Seasons Pt. 1: A Better Mental Model
First Principles Reasoning Series
This is the first entry in a 3-part series. Part 1 defines a useful mental model. Part 2 covers the seasons leading up to our current economic realities. Part 3 describes where we may be headed.
Fellow Partners,
There is nothing inherently advantageous about the many ways we have sub-divided time — e.g., minutes, hours, months, quarters and decades. The earth’s daily rotation and yearly orbit provide natural measurements, though even these are not universally useful. An intuitive but non-obvious example: one’s feeling of age can be a better predictor of longevity than their actual age.
Order
When we are very young, say, ages 0 to 5, we operate with immense freedom of time. Few days look or feel identical. Meals and family create some structure, but beyond this there is little regularity in what one is required to think or do. If something proves interesting it can be explored for minutes, hours, days or longer. The uninteresting can be ignored. For those with willing minds, curiosity, exploration, and creativity can consume the better part of most days.
When schooling starts, we begin to cut this off in favor of time structures that serve our broader society. Our modern school schedule was architected to raise laborers for the industrial era and from a desire to create a tolerant, civilized society. It has the added benefits of keeping children occupied while parents work and providing all participants at least a partial set of skills with which to engage the world.
The order of each day, the notion of class subjects as distinct from each other, the timing of breaks and meals, and regular switching between tasks are all methods we have implemented within the system. Even summer breaks are a derivative of societies that lacked climate control and sought respite from hot summers in cooler locations, returning to local schools when the weather improved.
Training
These structures train us to think certain ways. Regularly changing subjects. Anticipating lunch. Looking forward to Christmas and summer breaks. Lots of shallow endeavors.
This training in regimentation — based around the needs of social orders decades or centuries ago — is reinforced from the start of school through the end of most careers. What begins with regular task switching in school between subjects, centers, sessions and sustenance continues into college with courses and semesters and into the working world with product release cycles, monthly meetings, sales quarters, fiscal years, and annual performance cycles.
With this persistent training from our early years onwards, it is almost impossible to see how deeply this crafts how we engage with and understand the world.
We learn to task switch regularly, and that success is often measured by relatively shallow performance across a relatively large range of items. We learn to judge success in artificial increments of time such as semesters and quarters.
We learn to cope with incongruities between our interests and these structures through escapism. I only recently realized how much of my 20 years of schooling I spent anticipating lunch. What a waste. Surely we can do better.
Obsession
There is nothing inherently wrong with artificial time increments, but many systems do not work to such increments and are difficult to correctly understand in these terms.
What happens when we step back from this structure? What happens if we require motivation, hard work and intelligence as inputs, but leave time free for its own best purposes, defined as some combination of curiosity, interest, and specific purpose?
I spent decades struggling to feel maximally productive when structure was measured in hours and weeks and success was measured in quarters and years. Against this backdrop I have regularly seen my best work produced within the context of unstructured time — those times when I choose to shut out the noise of what is around me and go deep on a topic. Sometimes this takes days or weeks. On my deathbed I doubt I'll be proud of anything that didn't take at least a few years to create.
We seem to produce some of our best work when we are freed to obsess about a thing almost as long as it takes to get it right (provided, of course, that the thing is worth doing). We need to create — in fact we must create — more of this in the future. We don't need lots of things for ourselves, our families, our businesses or our societies. We need the best of what we are capable.
Human Impact
This has always been true. But its impact has grown exponentially as we have created an exponential age with unlimited access to knowledge and tooling that provides immense cognitive leverage:
For any innovator, business, or problem solver, the sum of all human knowledge is only a smartphone away. The implication of this level of connectivity to this depth of knowledge is only just beginning to be realized.
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Cloud computing infrastructure is akin to giving every tinkerer in past technological revolutions access to immediately scalable and inexpensive textile mills, steam engines, steel furnaces, moving assembly lines, and microprocessors. Providing the masses the freedom to experiment unlocks the potential of technological breakthroughs in ways that was simply not possible in past technological revolutions.
Thatcher Martin
This reality means that it is more critical than ever to have the time and space to capture our thoughts and breakthroughs and work with them until they are taken to their logical ends.
Seasons
This all points to the imperative of having the freedom and intention to operate in seasons. This is true for individuals. It is also true for collections of individuals, including markets and businesses.
Most of our training from school years onwards and the granularity of most of the data we encounter incentivizes us against understanding and aligning ourselves to the seasons of the social and economic structures we are in and, for this investment partnership, the businesses we choose to own.
Information doesn't enter the mind intact like a puzzle-piece slotted into a jigsaw. Instead, it becomes distorted to fit the shape of its container, like water poured into a vessel.
Gurwinder Bhogal
We aspire to own wonderful businesses for years, so we must resist the incentives to understand these businesses in months and quarters. Seasons are a much better model.
Think of the required progressions of any successful company. There are seasons of formation and experimentation until product-market fit is found. This is followed by seasons of scaling and refinement. There may be seasons of expanding partnerships (e.g., distribution) and/or expanding ownership (e.g., financing rounds or public listing). In all cases, durable success in these seasons depends far more on completing them well than on completing them quickly. No great business was built in a few quarters. (This is why analyzing businesses from the perspective of the persistent incentives within them is critical.)
Part 2
This brings me to the present state of capital markets which, too, are best understood as seasons — not the years, quarters, and months that corporate reporting has trained us to expect. This will be the subject of the second entry in this three-part series.
All the best,
John
Founder and Managing Partner