Conversation

Do you have a surplus resources project? As in, if you happen to have extra time/money/energy that’s where it will go by default? The drip tray under your workflows so to speak? If so, what is it?
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This is upstream of Clay Shirky notion of cognitive surplus. That’s surplus you kinda don’t know what to do with and return to the market via some large scale surplus mining scheme. Human hashpower pools making humancoin. I’m talking surplus you do have private designs for.
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Your surplus project carries your strategy. I’ve often used the overflow metaphor to explain Boydian/Blitzkrieg idea of Schwerpunkt. If the hierarchy of local commanders all have their own missions and expectations contracts, why burden them with awareness of the overall goal?
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So they know where to direct surpluses! Strategy gets easier with abundance, till it becomes trivial. People get lucky unpredictably. Luck creates surplus which if aggregated makes things much easier at some locus. Choosing that locus = strategy.
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It wouldn’t be wrong to define strategy as “choosing where you want to get as lucky as possible, and arranging for your luck to aggregate there.” For personal stuff, this is really where you want time and energy reserves to flow, and efficiencies elsewhere to cash out.
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A strategic center of gravity should be where you create localized abundance and “fat” so even if you’re sloppy, wasteful, and inefficient, you still win. You do NOT want strategy to be an optimization problem. You want it to be a mediocritization problem.
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Intellectually strategy is about being good at spotting cheats and unfair advantages Emotionally it’s about lazy people looking for ways to remain as lazy as possible when the situation seems to call for unreasonable amounts of hard work
Replying to
Sisyphus’ punishment was being denied the freedom to strategize even though he was allowed moments of reprieve between the uphill legs.
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