & change management, strategy, etc) – Even the best functioning individuals can't do much inside a dysfunctional system, so how can we orchestrate collaboration in a way that maximizes the emergent benefits and minimizes the problems?

• Entrepreneurship (i.e. topics like sales, marketing, or writing) – I don't see a better way to understand both personal and collective metawork than working with clients, learning about their challenges, and collaborating to solve them. But to get clients, I need to get good at client acquisition. And because I've learned that writing is thinking, I want to share what I learn. Plus, client acquisition is a key objective of every firm, and entrepreneurship might very well be the most holistic way of self-expression through work, so I think this dovetails beautifully with metawork proper.

• Philosophy & sensemaking – I considered several titles for this topic because it is kind of a catch-all, but calling it just “Miscallenous” felt too underwhelming. On the other hand, including philosophy in the title initially felt too ambitious, because I’m no philosopher and I won’t (usually) be dissecting the works of Plato or Aristotle either.
  That said, I do think that the nigh-impenetrable abstractions that we usually associate with philosophy are ultimately meant to provide tiny, practical pieces of wisdom for being a better person, and I do very much enjoy exploring those.
  I also feel like tightly coupled with philosophy is sensemaking, i.e. various ways of attempting to understand the trends shaping the presence and future of our society. Because everything is connected, every individual and organization lives within the society... and because none of the above matters if we can't prevent the existential risks humanity is facing.

For now, my aim for the structure of the newsletter is an essay (replaced today with this intro), a curation section of the most interesting articles and podcasts episodes I've found over the week, and perhaps a short reflection of what I want to improve in my own work. Now onwards to the dig-ups!

Personal metawork

• David Goggins is... hardcore. Listening to him talk makes me realize how much I'm still leaving on the table. He's basically to Chuck Norris what Chuck Norris is to regular mortals.

  • My favorite part: Turning excuses into fuel

Collective metawork

• On this episode of the Knowledge Project, Aaron Dignan talks about better ways of organizing. He is a founder of an Organization design company The Ready, author of the Brave New Work book, and co-host of the Brave New Work podcast. And since he and his company are fans of self-management like me, he's basically the ideal me in 10 years or so.

  • My favorite part: How organizations go from too much chaos to too much order

Entrepreneurship

• A Twitter thread about growing on Twitter, explaining five key elements: good bio, valuable Twitter threads, consistent tweets, demonstrating competence & giving bigger accounts a reason to help you out (essentially by DM-ing them and providing value for them). It's easier said than done, but I like to see this as a kind of benchmark to which I'm aspiring over time, as I figure out ways to become more efficient with creating content.

Philsophy & sense-making

An essay on how AI will shape the future and how our society needs to adapt, by none other than Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E)

• Excerpts:

  • In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. In the next decade, they will do assembly-line work and maybe even become companions. And in the decades after that, they will do almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of “everything.”

  • We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. In other words, the best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. This is not a new idea, but it will be newly feasible as AI grows more powerful, because there will be dramatically more wealth to go around. The two dominant sources of wealth will be 1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and 2) land, which has a fixed supply.

Reflection

The most important realization was that there is nothing more important for my entrepreneurial ambitions than just getting started with the newsletter and tweeting. Everything else will fall into place.

Also, I want to hang out more in communities of like-minded people. The inspiration (both motivation and ideas) this can provide is in my estimation more powerful than any other single method. To that end, I'm happy to report that a digital community seems to also work very well, so I'm excited about joining both the Digital Economics course/community, and the Posilovna pro Changemakery mastermind ("Changemaker Gym", only for Czech speakers).

So that’s it for this week. I’m grateful that you stuck around and I do hope you enjoyed the read. If you have any questions or comments, positive or (even better) negative, be sure to let me know!

See you next week

Chris