The road to El Dorado; the mountains and disposition

When asked why they are studying for a degree, most students answer that they want a good job, lots of money, financial security or something similar. When questioned further students usually have a deeper purpose, usually around making the world a better place through a job that reflects their interests; solving climate change, curing cancer, making people happy through music, looking after animals etc. Quite often, deciding what and where to study comes down to a mixture of these two things.

There are two ways to think about studying, the first is learning to do, and the second is learning to learn. Learning to do, commonly called ‘training’ provides skills to use the current technologies to complete set tasks. These skills are essential in getting a job and adding value quickly to the employer. However, learning to learn is the ability to think critically and adapt to new technologies and emerging problems. These skills are much more critical longer-term and in adding value to society over a career.

The mountains and disposition

My Introduction to Economics Professor at university, Amos Witztum, told a story on my first day of class. He compared the journey we were starting on, studying for a degree, to the search for El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. He said that you needed to learn how to walk and then train to walk long distances to prepare yourself.

This training will help you be strong enough for the journey, but if you start climbing and all you know is to walk, you will not get very far. You need to raise your head and look around, and you need to learn how to navigate and route find. When you get to the top of the first mountain and see the next, much bigger, mountain, you need the strength to keep going. Learning to learn will help you find the city of gold at the end of the adventure.

Discipline and motivation are dependent on your own expectations.
Amos Witztum

He ended with some advice. He said that you might be standing atop a mountain, scanning the horizon, along the way in your search for gold and see some new and undiscovered treasure. In your search for an assumed goal, you may find something more extraordinary and change your path. Keep your head up and don’t get too focused on the destination that you miss out on the treasure along the journey.

Have a big audacious goal but if on the journey you discover some other riches, seize the day. More importantly, in the absence of your own dream, don’t be worried about picking one that others see as worthy, and work on improving your ability to think and learn, and be ready to pivot when you discover your own path to greatness.

You can watch a version of the speech given by Professor Witztum on Youtube. It is a later year, so it is not exactly the talk that inspired me but worth fifty-three minutes and twenty-six minutes for the knowledge and wisdom.

Economics is not a science, it is a language, and without it, you can’t be a part of the conversation.
Amos Witztum

The fundamentals of bike training

To get the most out of your training, you should address the following principles in order:

Consistency
Volume
Intensity
Periodisation and tapering
Marginal gains

The two most efffective high-intensity interval sessions:

30/15 – 30 seconds high intensity (between 120-130% FTP) followed by 15 seconds low intensity for 13 cycles with three-minute recovery, repeat three times.
4 x 8 minutes maximal effort (around 102-107% FTP) with a two-minute recovery

The most effective training plan:

A periodized programme that follows three-week cycles, two intense weeks followed by a recovery week. The two intense weeks should have two of the above sessions and four low-intensity sessions. The recovery week should have one of the high-intensity sessions and two low-intensity rides.

To learn more visit wattkg.com.

30 minute clean

Dan John suggests in most of his books to have a cleaning routine and a cooking menu. The John house routine includes a set day for specific tasks like Monday for white laundry, Tuesday for black laundry etc. to free up headspace for work and thought. If you need scientific studies to prove that having a clean home is good for you, there are many, but as David Allen describes in Getting things done, you should do everything you can to reduce the background noise in your head to focus your attention on the task at hand. Having set days for specific chores does that.

For the last month or so I have used Saturday mornings for a two-hour ride on Zwift and then a quick clean of the house, mainly sweeping and washing the wood floors downstairs and vacuum the stairs and the rooms upstairs. I found a list for how to clean your entire home in 30 minutes on the Art of Manliness website and thought I would use it to add to my Saturday morning cleaning routine.

Saturday morning cleaning routine

quickly organise each room you visit
bathroom: spray all surfaces including the toilet leave to soak
spot clean kitchen
Wipe and dust all surfaces downstairs
Vac all carpets
Sweep, and wash wood floors
make the bed, put away loose items, put laundry in the basket, and clean bedroom,
Return to the bathroom and scrub
Take out bins

It took me 60 minutes to complete the ’30-minute’ routine this morning, and my wife did most of the bathroom. Yes, I did use a stopwatch, and yes, next week I will be quicker.

How do you define wealthy?

