Little Ways The World Works

Jul 20, 2022 by Morgan Housel

If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and recurring driver of how the world works.

Take two topics that seemingly have nothing to do with each other: goldfish and tech companies. Take two groups of identical baby fish. Put one in abnormally cold water; the other in abnormally warm water. The fish living in cold water will grow slower than normal, while those in warm water will grow faster than normal.

Put both groups back in regular temperature water and they’ll eventually converge to become normal, full-sized adults.

Then the magic happens.

Fish with slowed-down growth in their early days go on to live 30% longer than average. Those with artificial super-charged growth early on die 15% earlier than average.

That’s what biologists from University of Glasgow found.

The cause isn’t complicated. Super-charged growth can cause permanent tissue damage and “may only be achieved by diversion of resources away from maintenance and repair of damaged biomolecules.” Slowed-down growth does the opposite, “allowing an increased allocation to maintenance and repair.”

“You might well expect a machine built in haste to fail quicker than one put together carefully and methodically, and our study suggests that this may be true for bodies too,” one of the researchers wrote.

The same thing has been found in humans. And in birds. And in rats.

And isn’t it the same in business?

Chamath Palihapitiya once noted that however fast your business grows, that’s the half-life for how quickly it can be destroyed. So many companies, flush with cheap money from previous years, are learning this right now. Every business and every industry has a natural growth rate – push beyond it and short-term growth comes at the cost of long-term quality, and eventually survival.

When the limits of fast growth impact goldfish and rats the same way it limits tech companies, you know you’ve found an essential part of how the world works, and will continue working in the future.

John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Fields are studied individually, but there are so many common denominators across topics. The more fields a lesson applies to, and the more disparate those fields are, the more powerful and important the lesson becomes.

It might sound crazy, but once you understand the basic principles of your profession, you might gain more expertise by reading around your field than within your field. Connecting dots between fields helps you uncover the most powerful forces that guide how the world works, which can be so much more important than a little new detail that’s specific to your profession.

And if you look hard enough, there are so many dots to connect.

Here’s another.

Part of the second law of thermodynamics is that you get the most efficiency out of a system when the hottest heat source meets the coldest sink – that’s when an engine will waste the least amount of heat, converting as much energy into power as it can.

And isn’t it the same in business and careers?

A genius entering a crowded and competitive field may find a little success, but put her in a “cold” industry full of idiots and she’ll create a monopoly, destroying competitors. Jeff Bezos famously said “your margin is my opportunity,” which is the same concept. The biggest opportunities happen when a hot talent meets a cold industry. Thermodynamics has proven this since the beginning of the universe – no one should doubt how true and powerful it is.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/little-ways-the-world-works/