The Gunn Show - 8.4.24
What I'm Thinking, What I'm Reading
Hey Everyone!
Happy Sunday, and welcome back. I hope you all have had a fantastic week!
Tuesday marked the passing of the MLB Trade Deadline and it has been nice to have things slow down a touch toward the end of the week. The home stretch of the season is now all that remains with two months left in the regular season calendar, and we are looking forward to making a playoff push here in Texas. Here’s hoping there’s some 2023 magic left out there for us to recapture.
As promised last week, looking forward to getting back to some more normal programming for the newsletter with more time now available. This week’s edition was a fun one to write, as it centers around a key reflection point from the past month’s worth of work - how our efforts are not always correlated with our results. Hope you enjoy, and please feel free to pass along any thoughts or comments my way.
Catch you all next week!
- CG
Thinking - Input/Output Asymmetry
With July coming to a close and both the MLB Draft and the Trade Deadline in the rear-view mirror, it has been nice to take a few days to unplug and recharge after the gauntlet of the past month. It is one of the few periods of the baseball calendar where things go into ‘quiet mode’ a bit - players have been selected, rosters are set in stone, and all that is left is to go play the games out on the field and let the chips fall where they may.
And while it is nice to have an opportunity to slow down somewhat - at least relative to the past 45+ days - I find it difficult to completely disconnect. When your brain has been ramped up into hyperdrive for so long, the engines don’t spool down quite as quickly as you would like. So every year during this time frame, I naturally find my brain shifting focus in two directions: the future of what is left to accomplish this year, and the past of where we’ve been to get to the present.
As I’ve been reflecting on the path we’ve taken to this point in the year, one thing has stood out as it relates to the past month - what I’ll call the asymmetry between inputs and outputs. Let me explain.
One of the most unique things about the month of July in professional baseball is that there is an enormous disconnect between the amount of effort that you put in and the corresponding results that come out on the other side. So much so, in fact, that I would say this disconnect is one of the defining principles for both the MLB Draft and the Trade Deadline, all because of a simple underlying truth: the fact that you do work on a player says next to nothing about whether or not you will actually acquire the player.
As anyone that has worked in professional sports will tell you, evaluation and acquisition are two related but distant concepts. You can think of the evaluation - the underlying ‘work’ required to form an opinion on the player - as the ticket for admission to the dance. In order to make a recommendation on drafting, signing, or trading for a player, you need to have put in the necessary effort to give you confidence that he is the right fit for your organization. Your recommendations can’t be a house of cards built on a foundation of sand - instead, they require a combination of data, expertise, and conviction to make sure you get it right.
But what comes after is the ultimate challenge. Acquiring a player requires a unique alignment of stars, such that you need multiple things to work in lockstep with each other to even have a chance. Not only must you like the player, but you must also have access to him and be able to meet the price the market demands for him. At any point in the process, any one of these things can go wrong and dictate an outcome that is not in your favor.
The Draft serves as a great example of this. To participate in the process, you have to be willing to accept the notion that you will do a lot of work on a pool of players and may not get rewarded with an acquisition. Few are more familiar with this concept than area scouts - they are the lifeblood of the amateur process, the people that each year spend countless hours in cars and hotels scouting, all with zero guarantee that come the close of the Draft one of their players will be selected and signed to be part of the organization. In fact, it is not uncommon for a scout to put in thousands of hours of work over a year and get ‘shutout’ (ie have no players selected from their area by their team) come Draft day, depending on how the board falls.
I can speak from experience on this, too. Over the past two drafts, I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate 338 different hitters from all across the country for the amateur process, a pool from which we have been able to select and sign eleven (11) in total. Some quick napkin math will tell you that that is not a great ‘return on work’ (ROW), with 11 divided by 338 giving you a mere 3.25%.