When I was 13, I remember a friend telling me that his dad earned £30,000 per year. I remember this because, to me, his family was wealthy. My friends dad was a contractor and had people working for him, they had a new fast car, a large detached house, and my friend had all the fashionable clothes like a Helley Henson Puffer Jacket and a Kickers Boat shoes (it was the 90s). Growing up, In my head, £30,000 per year was what you needed to earn to be well off in the towns of rural England. It was my mental benchmark for the income level for a good life, where you did not have to worry about money.

Corrected for inflation £30,000 in 1998 is now equivalent to around £47,000, which is more than 86% of UK earners. For context, the average University Lecturer (including Lecturer and Senior Lecturer) earns just over £45,000 per year (84th percentile), and the average individual UK income is £24,400 (50th percentile). High income is considered to be the top 5% of earners at £76,800 per year.

The estimated take-home pay (‘disposable income’) for someone earning £47,000 after Income tax and national insurance is £35,600 or just under £3,000 per month.

An introduction to persuasive writing

Most of the time, we try to make writing complicated or create an outline without considering the outcome we are trying to achieve. Next time you write something, try and first think about what you want the reader to do with the information and put it at the top of the page.

Next, try to limit your writing to the three most critical points that the reader needs to know to take that action. Keeping the number of points to three helps the reader remember them, keeps your writing concise, and makes you spend time doing more in-depth analysis on what matters. Note down the three points and supporting evidence as bullet points in an order that flows.

Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.
Barbara Minto

Once you have the call to action and the main points written down as notes, turn them into full sentences. You can use Grammarly to help you with your language and polish the piece without spending much time on editing. Evaluate the work once it is written to make sure it fulfils the original purpose of making the reader take action, if not, revisit your three points and make them stronger.

Great wirting is talking edited
Steve Crescenzo

Use a final read-through to read it out loud and pick up any issues with flow. If it is easy for you to read it out loud, then it will be easy for someone to read it in their head. Correct anything you need to, and then you are done.

The four simple steps to writing persuasive arguments

Put down what you want the reader to do
note the three most important things the reader needs to understand to take that action
Write
Ask yourself: If I was the reader, would I take action based on what is written?

The Expectation Gap Survey

WONKHE and Pearson today released the analysis of their second Student Expectation Gap survey. The survey was available throughout December 2020 and covered English and Welsh universities with 3,389 student responses. Students have understood the situation academics are in and are satisfied with their responsiveness to feedback and support requests; however, only 40% agree that their experience as been of sufficiently good quality.

What we take from the findings is that among the students we surveyed, the fundamentals are generally in place. Teaching staff seem to be (mostly) engaging and responsive, and though some students flagged specific frustrations about learning remotely, most reported good access to learning resources.
WONKHE

The responses showed that 46% of the courses were delivered entirely online, and a further 14% started with some face-to-face and then moved entirely online during the term. Only 33% of student had campus-based sessions throughout the period. 80% of the students have less than 10 hours of timetabled sessions per week, and 17% had less than two hours (mostly PGT), the rest of their couses were independent study.

The pandemic has accelerated the move to technology-enhanced learning. According to this survey, students are open to keeping the changes once the government lifts the social distancing rules. Universities now have the challenge of assessing what delivery looks like post-COVID. They must decide what should be retained in the short term, what to develop for the longer-term strategically, and what to remove.

The survey suggests students want:

More significant interaction between students on campus and supplemented online through discussion forums
More contact time with tutors in the classroom, online in seminars, through remote check-ins with tutors, and via email.
Encouragement and support to become independent learners through online formative self-assessment, more frequent assessments, and progress reviews indicate how they perform on the course.
A more consistent approach to teaching across modules
The campus and classrooms used for interactive tasks and activities, practical experiences, lab-time, and fieldwork.
Online learning used to add flexibility, remove constraints around scheduled contact hours, and enhance learning delivery.
A better User Experience UX design of the VLE to improve signposting and to set expectations around learning.
Content broken into manageable chunks interspersed with a large variety of activities and knowledge checks.
Online access to wellbeing, careers, and academic support services.
More skills development through independent study learning activities for academic writing, digital learning, project and time management, the confidence to engage with groups, information literacy, and independent learning.

You can read the summary and the research findings on the WONKHE website.

We have a human captial problem; we should all become engineers

What if everyone became a (hard) scientist or an engineer, how quickly would we fix the world’s major problems? How quickly could we eradicate poverty and unemployment, create environmental security, and help people live healthy, predictable, and straightforward lives free of high order issues?

