Evolution, mountains, careers and superjumps

This is a post about career and life decisions, but first, evolution.

Survival of the fittest gets all the credit in evolution. But if that was all there was to evolution, we would all be slowly converging towards a single super-fit species. Evolution is only so powerful thanks to another

equally important component: mutation. As a species slowly grinds away towards slightly better fitness, occasionally, a member of the species mutates, and radically changes. Most of the time the mutation is a failure, but sometimes the complete shot in the dark yields a much better adaptation that ultimately creates an entirely new species or comes back to dominate the original one.

A good metaphor for understanding this interplay is that of the fitness landscape. Imagine a mountain range, with peaks and valleys and each mountain is a random height. Traversing this landscape, height = awesomeness, so everybody on this landscape always wants to get as high as possible.

Now imagine you’re dropped at random somewhere on the fitness landscape. You have a fancy GPS watch that tells you your elevation, but a dense fog has set in, so you really can’t see the whole range, or even the whole peak/valley you are currently on. How do you get higher? Well, you’ll take a few tiny steps in one direction, check if your getting higher and either keep going or change directions and check again. This is survival of the fittest, small variations that double down on incremental improvement.

But what happens if you have randomly been dropped at the foot of the tiniest little hill in the whole mountain range. Your survival of the fittest strategy won’t serve you very well, yes, you’ll eventually make it to the top of the hill, but what then? This is a local maximum. You are improving alright, but you’re going up the wrong hill, taking you further away from the higher, more awesome, peaks in the range.

This is where the mutation comes into play. Mutating in the fitness landscape is the equivalent of a super jump superpower. When you mutate you launch yourself to some other random spot, check your elevation and start feeling around for ways to get a bit higher. You might end up lower than the top of your first little hill, but you might also land on a much bigger Mount Awesome, and your incrementalist strategy will get you right to the top.

The interplay of small improvements and a few big random jumps is what makes evolution so powerful. Short guess and check with the occasional superjump is also the best strategy for traversing the fitness landscape. The metaphor is pretty simplistic, but I think it’s a powerful mental tool for a lot of scenarios.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the fitness landscape in the context of career trajectory. I think most of us spend way too much time optimizing for a local maximum when we should be taking a few more random superjumps. We’re halfway up our little hill. We think about all the work it took to get up to this point. The stack of degrees signifying our right to be so far up this particular hill. The carefully constructed CV that shows us a clear path several more steps up the same hill.

By contrast the mutation, the superjump, the leap of faith seems crazy. Where will we end up after the jump? What guarantee do we have that the we’ll land on a higher mountain? What if we fail and land smack in the middle of a valley? No no, this hill is just much safer and more certain. Two more steps up.

But evolution tells us that this really is the best way to get as high as we can. So maybe we should take a few more leaps of faith in our careers, trying out a field where we have no expertise, no credentials, just confidence that when we get there we will work hard and get better and starting heading up the hill. I’m not saying all the time, but probably more often than we do now.

Another upside, superjumps are definitely NOT boring.

You Don’t Have To Do Anything

I want you follow me down a strange and interesting thought experiment.

We all have things that we have to do. Much of the precious minutes of our short lives gets spent completing those things we have to do. For many of us, have-to-dos represent the majority of our time. For some us, nearly every waking minute is spent getting things done that we have to do.

But we don’t HAVE to do those things. There is no element of Newtonian physics that requires you to go work on Monday. No part of string theory compels you to reply to your emails. You don’t have to pick up your laundry from the dry cleaners. You could just leave it there.

So I want you to start making a list of everything that takes up time during your week. You can use this week if you’ve already got your schedule, or just a typical week. Start making the list of all the things you have to do and about how much time they will take up. You can be as detailed or vague as you like.

Write the list down if you want to.

Do that now.

Ok, now go through each item one by one and let’s acknowledge that technically speaking, you are not forced to do them.

Now visualize in a very detailed manner how you could unburden yourself from them. The trick here is to really walk through and visualize every step.

