what i would do if a loved one was sick
or what i would have done if i could go back in time
my grandmother was one of my favorite people in the world and when i was younger she had cancer and passed away. at the time i lacked the general agency to do something about it. that sucks1. life sucks sometimes.
my mother recently introduced me to a friend whose son has a very life threatening and urgent medical problem. her son needs a kidney. his mother found him a bunch of volunteers but the hospital did not approve the volunteers. the hospital can’t legally say why. she has an information gathering problem and she also has a recruitment and outreach problem and she has a time problem.
when the pressure conditions are radical — like when your son is sick — things should be clear. but things are not clear. we live in american business logic. what do you do when your loved one is sick? american business logic and paul graham would advise something like ‘founder mode.’ go run at the problem and figure it out. paul graham is an idiot. im also an idiot. idiot as a universal property of all systems.
anyways, go run at the problem and go figure it out is a great portfolio approach. but your loved one is not a portfolio. your loved one is your loved one. and so the paul graham school of thinking on how to do things only applies when things are just not that serious. a portfolio approach is a different way of saying some things will not work out. can you tell that i am being serious?
when the pressure conditions are radical — like when your son is sick — your job is to not fail at accomplishing your objective. a different way of saying that is that your job is to have so much safety that you trump all risk. it’s not about go run at the problem and figure it out. it’s about that and ten other things with hundred times the amount of intensity. it’s not either or, it’s yes and. quantity is the most underrated quality.
rapper/mogul p diddy got arrested in his home. p diddy was a guy with a security guard. he got raided. he was up against like 50 fbi agents those agents were really well trained. it was not a competition. it was complete overkill. resource mismatch. this is not intelligence but this is how failure is avoided. we think that this analogy does not apply for all topics but it does. do you have the necessary force to deal with the inertia. do you have the computational states to convert the needed information space into matter? failure is safety minus risk. paul graham says founder mode. i have nothing against paul graham. seriously.
so what i would do if a loved one was sick? or maybe better, what did i advise for this woman. i advised her to go find five highly competent women.2 volunteers, friends of the family, or if she can’t find someone, go pay them on upwork. the idea is that two of those women execute on an outreach find a donor plan. and two of those women execute on a information gathering plan. and the last of those women ensure that the four women execute on their plans. if they can be all in person for this great. make them apple pie and set up a whiteboard. operate like a yc startup. weird huh? it’s not either or, it’s yes and.
if the plans are executed and the goal is accomplished by the end of the week great. let’s say at the end of week one you get 50 volunteers and you figure out all the information you need to know. your not done. you keep repeating until you are at overkill. don’t get 50 volunteers. go get 500. go get 1,000. paul graham says 50 volunteers is probably done, kobe bryant says jobs not finished. operations as safety minus risk.
as for the mother herself? she can go into founder mode. go run around and be a paul graham idiot because it’s not idiotic. it clearly works within some context window. and it should be respected. it’s not either or, it’s yes and, because everything is always safety minus risk.
what probably sucks more is that on some level i am lying. it wasn’t an agency problem. i was too selfish // not motivated enough. laziness is a recursion policy. this is not true but it also is. that sucks even more. mom, i don’t want to talk about this, i have nothing more to say.
yes women — yes i believe that women are the most competent, maybe a story for another time