Naval Ravikant believes everyone can be rich and belives it can be taught. He believes that everyone can become a scientist or engineer with support, patience and the right expectations. Of course, most people do not want to put in the time it takes to build these skills, they want to do other things, or they do not have the financial support or expectation that it is possible, but it is.

The engine of technology is science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance. So, I think fundamentally everybody can be wealthy.
This thought experiment I want you to think through is imagine if everybody had the knowledge of a good software engineer and a good hardware engineer. If you could go out there, and you could build robots, and computers, and bridges, and program them. Let’s say every human knew how to do that.
What do you think society would look like in 20 years? My guess is what would happen is we would build robots, machines, software and hardware to do everything. We would all be living in massive abundance.
We would essentially be retired, in the sense that none of us would have to work for any of the basics. We’d even have robotic nurses. We’d have machine driven hospitals. We’d have self-driving cars. We’d have farms that are 100% automated. We’d have clean energy.
At that point, we could use technology breakthroughs to get everything that we wanted. If anyone is still working at that point, they’re working as a form of expressing their creativity. They’re working because it’s in them to contribute, and to build and design things.
I don’t think capitalism is evil. Capitalism is actually good. It’s just that it gets hijacked. It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities. It gets hijacked by improper yields, where you have corruption, or you have monopolies.
Naval Ravikant

Chamath Palihapitiya believes we can solve most problems, and we have the money to do it through capital markets, but we have a human capital problem. We know how to fix most issues, but we miss the smart people to research, develop, and build the solutions. Part of the problem is that technology firms swallow all of the best talent straight out of university. We need more talented scientists and engineers, and we need to motivate them to become entrepreneurs or work for innovative companies that want to solve the most significant problems.

Human Capital: the skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by an individual or population, viewed in terms of their value or cost to an organization or country.
Oxford languages

The example Chamath gives is the goal for making every home in America carbon neutral. Sustainable home-generated power could be achieved through roof-mounted solar panels that store electricity on-site in a reliable battery and controlled by an app on your phone. The homeowner could also power an electric car and replace their petrol or diesel one. Through bonds and investment, capital markets can fund such an effort, but we do not have the technically skilled people to research, develop, build, and install it. But how real is Chamath’s and Naval’s idea of science solving the problem if we just had the people?

In the UK, fossil fuel burning to generate electricity is the largest source of carbon emissions. WWF UK suggests that moving to 100% sustainable fuel power generation by 2050 is the most significant action the Government can take to meet the climate ambition of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The next most crucial step is to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and transition to electric vehicles. SolarPower Europe suggests that engineers have improved solar technology and panels now generates 30 times more power over there lifetime than is required to manufacture and that ‘solar offers the most cost-efficient means to decouple electricity generation from environmental and health impacts.’

EngineeringUK references ten core and related engineering occupations on the UK Government 2020 Shortage Occupation List (SOL) of the most needed skills in the economy. The skill shortages include design and development engineers, electrical engineers, and production and process engineers, all of which are involved in solving the emissions problem. We do have a human capital problem, and it is holding back a solution to climate change.

Naval and Chamath set a challenge to all of us to solve the significant issues that we face. Are you working in the hard sciences or in engineering to solve these issues? If you are an educator, are you focusing your efforts on developing and motivating people to solve these technical problems? Once we reach a world of zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero carbon emissions, we can all pursue creative expression. Until then, let’s solve the human capital issue and become engineers.

Leardership and management 101

I believe there are three keys to strong leadership and management:

Vision
Wellbeing
Productivity

First, you have to have a clear and ambitious vision for the future your team is creating and communicate it so that they believe it. Next, you need to look after the individual team members and promote psychological safety. Finally, you need to break your vision down into clear goals and let each team member know what they are responsible for, then let them get on with it.

Vision: the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.
Oxford Languages

Wellbeing: the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.
Oxford Languages

Productivity: the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.
Oxford Languages

A new manager can start with simple steps for each of the three elements and then gradually built upon them to spiral out their capabilities as a manager and leader. For example, once you have written a vision, you are holding regular open and honest 1:1 meetings with each team member, and everyone is clear on what they should be working on, you could turn your vision into a strategy, You could add a daily stand each morning to build community in the team, and you can start to have more control over the flow of work by identifying and removing constraints.