Start with the small nitpick stuff

Delete your Facebook and Gmail.
Just leave your clothes at the dry cleaners. Nothing to do there, just don’t pick them up.
Check engine light is on? Just get out of your car and walk away. Leave it on a street somewhere with the keys in the ignition.
Sell your lawnmower
Smash your dirty dishes
Let your pet gerbil roam free

If you wrote the list down, start making little notes on how you’d dump each and every thing.

Of course you have to quick your job.

That’s a big chunk of your have-to’s for sure. So, mentally quit your job. You can just dash off and email, handwrite a letter and walk it in to your boss, or you can go all Office Space. It’s up to you but visualize it the whole way through.

Now things get a bit dicey because you have some moral obligations. But stick with me here. We’re getting rid of ALL of our have-to’s in this experiment. EVERYTHING. Moral obligation or not.

Write a heartfelt letter to your family that you will no longer be visiting for any holidays.

Got kids? Get rid of the buggers. Buy them a round the world flight and send them on their way. Too young travel? Drop them off on Angelina Jolie’s stoop. Or just don’t ever pick them up from day care. Honestly, they’ll probably be fine.

This is stupid! It’s insane! Of course I can’t do any of this stuff. Do it, in your head, every incredibly awkward minute of it.

Now, look at your life. Look at the free day in front of you. Look at the open week ahead. Look at the decades of the rest of your life. A blank canvas, totally unburdened of obligations and yours to fill with only things that you WANT to do.

Now, if your day/week/life doesn’t look like this, remember, it’s because you are choosing for it not to be. Technically you could choose not to do some of them or any of them. We just walked through how you’d do it. The ways out might be anything from terrifying to morally abhorrent, but they are options. But more likely the things you’d have to do, or not do, to get out of those obligation are probably pretty pedestrian. Pretty unscary when you actually visualize them.

So maybe try this from time to time

I find this to be incredibly helpful when I’m worrying about stuff I have to do. I take a moment, visualize exactly how I would go about just not doing any of it, with as much practicality and detail as I can. I compare multiple options, consider the ramifications. In a minute or two I have a Plan B and then I just decide to either do that or not to and stop freaking out about it (pro tip: sometimes you should do it).

So you’ve broken down your life to blank canvas, do you want to fill it back up?

This may seem like a stupid question. But ask it to yourself anyway. Am I bored of life? Given this blank canvas of minutes left on Earth, do I want to go to the effort of filling it back up with ways that I’ll spend my time? Am I still excited by the possibilities of things not done and seen. Do I still want to learn new things, master new crafts, meet new people?

Hopefully the answer is yes so let’s move on.

Ok, now start filling up that canvas

You can start adding back things that you want to do. Get the kids back from Brangelina because they’re the lights of your lives or whatever. Pick up your laundry because you don’t want to smell.

Start filling it all back, considering them one by one.

How does your day look like now? An extra hour in there to sit down with a book? How about your week? Did you just found out how to fit in those Tai Chi classes you’ve been wanting to take or that literature course. Or you finally have a enough time to tackle Ulyssess.

Maybe it looks radically different. Isn’t that interesting.

Sometimes it’s fun to start this part from the other end. Pick things you’ve always wanted to do, things you’ve wanted to change or add to your life and drop onto the canvas first then fill in the rest with whatever you got time for an leave the rest off.

I’m really curious to know. What did you find out from this little experiment?

photo credit: Kamil Dziedzina Photos

Automate your life and eliminate BS

I am an obsessive automator. We all only have one life to live and it should not be spent doing repetitive nonsense. Here are a few of my favorite ‘hacks’ and services that make my life better.

Clean up your email Inbox
1. SaneBox gets crap out of your inbox automagically. As soon as you install it, all of your unimportant emails will be moved into a separate SaneLater folder that you can look at once a day. Only your important emails will sit in your inbox. It has several features around email automation, but another favorite is automating follow-up. If you’re sending a pitch that you might need to follow up on you can bcc 2weeks@sanebox.com and it will remind you in 2 weeks if you do not get a reply. Fantastic. Sign up for it here.

