Maximising Macro Leverage through Optimised Micro Performance

This title was generated through GPT-3.

As I began writing this article, I was thinking about a suitable title. Rather than doing it the old fashioned way I decided to use the tool that embeds the philosophy of this article itself.

Not too bad huh.

Anyways, I’ve been seeing a lot about GPT-3 recently and what started off as an initial dismissal of “another AI trend” has now become something that’s making me think a bit deeper about what the future of work and people really is.

If you zoom out from crypto, you consistently see a theme of extreme leverage possessed by very small teams. That’s mainly possible because you have one ledger (barring cross chain complications) and lots of things are handled for you as a developer. The internet was the first step up in humanity to give unprecedented scale to an individual. Crypto then decided to 10x in the realm of money. AI feels like it’s reaching a point where the combined leverage a single individual is unimaginable.

The canvas and design space is expanding before our eyes.

Where this becomes even more interesting is thinking about how this impacts team and organisations moving forward. Typically in the history of “scaling a company” the easiest answer is to simply hire more people. However, I think in the future this is going to be the sub-optimal and O(n) way to scale an organisation. The winners are already starting to realise this and will continue to exploit this feature. What if you could scale an organisation simply by:

• Having individuals that are capable of thinking deeply about what they’re doing

• Give said individuals tools of leverage to make outsized impact

The obvious pushback is always “but at the end of the day you need more people if you want to build more”. This is a classic example of being stuck in the past. The question shouldn’t be how you can build more, but how do you build the least to get the most impact out of what you’re doing. Furthermore, if you do need to build a lot of X, instead you can focus on building a system Y that can build a lot of X instead.

I read this book a few months ago and found it to open my eyes to the possibility of this, however as time goes on it becomes harder to un-see this.

Here’s a tweet from a thread that I found perfectly encapsulates some of this thinking of individual thinking:

Eric Wall @ercwl

the difference between saying ”a 3d render of a teacup, warm light, trending on artstation, 4k, ultra detail” and simply ”teacup” ultimately i believe that mastering these nuances is what will define you as much as hermione’s wand mastery defines her

Organisations that have a higher number of people that can equip more leverage per individual appropriately will outperform those that don’t.

I’m still grappling with the implications of this all as it represents tremendous possibilities.