You might assume that the apparently low ‘ROW’ makes the player acquisition process less rewarding for anyone involved in it - but you would be wrong. In fact, I’d argue the exact opposite - I believe acquisition is one of the most rewarding aspects of professional baseball, specifically because of how difficult it truly is. The more involvement you have in the player procurement process over the years, the more attuned you become to the low probability reality of taking a deal from start to finish. You quickly come to both recognize and appreciate the many hurdles that lie between evaluation and acquisition, between wanting a player and actually getting him. And as a result, a natural scarcity effect emerges - when the stars finally align, you are rewarded with an incredibly satiating - and oftentimes, intoxicating - feeling as a direct function of how hard it is to come by.
This principle has broader applications beyond baseball as well. In fact, there are many areas of life where you have to put in the work with no guarantee of the outcome, while recognizing that you won’t get the outcome without the work.
Some that come to mind:
Job Applications - The job market often necessitates you submit hundreds of applications when you will ultimately land only one position.
Businesses - Serial entrepreneurs may start multiple companies that fail before they ever have one that succeeds.
Venture Capital - VCs cut many checks to seed startups but may ultimately only see a few pan out.
Academic Research - There are hundreds of thousands of research papers published each year, but very few will ever gain mass acclaim and influence society at scale.
All of these come with the same scarcity effect outlined in the baseball examples above - low probabilities of success (or low ‘ROW’) make the wins incredibly sweet. There are few feelings like the moment when you finally land the job or make your first sale, if only because you understand exactly how hard that moment was to come by in the first place.
But while these situations of high effort / low guarantee are frequently the norm, that does not mean they are the only. To see this, we can think of effort and guarantee as two variables that exist separately with their own scales. And when we put the two together, we quickly see that there are multiple different combinations of the two.
To this point, everything discussed falls in Quadrant II (High Effort, Low Guarantee) - but what about some of the others?
Let’s start on the ‘lower effort’ side of the equation with Quadrant IV. From my perspective, this is perhaps the most desirable spot to be in, the ‘$$ Zone’, where most of us would like to live as much as possible. These are the ‘low hanging fruits’ or ‘leveraged’ aspects of life, the things that require very limited effort but can give you outsized returns with high probability. Things like:
Index Funds - It takes no effort to set a recurring index investment to tap into the long-term powers of compounding.
Publishing on the Internet - The cost to publishing content on the internet is virtually $0 and comes with a high probability of added connectivity or others getting exposed to your ideas.
Minor Health Interventions - Small changes such as getting 8 hours of sleep or drinking sufficient amounts of water can have drastic effects on your health.
Quadrant III, on the other hand, is similar in effort but differs in results. To me this is the ‘Re-Charge’ zone, an area you are fine living in sometimes-but-not always, one encompassing things that require limited work but don’t give you much of a guarantee on what, if anything, you are getting out of it. Things like:
Casual Gaming/Reading - Are the video games or romance novels really giving you any value outside of decompressing?
Social Media Scrolling - What did you really get out of all the Tik-Tok scrolling, except for lost time?
And lastly, we have Quadrant I, which I think of as the ‘Agency Zone’: areas in which you are almost guaranteed to succeed if only you are willing to take initiative and put in the work. Things in this bucket differ from Quadrant II in that there is a much higher ‘ROW’ (return on work) effect - you can go into these types of projects or tasks with higher levels of expectation of what you will get out of it. Things like:
Physical Fitness and Health - Exercising, eating a clean diet, and living a healthy lifestyle require effort and commitment but come with a guarantee of positive outcomes.
Education - Studying/reading are hard work, but there is a clear correlation between time invested and the knowledge you emerge with on the other side as a result.
Skill Development - Whether in athletics, music, or other competitive arenas of life where skill is a separating factor, hard practice tends to lead to increased performance.
The more I’ve thought about the above graph and the subsequent buckets, the more I’ve come to believe that we can view it as a ‘map’ for different aspects of our lives, for two main reasons.
