Venkatesh Rao

And finally, Level 4, which I'd say is 10^3 harder than a basic community, is a *production* community. They are incredibly rare. The only 2 I can think of online are Wikipedia and Github. Getting a big group of people not just *transacting* things, but *making* new things

The "fit" moment is what I've labeled a "collaboration flywheel" moment, where a robustly generalizable mechanism kicks in and starts catalyzing all sorts of collective creative effort, not just isolated things. There is often a discovery of a key mechanism underlying the moment.

I think for GitHub it was the invention of the pull request. For Wikipedia, it was... I guess the basic wiki mechanism of editing being as low-friction as reading.

tbf, when I was involved in casually instigating the yak collective last year, I hadn't thought this through. I had the initiative miscalibrated as about as difficult as getting a decent Facebook group or meetup going. ie I underestimated the challenge by a factor of 10^3

Building communities that *produce* is 10x harder than building communities that *trade*, which in turn is 10x harder than building communities that *buy*, which is 10x harder than communities that talk. And even *talk* communities ain't easy. Failure rate is like 95%.

In hindsight, it was dumb to not realize from the get-go how hard production community building is. It's not like building a startup, but like growing an ecosystem, like Silicon Valley. Yep... getting something like Wikipedia or GitHub off the ground = building Silicon Valley.

Level 4 is the level at which the adage "Rome wasn't built in a day" applies. In my graph, I've estimated the "collaboration flywheel moment" at the 5y mark, which seems about right. Effort peaks around the 7y mark, and you don't hit the sustainable plateau till like year 10.

The individual effort-rate is actually the same across all levels. Everybody still has only ~16 waking hours in a day, and whether you are building cathedrals or just doing laundry, humans still average only about 100-150 watts of power output. So where does the difference lie?

The difference lies in accepting horizons of commitment. To build a production community, you have to say to yourself something like "so long as this is alive, I'm going to stay involved in it, for at least 10 years."

One of the projects I'm helping kick off at the @yak_collective is literally a 10-year project: the yak rover, with a goal of getting a rover to mars. And yeah, at this stage it is a borderline a joke, but there's a few of us actually getting started...

I have no idea how far we'll get. Certainly if we actually make it to Mars, far more talented people than me will have to get involved. I'm pretty much just futzing around with 3d printing toys and learning to control motors with arduinos. Hardly a space program.

But at whatever level of ability I can bring to the party, I've sort of decided I'm willing to keep tinkering and muddling through on this project for 10 years, while I have some good company. It's like deciding to write a difficult book as opposed to a quick-turn fad book.

I'm not very ambitious, and am pretty lazy and mediocre as far as average effort rate goes. But I do tend to stick with things for really long. Most of my current projects are years old. Some are over a decade old. So I'm optimistic :D

ie, it's not a sprint, it's not a marathon, it's not a "heavy lift" single herculean effort. It's simply the willingness to keep generally heading in a particular direction, at whatever pace/duty cycle (on-off pattern) you can manage, *for a really long time.*

Funny how sheer quantities of lightly committed "involvement time" can be a substitute for a LOT of rarer, more impressive traits like intelligence, peak effort, knowledge, insightfulness etc. More time substitutes dumb trial and error for basically everything.

As the saying goes, 80% of life is just showing up. And if you decide you're just going to show up in a certain activity for long enough, many interesting things can happen that you would have NO talent for under shorter time horizons.

Can't recall where I saw this, but aptitude can be defined as the time it takes you to learn something. It's not that a genius can learn things you can't. Most of the time, it just means it will take you 10-100x longer to get there.

Tortoise-hare something something. If you're not a genius, just check out how long it takes your friendly neighborhood genius to do something and simply commit to doing it too, over 10x time.

The thing that accomplishes that being a genius doesn't is open up potential for collaboration, since there's a lot more people with ordinary levels of aptitude than geniuses. You can collaborate with everybody else who is at your level. You can do overall bigger things.

This sounds like yet another sermon about long-term thinking, but it isn't. It's a sermon about long-term *commitment.* It doesn't take much upfront thinking. I mean, fairly dim people seem to get married at 22 without much thought and make a successful 30-40 marriage out of it.

It sounds extreme, but it actually isn't. The world is full of patterns of almost casual long-term commitments: marriages, 30-year mortgages, having kids, picking a major in college...

We tend to be afraid of long-term involvement commitments because we tend to think they need to be heavily overspecified up front. But a 10 year involvement commitment does not involve a 10 year *plan.* All it implies is picking a direction you'll be muddling-through towards.

The "plan" for a good marriage is basically "stay involved." The plan for being a successful parent is "stay an involved parent for 18 years." There are no milestones and detailed gantt charts.

It's a milder version of "burning bridges." Once you decide you're going to "stay involved" in something, there's a certain stability of mutual expectations for everyone who makes that decision. You start thinking in indefinitely iterated prisoner's dilemma mode.