Hofstadter’s Law: Stop Underestimating the Work

A therapist asked me if I could shift my mindset from ‘achievement’ as the goal to ‘effort’ as the goal, and I can’t stop thinking about that.

I’m aware that I look like a complete psychopath from the outside. I trained myself to work 80-90 hours a week after realizing everything in business takes so much more effort than anyone ever accounts for. In fact, it is so common that people underestimate how much work or how long something will take that someone named a law for it.

Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

Nobody realizes they are underestimating everything, and everyone is doing it constantly. It’s a wonder that humans can be as competent as we are and still be completely naive to our own patterns of behavior. Unfortunately, there are real consequences for being naive, at least at this time in history.

Throughout human existence, entrepreneurship has been a few people sprinting to make progress while the rest of the world stands still or bursts into chaos. From an entrepreneurial stand point, we’ve been running a marathon, to eventually cross the finish line into an age of abundance. Every entrepreneur is trying to create their own little ecosystem of abundance, and on a long enough timeline those little ecosystems will pop up more and more, getting more resilient with each market change. This cycle will repeat until we have created so much value that we can automate goods and services. Once goods and services are automated (which is what an economy is built on) we will have achieved abundance for the first time. That comes with its own set of problems, which I’ll gladly take over our current issues, but until then, we’ve got to innovate our way out of this broken world.

WE UNDERESTIMATE EFFORT

Every entrepreneur that tried to make it will tell you that it’s so much harder than they could have ever imagined. Small business owners, which are the majority of business owners, are typically operating with very limited resources. The fact that anyone can make a company run at all is amazing, considering the enormous effort and resources that takes. It’s the most surprising lesson of entrepreneurship—realizing that the entire population is underestimating the amount of work it takes to make society function, let alone improve.

For example, it usually takes an entrepreneur multiple decades, if ever, to create enough abundance to give an entire staff a comfy lifestyle. From the outside it looks like the company is growing and they need people to help manage that growth, but what is actually happening is that the *people* inside the company are growing as they learn to handle capacity. And since it’s true that how fast the company grows depends on how well the people in that company can hold capacity, it’s also true that a company will *not* grow if no one has a greater capacity today than they had yesterday. If capacity itself is a combination of skills, character traits and beliefs, then people must actively seek out growth in those areas if they are going to help grow a company. If it’s only the owner experiencing growth then the company can still grow, but the owner will be a bottle neck until they are not the only person on the team that’s learning to increase their capacity. Or, the owner will create so many systems that other people can use them in place of their own capacity. The ladder is getting much easier with the new technology available.

There are lots of businesses where no one is growing and so the business continues to spend money just to stay alive. This works for everyone in the business except the owner who has to foot the bill every month that eats at their profit margin. I’ve been this business owner and I’d rather eat dirt than ever be in that scenario again. If you want to see a master class on this whole concept, go watch Hells Kitchen and see their restaurant turn arounds. Then imagine that 75% of business are running like those and see how it changes how you think about business. If you’re an employee, this is just as useful.

What happens is this: the business owner is putting effort and money into the business every month. The employees don’t see any need to grow and the business owner hasn’t been able to help their employees connect their success to the company. It’s a disaster and it’s the reality of most small businesses. Ideally, every person would learn to improve themselves and then the team shares in the wealth created from those improvements. That is not the reality of most workplaces though.

WE ARE MORE CAPABLE THAN WE KNOW

There are levels of hard in this world that are beyond what we can comprehend. If you are one of the lucky ones that lost something so incredibly valuable to you, that you woke up every day for months or years on end shattered, and you learned from it and you lived to tell the tale, you know what I’m talking about. We believe the stories we’ve been told, until something breaks our hearts so deeply that we cannot bear to believe the stories any longer, so we trod our own path rather than die from sorrow. The people that make it out less scathed were either lucky enough to have safety nets to catch their fall, or smart enough to create safety nets before something went terribly wrong. When something extremely hard happens to someone, beyond what they thought was possible (which happens to everyone eventually), the amount of privilege they have will determine how far they fall. And so privilege is the amount of safety net someone has when shit hits the fan.

ON PRIVILEGE

Privilege is potential. It is not static. Privilege is the sum of time, money and/or energy available to a person, that can be used to soften the blow of pain inflicted upon that person by any source. Privilege can be used up and run out. Privilege can be bought, and it can be created. We should all aim to increase our own privilege in order to make the world a better place. It’s vital that we stop wasting so much time looking at other people’s privilege as a reason to not develop more of our own.

There have never been enough resources in the world to make everyone comfortable. It used to be that everybody knew that you had to work hard if you wanted to be happy, healthy and wealthy. But at some point along the way we forgot that we have to fight for a great life. The expectation that these things should come easy is what causes people so much disappointment, and keeps them from making choices that could turn their lives around, and make them a positive force for the people around them, which in turn can change the world.

Every single one of us is a participant in this reality that came before us, and that will persist after us. We have a responsibility to solve what’s ours to solve, regardless if it is not a mess we made. Humans do not live long enough to be as entitled to say “that’s not my mess.” And technology is moving too fast for humans to say “that’s not my mess.” The times are asking us to step the fork up.

It’s overwhelming to be born into a developing world like ours, where so many things are still broken. As we have seen in capitalism, there are some signs of abundance among us, but most people can’t discern abundance from greed, so they choose to believe that greed runs the world, which makes them powerless to change themselves, because limiting beliefs must be shattered as the foundation for change to occur in any one person, let alone a nation.

If you have big dreams, if you want a good life, then you have to be prepared to fight for every inch of progress. Nothing is given freely. The world owes us nothing. The sooner we can realize that nobody is coming to save us, and it’s entirely up to us to become better, the sooner we win.

So yes, we should be proud of our efforts, but we should also expect to work hard for the things we want, if those things don’t come easily. Consider that gratitude is the ability to recognize our privileges. If we could all be so lucky to find ourselves in a gratitude loop, where we recognize our own gifts and continue to invest in ourselves and amplify those gifts, we’d do more for ourselves and humanity than we could ever imagine.

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Hofstadter’s Law: Stop Underestimating the Work