If you want some ideas on how to spiral out your vision and productivity, Jim Collins’s Level 5 leadership and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) are an excellent place to start. For wellbeing, begin by learning about creating a psychologically safe workplace and then take the lessons of Self-determination theory to encourage your team to develop autonomy, competence, and relatedness in their work.

Free markets, Liberalism, and Moral Hazard

Over the last few years, there has been a rise in trading platforms that allow affordable access to financial markets for regular working people. Over the last year, many more people have joined these platforms to trade while furloughed or working from home. Trading stocks and bonds were once expensive and carried out through a third-party with large commissions, but the internet has made it possible to learn about what to buy and sell and then execute these trades with minimal costs.

However, this week, financial companies and independent traders had clashed when a hedge fund attempted to make a risky bet against an American high-street retailer. Melvin Capital decided that GameStop stock was overvalued and made an enormous bet that it would reduce in value. A group of individual traders on a Reddit subforum coordinated an effort to buy this stock, raising the price significantly and costing Melvin Capital billions of dollars.

It is not clear who the winners and losers are yet as Fidelity and BlackRock already owned large numbers of GameStop shares, other hedge funds also bet against the retailer and lost heavily. Additional funds will have profited in the chaos. What is clear is that government intervention into trading is likely to result from the situation. If they choose to protect the risk-taking financial institutions, this may hurt the recent increase in individuals accessing the stock market and encourage these financial institutions’ risk-taking.

Free markets

A free market allows the voluntary exchange of goods and services, guided by supply and demand, without government intervention. People are free to trade with whoever and whenever they want and produce goods based on what people want to buy at a cost that allows them to make an income. In a real free market, government intervention is restricted to protecting personal property rights, upholding the rule of law, and maintaining the national currency’s value.

The current systems in most western countries, however, are not pure free-market systems. Governments intervene to regulate and provide insurance to prevent large adverse outcomes and maintain stability. They prevent individual companies in a market from becoming too big to promote innovation and competition. Governments also provide some public goods and services such as education, roads, a national military, and police. They redistribute wealth, and they correct for externalities that are not priced in production such as pollution.

Most people agree that a pure free-market system is not desirable. Some government intervention is positive, mainly to help those who find themselves in a negative situation for no fault of their own. For example, most western countries provided universal healthcare free at the point of use and paid for through general taxation. It is hard to argue against giving healthcare to people who needed it without the worry of direct costs; however, government involvement can produce a lack of competition, so the system’s quality and efficiency may suffer.

Liberalism

There is a lot of debate in politics about how much intervention is needed, and the negative consequences of a particular intervention are more significant than the benefits it brings. The promise of liberalism, according to The Economist newspaper that was set up to promote free-market ideas, is the commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress. However, the criticism of liberalism is that although it has been the most successful political approach in history, the benefits have been distributed unevenly. The uneven distribution and lack of dignity for many groups have led to significant government intervention in all areas of peoples lives, from increased regulation that limits freedom, restrictions on speech and so ideas, and taxation that creates distorted incentives and outcomes.

Much of this intervention has created positive outcomes, providing the promise of liberalism to a more significant number of people and balancing some of the inequalities created by a somewhat free market. A significant negative consequence, however, is that of moral hazard.

Moral Hazard: In economics, moral hazard occurs when an entity has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk.
Wikipedia

An oversimplified description of Moral hazard is enjoying the positive consequences of your actions while passing the adverse effects on others. This increased risk-taking level is not always deliberate, but the presence of insurance can lead to a flawed calculation of risks involved. It may also occur when the entity taking the risk understands the situation more than the entity paying the cost of the consequences or evaluating the risks being taken.

To use our previous example, some critics of universal healthcare argue that the state’s health insurance may encourage some people to be less concerned with their health and make poor decisions around diet, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption. The same people make arguments about longterm welfare benefits making returning to work less attractive or financially rewarding, leading to a loss of purpose and dignity. Moral hazard can be seen in the workplace where people are rewarded through bonuses for successes but have no direct consequences for losses, leading to excessive risk-taking. At the national level, as we saw in the banking crisis in 2008, some financial companies take on very high levels of risk, profiting when it goes right and relying on government bailouts when it goes wrong.

Moral hazard and Melvin Capital

Both the US and UK financial regulatory agencies have commented about the instability caused by the Malvin Capital and Game Stop situation. Some financial leaders have uncharacteristically been calling for regulation to prevent the problem from happening again. What happens next with regulation is essential for delivering on the promise of liberalism to all and for moral hazard.