Mailbox app helps you quickly deal with the remaining important emails from your iPhone. My remaining inbox is a task list that I try to get through each day. Mailbox is a great email app and the best feature is the later function that let’s you remove an email that you can’t deal with right now and put it back in your inbox at future date. Download it for iOS here. I’m currently testing Dispatch as an alternative email client that looks pretty good.
Add to Asana or Evernote from Email. Both of these services offer a way to forward an email to create a new task or note. If an email is reference material for later, send it to Evernote. If it is essentially a longer task, forward to Asana so you can prioritize or delegate it accordingly. Learn how to do this on Asana here and Evernote here. They each have cool functionality around parsing the subject line as well that can be handy for automatically sorting notes/tasks so it’s worth learning all the features.

Using these three services I can get to “inbox zero” really fast. Unimportant emails go to SaneBox for once daily review. For the remainder, if they need a quick answer, just answer it. If they are a task or reference material, forward to Evernote or Asana. And if you don’t have enough information to act right now, use Mailbox to send back to your self in the future.

Capture Ideas and Tasks Quickly

A big part of automating nonsense is getting tasks or reference material out of your brain quickly and into a system other than your short-term memory. I use Asana (for tasks) and Evernote (for reference). Both of these have powerful mobile apps that offer the full functionality of the platform. But I need to add 15, 30, 100 things a day and waiting for these apps to load can be annoying. So I have two very fast apps on my home screen whose sole function is to add items to both services.

Jotana is an iOS app specifically built to quickly add tasks to Asana. It is fast and simple, use it. Find Jotana in the iOS app store here.

Captio is a very fast note taking app. Its only feature is that it will email a copy of the note on save. I the email to my Evernote email (see above) and use it exclusively to add reference ideas to Evernote. Learn about Captio here.

I write the same text all the time. The latest pitch for SolarList, troubleshooting tips for StoreMapper, the dial in code for our conference line, etc. Stop writing repetitive text and get

TextExpander where you can save text snippets that will expand to full blocks of text, links and even images. The best trick with TextExpander is the save selection to snippet. As you write something you will realize you are typing it for the tenth time. Finish writing it, highlight it and save it as a snippet. There is a short learning curve but amazing once you get used to it. TextExpander is available for desktop and mobile here. I would recommend starting with the desktop version and then adding mobile once you get a nice library of useful snippets.

Never deal with a conference line pin code again.

Tempo is the best calendar app for iOS. Among its awesome features is automating the process of dialing in to a conference line. It will intelligently pull out the number and pin code from a calendar event and has a clever hack that will input both for you with two taps. Try it and be delighted here (iOS).

Use Twilio + Dropbox to setup your own conference line that does not require a pin code. This tutorial is easy enough to follow and when you finish you have a line you can dial in to with no pin code. I try to move most of my calls to this format so I don’t even have to save or remember the number I am supposed to dial even for 1-to-1 calls. You can set this up yourself with this very fast guide. Or apparently there is a service that does the same thing called HipDial.

Automate Everything

Zapier and IFTTT are two software platforms specifically designed to automate tasks across apps. I’ll write a more detailed tutorial on this later but jus explore it. IFTTT has the friendliest interface to figure out how the automation works while Zapier has better connected apps particularly for business stuff.

Hope you found this helpful. Spend some time setting all this up, but don’t forget to put that extra time you saved to good use.

Solar Energy will be f-ing huge

Let me convince you right now
I met with a friend who recently moved from an energy efficient technology startup to a different sector. He commented on how pleasant it was to be going after a “big market”. When you go after a big market, even before your business plan is airtight and bef

ore you have traction, investors will give you resources and time to figure it out.

The implication is that startups selling clean energy systems and energy efficiency products are going after some tiny, lifestyle business market barely worthy of a Shark Tank episode.

