Let’s call this pattern “show-up sticky systems” — complex systems whose evolution is *entirely* a function of who shows up regularly. We’ve had strong and sincere participants show up and participate with intensity for a while, but sadly very little of what they do “sticks”
Conversation
This means it’s not just hard to truly join, it’s hard to start anything new. Many people show up, are excited to find a decent level of existing participation, and imagine it’s available as a social “resource” to get interesting things done. Yes and no.
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Yes, if you’re grok the “show up” frame. Say you show up for our Friday governance studies chat regularly for 3-4 weeks, and then propose a new track on say geology. You might get a nibble. Show up for 8 weeks and incept/notice geology conversations, much more likely to take root
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In fact, so long as it’s not ultra-specialized, the topic doesn’t matter. People with a time-abundance habit-formation mentality tend to be rather indiscriminate in what they sign up for. The clincher is not the topic but a reliable driver and a (low) critical mass of 2-3 people.
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Hmm. Just hit me that this is also how my consulting practice works for me at its best. If you want to hire me for 20h but use my time in a 1h/week or even 1h/month way, I can do vastly more for you than if you try to have me do 3 full-time “leadership retreat” days.
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I suspect the common feature is compound interest on mutual learning. You get to know each other as well as the shared topic, in compounding ways. Not least because you shallow-sample an evolutionary trajectory rather than doing a deep snapshot.
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For eg. We’ve been doing our rover project for ~2y now. It’s our most “intense” project since the weekly call is zoom rather than audio, and has presentations. Very slow. We’ve logged ~150-200 each I’d guess. 100h shared talk, 100h solo work…
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…But I think we’ve all learned more and different things about rovers and robotics than we would have if had done an intense 200h “rover bootcamp” over 1 month. We’ve sort of built a sustainable rover-ing “habit” as a hobby.
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Actually, an intense rover bootcamp *now* would be high value, though it would be hard or impossible to arrange (flip side of a lifestyle of many 1h/week commitments is it’s harder to just get away from your life to immerse yourself in 1 thing)
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Replying to
That’s already/better done with the weeklies
In-person bonding stuff is less important in this mode. I doubt we’ll ever do a yc event or conference.
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