How to remain an expert in an ever changing world

In this translation article, the author, well-known entrepreneur and founder of the Y-Combinator, discusses the variability of the surrounding world. After all, indeed, how quickly everything changes is simply amazing. It is important to always remember this when making decisions. The translation was made specifically for the corporate blog site about payment systems with monitoring courses, Web-payment.ru .



If the world around us did not change, our confidence in the correctness of our beliefs would increase with monotonous constancy. Our views are tested by life experience, the more this experience (and the more diverse it is), the less likely they are to be wrong. Many people believe that this is true. Such an attitude is fully justified when it comes to views on things that are essentially unchanged in their essence, for example, such as human nature. However, for changeable phenomena, to which almost everything else can be attributed, you can no longer be completely sure of your views.



Experts are often mistaken in their predictions simply because they are experts in earlier versions of the world.



Is it possible to avoid this? Can you protect yourself from outdated beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost ten years investing in startups that are in the early stages of development. Very curious, but my experience shows that the ability to recognize irrelevant ideas is the skill that can make you a successful startup investor.

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Most truly good startups look terrible at first. Often they only seem so to us, simply because the world is changing, and the changes that occur in it turn such bad ideas into good ones. I spent a lot of time learning how to recognize ideas, and the techniques I used can be applied to the selection of ideas in general.



The first step is a selfless belief in the constancy of change. People who allow themselves to become victims of the very monotonously growing confidence in their convictions are people who have tacitly decided for themselves that the world in which we live does not change. Consciously reminding yourself that this is not so, you immediately begin to look for change.



Where not to look for them? Unfortunately, in addition to a measure of useful generalization about the almost unchanging human nature, one can only say that the changes are difficult to predict. Yes, it sounds like one big tautology, however, it will never be superfluous to recall: important changes usually come from where nobody expected them.



Therefore, I do not even try to make predictions. Periodically, during the interview I am asked to make a forecast for the future. At such times, I always have difficulties, because I have to come up with some plausible answer on the fly, and I feel like a student who has not prepared for the exam. [1] However, unlike a student, it’s not laziness that prevents me from preparing. The fact is that the assumptions about the future are so rarely true that they are usually not worth the additional restrictions that they impose on the author’s way of thinking. Attempts to determine the right direction should be stopped, recognizing, instead, that you have no idea which direction is the right one, and becoming much more susceptible to the wind of change.



In general, to follow the development of events and try to guess their course is a very exciting activity. Working hypotheses limit the freedom of your thoughts, but nevertheless, they can also become a motivating factor for you, therefore, building them is quite acceptable. It should, however, be fairly disciplined and not give your assumptions to turn into something more serious. [2]



I believe that such a passive work model is suitable not only for evaluating new ideas, but also for creating them. New ideas do not appear when you intentionally try to invent them, but when you try to solve a particular problem without neglecting the unusual options that intuition tells you in the process of finding a solution.



The wind of change is born unconsciously in the minds of specialists of a particular field of knowledge. If you are an expert in a certain field of activity, then for you any question that does not have an obvious relation to the matter, any strange idea that comes to your mind is worthy of verification already because of the very fact of their occurrence. [3] When, as part of the Y Combinator, we call the idea insane, it is a compliment, and, as a rule, more meritorious than just a “good idea”.



Investors who invest in startups have unprecedented motivation to change their outdated views with new ones. Having managed to understand before others that one or another, initially hopeless startup, in fact, is not one, they are able to earn a huge amount of money. Be that as it may, their motives lie not only in the financial plane. In the selection process, their beliefs are directly tested: when startups come to an investor, he must say his “yes” or “no”, so that after this, he will quickly find out if he has made the right choice. Investors who said no to Google (of which there were several) will remember this for the rest of their days.



In general, any person who, in one sense or another, has to “bet on ideas” and not just comment on them, has the same motivation as the investor. You have the opportunity to feel it, just like any other commentator has. You only need to turn your comments into bids, writing, for example, about something so that what you write remains on public reviews for a long period of time. Already in the process of writing, you will immediately notice that you have become much more attentive to what you write. In a casual conversation, everything would be much easier. [four]



Another trick that allows me to protect myself from outdated ideas: from the very beginning I try to focus my attention on people, not ideas. Predicting the nature of future discoveries is difficult, but I, however, have learned quite well to determine what should be the people who make them. Good new ideas come from people who sincerely believe in them, are energetic and have an independent way of thinking.



To bet on people, not ideas. This approach has saved me countless times. For example, we considered Airbnb to be a bad idea, but we could definitely say that its founders were energetic, determined, and all had different views from the generally accepted ones (they even went to extremes). Therefore, we decided for some time to push our doubts aside and financed them.



There is another technique that seems to me quite suitable for use in the general case. Surround yourself with people who create new ideas. If you want to quickly determine that your views have become irrelevant, there is no better way than to make friends with people whose discoveries will make them so.



To be free from the captivity of your own professionalism is a task, not simple in itself. Each time, it will become more and more difficult, because over time, the changes will happen faster and faster. The story is as old as the world: changes began to gain momentum in the Paleolithic era. Ideas generate ideas. I do not think that this will ever change. Although, how do I know for sure?



Notes



[1] I usually manage to get out of it this way: I talk about the present, but talk about assumptions that most people don’t know yet.

[2] Especially if they become so famous that people begin to identify them personally with you. You must be extremely skeptical of the beliefs that you tend to believe and as soon as one or another hypothesis becomes associated with your name, it almost certainly falls into this category.

[3] In practice, the concept of an “accomplished expert” does not require a person to receive recognition as an expert from other people, since it is in any case a belated indicator of your ability to evaluate ideas. One year of hard work plus interest will be enough for most areas of human activity.

[4] According to my empirical observations, comments in such places as, for example, forums and Twitter in practice work in the same way as random conversation, despite the publicity and perpetuality of their existence. Perhaps the role of the dividing line between a serious discussion and a casual conversation is played by the fact that your text has a well distinguishable title.