Productivity

But the biggest productivity win that Sam Altman epitomises seems to be a bit glossed over - it's his day job - that of making more efficient organisations of people (no I don't mean "teams", i mean companies, that make eco-systems that make machines that dwarf the output any productive human can make)

Ok - bear with me - imagine a medieval mining company, with some guys in an open face mine, with pick-axes and a few monks tallying up the baskets.

Then invent another company, but this one has the mine-truck on rails, it has a steam engine to pump out the water from 200 feet down, and even Stakhanov style they organise miners into chains.

And up above the office tallying is so complex James Watt as to invent Carbon Copy Paper just to keep up (#)

All the workers in the second one can break for tea, take weekends off and still out-produce the medieval mine by embarrassing amounts.

Jethro Tull invented a wooden contraption the Mythbusters would laugh at and trebled yields in English wheat. Knowing that planting turnips in fallow fields would bring about a miracle is one thing - but that means changes in harvest methods, storage, onward logistics and more.

Some of it is because of "technology" but more so it's organising around the technology. We have all experienced companies that cannot move with the times. And many companies and organisational structures from the middle ages have failed to adjust. And failing to adjust means failing to bring in those harvests - and that's a waste.

So my rather belaboured point is that Sam Altman has actually kinda nailed it on his first sentence - pick the right job to work on. But the job he works on is waaay more important to his productivity than his list making prowess -that job is maximising the number of times humans try out new ways to put technology to use.

Give a steam engine to a open cast mining organisation and will they move to deep mining? Give a Roman society of slaves Hero's steam engine and will they give up their social structure? There are so many ways we can miss the next step that any step chnage in entrepreneurship is surely a win for us all?

Anyway, in the micro-side the lists and the staying healthy are all good and sensible. i should do more of that instead of posting on HN :-)

(#) He really did. His steam engine business was a true multinational startup success story!

More relevantly, from the article: "The most impressive people I know have strong beliefs about the world, which is rare in the general population. If you find yourself always agreeing with whomever you last spoke with, that’s bad. You will of course be wrong sometimes, but develop the confidence to stick with your convictions."