First, I think the distinction between inputs and expected outputs can serve as a valuable ‘perspective setter’, especially in regards to areas of life that require high effort. Think back to times in your life where you have had a crushing disappointment - a moment where something you expected to happen as a function of all the work you put into it did not come to fruition. Ask yourself the following: why was that moment so devastating, the disappointment so difficult to deal with? After doing the exercise for myself, I think the answer is relatively clear: there was likely a misalignment between your effort and your expectation. You thought you were in Quadrant I - where you effort is directly correlated with your probability of success - when in reality you were in Quadrant II - where your effort was the price to pay for the opportunity, but came as no guarantee of the result. The better aligned our expectations are, such as in the case of player acquisition, the better positioned I think we all will be to deal with the outcomes.
Secondly, I think we want to create a balance of all of these things. My guess is that while each of us will naturally gravitate towards one area or the other, spending too much time in one will cause us to miss out on other equally important aspects of life. Living on the right side of the chart at all times is likely a recipe for burnout, but living on the left is sure to keep you stagnant without any opportunity for growth. We need each of these things as much as the other - high effort things balanced with low effort things, high guarantees balanced with low guarantees.
And so, I think the best place to start is by gaining an understanding of the game you are playing - how much effort does the task require, and what is the guarantee that it will be rewarded in kind? Because unlike the story that we’ve been sold for much of our lives, there is no guarantee that more effort is correlated to better outcomes. As we’ve seen, this is not necessarily a story of more equals more and less equals less - it’s not that simple, as much as we would like it to be.
The path to aligning our expectations - and subsequently, our reactions - comes through understanding where each aspect of life falls on the map. By doing the exercise to place each one in its appropriate place, we can begin to tease out what game we are playing - and whether or not we should be playing it in the first place.
Reading
Health/Fitness
Don’t Underestimate the Importance of Oral Health - Peter Attia (~6 min)
From Peter Attia’s commentary on a recent study that examined the connection between oral health and hospital-contracted pneumonia:
For critically ill, hospitalized patients, a relatively simple intervention of toothbrushing reduced the risk of hospital-acquired pneumonia. Toothbrushing also had broader implications for recovery, reducing overall time of ventilation and ICU stay, demonstrating that at minimum, oral health is a barometer for overall health, and in all likelihood, has systemic effects.
A good and important reminder for those of us that may skimp on the ‘2 brushes per day’ rule from time to time.
The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)
AI Can Help You Make Big Life Decisions - Dan Shipper, Every (~9 min)
Found this to be a great read from Dan on how you can use AI tools to deal with big ‘one-way door’ life decisions that can be challenging to navigate.
Machines Have Surpassed Humans in Empathy - Adam Grant (~1 min)
I like this take from Adam Grant on a recent study that suggested AI tools are capable of beating humans in decoding emotions. Rather than giving the common ‘doomsday’ take that AI is surpassing humans in all areas of other life, he suggests something different: AI is only beating us in certain areas such as emotional intelligence because we are failing to use our full capabilities.
Personal Growth
What Shapes Our Desires? - Luke Burgis (~16 min)
A good interview of Luke featuring a wide ranging discussion on books, memetics, the humanities, AI, and more. A couple of my favorite quotes:
“The world needs more mystagogues—those who know how to lead others into mystery.”
[On AI and the Humanities] I always come back to the language of supplements versus substitutes, which I learned from my friend Dr. Josh Mitchell. Is AI a supplement or a substitute? I think it’s a supplement that we risk turning into a substitute. And it is certainly a substitute, and should be, for certain things.
How I Reduced My Screentime by 80% - Reysu (~10 min)
Wanted to share this as I’ve found two resources in this video - ScreenZen and SocialFocus - to be extremely helpful in cutting down screen time usage on social media of late. The former is a clear step up from Apple’s ScreenTime blocking functions, while the later allows you to customize what your social apps show when viewed through the browser - giving you the ability to hide things like replies, certain feeds, ads, and more. Powerful combination I’ve been liking of late.
