The Death of the Universe and You

Don't get run down.

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Entropy and You

The Universe is on its way to heat death. It’s all likely to end in the “Big Freeze.” This seems important, sure, but not terribly relevant to our own success, no matter how ambitious we are. Yet, Universal exhaustion and our personal ability to create success, while operating at vastly different timescales, are related. The Universe is running down because of increasing entropy. Our success is also determined by how we combat entropy.

You walk into your garage and there’s a new Ferrari in your parking spot in the place of your old ride. How might this happen? It’s likely the result of the energy you put into imposing order on bits or atoms, then capturing the value created. Without putting in that energy, entropy prevails, and the car in your parking spot is just more worn out and worth less than it was when you last looked.

Observing the challenging lives of some older relatives who’ve been struggling recently, I’ve been struck by the contrast between my expectations of the future and theirs. I expect positive surprises—payoffs from efforts in the past—like a Ferrari in my parking spot after you all read this and hire me as your CEO coach. When we are younger, working long hours putting energy into organizing bits and atoms, upsides come our way— security, luxuries, travel, art, leisure, new opportunities, house remodels. (I’m glossing over the problems people have even when materially successful, but, first-level-of-approximation, where there is effective effort expended, progress happens.)

Instead, for my older relatives, something is always breaking that they haven’t the energy to fix. They are unable to keep up with the progress of entropy in their lives.

Nothing good shows up in the world without energy going into battling disorder and organizing it productively. Energy in creates stuff out. Without that injection, things fall to pieces.

Our own energy, and that we corral to work on our behalf, fuels our success.

But the energy we command is limited and can be deployed more or less effectively, so we need to ask ourselves, “where do we get it?” and “how do we apply it well?”

Where: Energy Sources

• Ourselves

  Our primary source, which gets everything else started, is our own personal physical, intellectual, and emotional energy. Physical energy includes both strength and stamina. Intellectual energy must be focused, channeled by knowledge, and requires balancing exploration and exploitation. Emotionally, we need resilience, bravery, and a tolerance for discomfort.

• Fuels and Tools

  What fuels can we find to create energy? In the most literal sense, nutrition plays a role, as does maintaining our health. To concentrate our energy, we need to have passion, belief, and conviction and need to love what we’re doing and creating to maintain motivation.

  Tools and technologies are powerful force multipliers. Finding and using effective tools and exploiting (not creating!) efficient technologies are keys to staying competitive.

• Other People

  Others’ energy expended on our behalf is the biggest energy multiplier we can tap into; they contribute to us their own stores of all the other sources. To be able to get them to collaborate, we need to be good proselytizers, develop charisma, and listen and communicate well. We need to be compelling storytellers and excel at recruiting, and hiring.

• Capital

  Money is an obvious fuel for creating energy.

  Note that money isn’t as effective in its common form of “diversified investment.” External investment dissipates focus. In his excellent autobiography, Andrew Carnegie advised that a wealth-creator (as he put it) should invest in only “his (sic) own company” to concentrate effort and prevent distraction. Until he realized this and divested himself of outside investments, he started his day looking at stock quotes instead of paying attention to his own businesses, but he came to believe in “putting all his eggs in one basket.” Not all of us have the conviction to be comfortable with that lack of a hedge, but it’s a good principle.

  To get our own and other people’s money, we must be able to borrow, produce, sell, and make a profit. So we need to get good at selling, optimizing costs of production and sales, and managing production.

Using Energy Effectively

• Maximize our useful, available, Personal Energy

  We need to be healthy so we’re not fighting disease or weakness. We need to attend to our nutrition and sleep. We need to maintain fitness, without going overboard into fitness for fitness’ sake. Training to compete or win in some athletic endeavor, for example, uses up all our available energy in the competition without significant benefit unless our goal is to be a world champion performer.

• Avoid Time-sinks

  We all have activities we relax into that risk becoming time sinks. Watching TV, drinking, gaming, or getting lost in social media, all may have their place in providing relaxation and restoring us, yet they have the propensity to cannibalize time that otherwise might be used productively. We need to be honest with ourselves when an activity starts to regularly eat up time we want back.

• Avoid Conflict

  Conflict is wasteful as our effort is directed at merely nullifying another’s work.

  In High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped In It and How We Get Out, Amanda Ripley distinguishes between “creative conflict” and “high conflict.” The first is used to arrive at conclusions and has some benefit, the second aims only at making opponents lose, and is destructive.

  High conflict arises from particular situations and, in those situations, no one wins, it is a battle just to increase the other side’s losses. My takeaway is that the only practical strategy for high conflict is to avoid and exit those situations entirely, where possible.

  Even creative conflict needs to be managed carefully, though, to make it rare, quick, and innocuous, leaving no damage. To manage it, we need to get good at conflict resolution, building trust, and resilience in teams.

• Use Others Effectively

  Others’ energy is the most powerful energy multiplier we can tap into.

  Making hires work well and setting clear directions is management’s primary mission.

  Advisors may be better than teachers if what they’re advising is something you need to execute but do not need to have as a core competence.

  Allies are a just-in-time source of power when needed; enemies are the opposite. Avoid making enemies, and when you can’t, follow Sun Tzu’s advice to “keep your friends close, your enemies closer.”

  Look for synergistic relationships. I think they’re less common than people want to believe, but where they exist they are a multiplier.

• Work High in the Power-Law Curve

  Peter Thiel in “From Zero to One” discusses the prevalence of power laws in society. Some efforts produce exponentially higher payoffs than others. Concentrate your efforts where the payoffs are highest.

• Make Efficient Decisions

  Decisions need to be made once without rehashing and doubling back. Profligate exploration and experimentalism waste time and focus.

• Focus

  You have limited energy so solve only a few problems and only your own.

Conclusion

How we think about energy is similar to how we think of money and the disciplines of Finance and Economics cover that copiously. But though many of the ideas about capital apply to energy, there’s insight in looking at the issue of the application of resources from a broader viewpoint. Capital and energy are not the same and interchangeable.

I hope these musings inspire you to consider how you work from a different perspective. Let’s continue the conversation on the subject; I’d love to hear your ideas, and revisit this article in the future with your input.

Here’s wishing you an energetic 2023!

Marc

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Marc Meyer is a Silicon Valley technologist, founder (6 startups, 4 exits, 1 IPO), engineer, executive, investor, advisor, teacher, and coach. He has invested in and advised over 150 companies. He advises and works with accelerators and funds including Alchemist, 500 Startups, HBS Alumni Angels, and Berkeley SkyDeck, where he chairs the Advisor Council. He has an Executive Coaching and Advising practice helping leaders achieve their greatest potential.