Will western governments live up to the liberal ideal and protect retail investors’ right to trade and benefit from markets or will they act on the side of risk-taking billionaire hedge funds reinforcing moral hazard and setting the economy up for even more significant problems in the future?

Regulators may move to restrict the way individuals are allowed to trade to protect the risk-taking of financial companies in the name of stability and protecting these individuals against themselves and the chance of losses if they bought GameStop the peak at $469.24 hoping to make money, but this misses the point. This action called the bluff of a hedge fund taking a risk that they believed no one would question. Regulators should continue to allow this type of activity that caused short term volatility for the long term stability it will bring.

Strength Standards and Assessments

I am currently reading Dan John’s excellent book Interventions. Dan John is one of the worlds top strength and conditioning coaches and presents his ideas in easy to understand and entertaining ways (think Yoda with dad jokes). The book lays out Dan’s approach when first working with a client, by first identifying a goal, then assessing where they are now, finally finding the shortest route between them.

A foundation for strength and conditioning, ideally developed at school and before 18 years old should contain the following:

The kettlebell foundation: Swing, Goblet Squat, Getup—
The Barbel foundation: Military Press, Front Squat, Power Clean, Bench Press
General Movement and mobility: Hurdle Walkovers, Farmer Walks, Cartwheels, Forward Rolls, Tumbling, Shoulder Rolls
Final stage: Deadlift, Back Squat, Sled Work, Prowlers and Car Pushes

Dan also recommends that everyone should learn to swim, ride a bike and tumble and play as many sports, games, and movements as possible. These are skills that you learn once should stay with you for life. If you cannot do anything listed so far, that is what you need to work on before moving on.

For most people, those who are not professional athletes or special forces soldiers, their focus needs to move to keep the body as young as possible for as long as possible. Building and maintaining lean body mass (less fat and more muscle) and joint mobility should be the focus. The challenge is to do what you need to do in the gym rather than what you want to do. You can use two tools to keep you focused on what you need to do; a coach and constant assessment. You should assess mobility via the Functional Movement Screen (FSM) or alternative once every six weeks and assess strength every two months.

Absolute strength is the glass. Everything else is the liquid inside the glass. The bigger the glass, the more of everything else you can do.
Brett Jones

Dan provides some strength standards for enough strength so that strength is never the limiting factor in any physical pursuit. The standards are relative to bodyweight and so are extremely relevant to endurance athletes like runners, cyclists, and triathletes. It is tough to get big and lean if endurance athletes eat intelligently and programming strength and conditioning on building strength rather than size, they will find that they end up leaner and faster than those that skip weights in fear of putting on size.

The book Interventions list the six fundamental human movements, push, pull, hinge, squat, loaded carry, and the sixth movement (everything else). A good strength and conditioning programme should include all six of these movements and target achieving the expected standards in each of the exercises first, and then working towards the gamechanger standards.

Dan John’s strength standards for men

Push
1. Expected = Bodyweight bench press
2. Game-changer = Bodyweight bench press for 15 reps
Pull
1. Expected = 8–10 pullups
2. Game-changer = 15 pullups
Squat
1. Expected = Bodyweight squat
2. Game-changer = Bodyweight squat for 15 reps
Hinge
1. Expected = Bodyweight to 150% bodyweight deadlift
2. Game-changer = Double-bodyweight deadlift
Loaded Carry
1. Expected = Farmer walk with total bodyweight (half per hand)
2. Game-changer = Bodyweight per hand
Getup: One left and right, done with a half-filled cup of water

For those of us who like to challenge ourselves with endurance events, the overwhelming message from top coaches including Dan John, Charles Poliquin, Percy Cerutty, and Pavel Tsatsouline, is a solid base of strength is essential to performance, health, and injury prevention. Start working towards the ‘expected’ standards for strength at a minimum and have a long term plan to reach the game-changer standards and you will find that strength is never the limiting factor in any physical activity you do.

Dan John has a weekly newsletter, a weekly youtube Q&A, many excellent books (I would start with 40 years with a whistle) and articles, and a workout generator website that allows you to enter the equipment you have available and the days per week you want to train, and it will provide you with a strength programme.

You can find the extended standards with regressions for additional milestones and the woman’s benchmarks on Dan’s website.