We have pitched A LOT of investors building SolarList and it is shockingly common to hear that solar is just too small of a market. “We’re used to hearing numbers with a B guys.” Initially we were dumb-founded, the opportunity of radically shifting our electricity consumption infrastructure feels so obviously enormous that we didn’t have an articulate response to why we were clearly going after something more ambitious than photo sharing, or photo sharing with an expiration date, or photo sharing with more filters or photo sharing using both the front AND, wait for it, the back camera (big markets folks).

Total addressable market (TAM) to me consists of two parts. First what’s the raw total amount of money that is spent on your market. And second, for either structural or practical reasons, what slice of that market could you theoretically capture if you were wildly successful. For example, if you are building a flight search startup, you find that $XXXbn is spent on air travel every year. But you’re not building an airline, you’re building an app that will get paid a commission on every flight booked through it. So realistically your TAM is maybe 5% * $XXXbn. Maybe this is technically Serviceable Addressable Market, but whatever, this is the framework I’ll use below.

Markets with a B
Solar panels produce kilowatt-hours of electricity. Americans spend nearly $400 billion per year on kilowatt-hours of electricity. About $170 billion of that represents spending from houses and apartments, the rest coming from commercial and industrial sources.

This is way more than the $135b spent on hotels and lodging.
More than the $225b spent in the entire retail e-commerce market.
Shockingly it is much more than the $165b that makes up ALL US advertising spend. Even if you limit yourself to only tackling residential electricity, you are still going after a market with the same sized pool of revenue that provides all the sales (or hypothetical future sales) for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat et al.

But, how much of of the market can solar take over?
A Lot. And a lot more than you think is a lot.

This is a question that skeptics have continually been proven massively wrong about. See The Economist’s excellent coverage of how European utilities wiped half a trillion euros from their market cap by underestimating the power of solar.

Here is an awesome overview in very plain terms from Mark Jacobson of Stanford on how we could realistically switch to 100% clean energy.

Lest you think this is all just eco-greenie hippie talk from liberal bastions like The Economist. Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that oversees the entire US utility industry, was recently quoted saying,

“Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake everything.”

Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, the country’s largest utility says,

“If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.”

David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy another huge electric utility, echoes the sentiment,

“[Consumers are realizing] they don’t need the power industry at all, … That is ultimately where big parts of the country go.”

The expectation, and on some level fear, of a huge solar boom permeates the utility industry. The Edison Electric Institute, the trade group that represents all the electric utilities, which has historically down-played the future role of renewables, outlined in a recent report the probability of asolar viral loop, others have inverted it into the utility death spiral. Solar is a direct alternative to getting electricity from your utility. Each customer that leaves their utility for solar will slightly increase the cost to other utility customers, making them in turn more likely to switch to solar. Solar, it turns out, benefits from a network effect.

And there is still so much more room to grow it’s insane
Germany now gets 7% of its power from solar, most of which is owned by average citizens, and on sunny Summer days the German grid will sometimes be completely powered by solar.
In 2012 in the US, solar represented just 0.2% of all electricity consumption. 35x less market penetration than Germany.
In 2012 annual US solar installations were valued at $11.5b meaning we would need another $400bn in investment just to catch up to Germany
The US electric grid is the world’s largest machine. It is old and dilapidated and the highly regulated, monopolistic nature of the utility industry means it has gone largely undisrupted for a century. Distributed solar represents a scaleable opportunity to capture entirely one of the largest slice’s of US spending ($400b) replacing it with a technology, that for millions of America homes means a cleaner electricity, a lower carbon footprint, a more resilient home AND savings that beat the return on your stock portfolio. It is not only a huge market, but very possibly the most prime startup opportunity on the planet right now.

If you think more investors should be looking at the opportunity in clean energy it would mean a lot if you would recommend and share this post.
This was originally posted on the SolarList Blog.

Tyler Tringas

Thoughts on Micro-SaaS, Entrepreneurship, Remote Work

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