The Most Important Step A Man Can Take

Some folks consider fiction books a waste of time and liken them to junk food for the brain. This has always confused me because study after study shows that people who read fiction often gain a variety of mental benefits besides partaking in an enjoyable hobby. I can also think of many fictional characters who taught me not just valuable life lessons, but profound lessons about myself. They have provided a plethora of thoughts and traits I cherish and hold dear, points of view I consider novel and pivotal to my world view, and acts of service and fortitude so grand it boggles the mind and challenges me to do better.

I have been marinating on this as a colleague of mine is reading through the Stormlight Archive and rapidly approaching one of my favorite sequences in all of fiction in the book Oathbringer. If you have not read it, this is a fair spoiler for a book that is now over 7 years old, so carry on at your own risk.

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Turbo and Throttle

Most of the time the processor in your computer is doing very little work. In fact, as you read this, it is probably sitting close to idle. The work demanded of it is often tiny compared to what it is truly capable of when it runs full tilt. Modern processors have base clocks and turbo modes to reflect these dual demands.

When work is light a processor sits at its base clock trying to be as energy efficient as possible. When work is hard it runs at its turbo frequencies for as long as it can manage until the work is complete. This often results in a very spiky existence for the processor as it oscillates between dreadfully long periods of doing nearly nothing and often relatively brief (but sometimes continuous) bursts of all out demand for optimal performance.

On the other hand, if a processor has insufficient cooling or suffers from other environmental factors (like being directly in sunlight for a long time), it will begin to thermal throttle. This is a feature designed to prevent the chip from harming itself, and potentially other valuable components, if it is going to exceed its thermal capacity for too long.

This means that the processor eventually finds equilibrium at maximum sustained performance given its thermal realities. In a perfect world (with good cooling) it can and will run at full tilt forever as it sheds heat into an environment capable of dissipating it effectively, but in the worst case it will shut down all together (such as when the heatsink is removed) which stops any work from being done.

Technology often mirrors life since it is made by humans for humans, and these concepts translate directly into how people operate. In knowledge work the demand is often spiky like that of a processor. We may be chugging along performing our work as normal before a new initiative kicks off and soaks up all of the available bandwidth from a team. Depending on the circumstances, this may cause people to go from from their normal work output into turbo mode. If teams or individuals run in turbo mode for too long, they burn out unless throttling is introduced.

This scenario is actually an example of optimal stopping theory. If a team or individual operates at 100% of their ability at all times then there is no scenario in which they can respond to a spike in demand or change of circumstances without dropping something else they were doing which was already important. However, you also don’t want anyone sitting around idle.

How much capacity should generally be utilized? When do you introduce throttling?

This depends on the nature of the work and the environment the team or individual finds themselves in. If the work is well understood and consistent then maybe you can survive closer to the 100% threshold, but the less clear and less consistent the work the more you need to build in some reserve capacity. This idea was somewhat infamously explored by Donal Shoup‘s book The High Cost of Free Parking. He proposed the idea that parking utilization should be around 85% to be optimal, and that introducing parking fees to achieve this this would reduce traffic congestion, fuel waste, and time waste (thus saving more than the fees paid) while raising revenue for the city by removing free parking. For the cities that have tried it, it appears to work.

This seems close enough to the 80/20 rule (known as the Pareto principle) to help us here. We should strive to consistently operate around 80-85% of our possible capacity. This leaves us room to turbo when necessary, but also means we are never idle and not providing value. When I say these numbers I don’t mean just at work, but your total capacity as a human being. When one of my team members had a sudden loss in the family that obviously demanded many of his cycles, and that meant he had less cycles to use elsewhere for a time. Try to quantify the demands life has of you and be realistic about what that means for where you spend your cycles.

If an individual or team is consistently above this threshold then they (and leadership) need to consider two things:

Throttle before you burn out. This will feel impossible when the workload is at its peak with no end in sight, but it simply must be done for the good of all. Take some PTO, find ways to relax and de-stress, and see if any of the work can be better balanced among teams and individuals.
Increase capacity and/or shed workload. For a team this is obvious: if there is important work not getting done then see if you can delegate this (or less important) work or hire more people. For individuals this is a little harder. Are there improvements to the workflow or process you could make? Would training help you be more efficient? Is there other low value work eating up your cycles that you could stop doing? Can you partition the tasks differently such that more people can contribute?

America treats working yourself to the brink as a rite of passage, but as a recovering workaholic who has gone beyond all limits several times I assure you it is sub-optimal just like free parking and infinite turbo. When you run out of juice and force a shutdown you halt everything, and the damage of this scenario can be extreme.

You do not provide value to your team, your organization, your family, or yourself if your burn out.

To be a consistent high performer you must learn and respect your actual capacity. To be a good leader you must stop individuals and teams from running too hot for too long while also making sure no one is idle.

If you are turboing right now without an end in sight, consider when to start throttling. Taking care of yourself is not defeat. On the contrary, it is the most optimal thing you can do.

Hope And Fear Are The Same – The Daily Stoic – Part 20 of 366

Hecato says, “Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.” … The primary cause of both these ills is that instead of adapting ourselves to present circumstances we send out thoughts too far ahead.

– Seneca, Moral Letters, 5.7b-8

This one is very interesting. While I imagine most people would indeed consider hope and fear two sides of the same coin, I don’t imagine most people would consider them the same. Hope is good and fear is bad, right?

Wrong. Both are at odds with present moment, and both are entirely outside of your control. That doesn’t mean it is wrong to hope or wrong to fear, but it is wrong to invest your valuable time and energy too deeply on something that may not come to pass, or that is “too far ahead” as Seneca writes.

Two of my other favorite quotes are also along these lines. Seneca said in perhaps his most famous line, “we suffer more in imagination than in reality,” and Marcus Aurelius wrote, “don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole.”

I come back to these lines often and share them with others because this seems to be at the root of anxiety for a lot of people. I have seen multiple people multiple times convince themselves everything was horrible despite them being objectively in the best situation they have ever been in their lives. Just the other day at work I was having a tough discussion with someone fearful of the future that was extrapolating worst case scenarios about things that may never come to pass.

It is easy to suffer worries imagined, but what about suffering wants imagined? Part of what is fascinating about this to me is that this can manifest in a couple of different ways, and none of them good. Some people when imagining wants will encounter loss aversion over something they have never obtained, and loss aversion is extremely potent in the human mind. I know friends who would rather dream of asking out a specific woman in their lives than give it a shot because they can ruminate on it endlessly if they never bring it to a conclusion (a Schroedinger’s Relationship). This is want and fear manifested at the same time! In some ways this is a remarkable achievement of the human mind, as there is no other animal we know of that can achieve these sorts of mental gymnastics.

The other manifestation I find interesting here is what happens when you get what you want. If you have convinced yourself you deserve it and it comes to pass then it may mean far less to you than if it had just happened in the present without any seriousness or import bestowed upon it in your mind. This ties back into the Hedonic Treadmill and the innate human feature of never being satisfied with the here and now. By the time you get what you want you are already hoping, imagining, and wanting the next thing. It can also turn into a sense of entitlement if you convince yourself that this hope of yours should come to pass, and the sense of disappointment may be profound when it does not occur and you have, in Marcus’ words, “let your imagination be crushed by life.”

We all want and we all worry. We all hope and we all fear. But we must also understand that these things can be dangerous because they exist solely in our minds, and, consequently, we directly control how dramatic, impactful, or erroneous they ultimately are.