Power Lies & Power Law
There’s a big lie in here somewhere, let’s find it.
The power law is a mathematical relationship between two quantities where one quantity varies as a power of another.
In a power law distribution, a small number of occurrences are very common, while a large number of occurrences are extremely rare. This results in a “heavy tail” when plotted on a logarithmic scale. Power laws are often observed in natural and social phenomena, such as earthquake magnitudes, city sizes, and wealth distributions.
The law doesn’t lie, but since we’re talking about social phenomena we should also talk about the funky part of that phenomena. I’m not talking about the funk phenomena in the music sense. I’m talking about a flawed component of the social phenomena which causes 80% of society or so to embrace a complacent stance. This complacent stance manifests itself in phrases like “If you really had a vision, you’d have revenue.” or “If you really had a financial track record, you’d own your own house in a specific neighborhood.” or “If you really knew what you were doing it would be painfully obvious to everyone.” These are power lies. Keep telling yourself those lies? I think 80% of the time that correlation may be accurate for only conventional lives of people living within the constraints of the bell curve. So it works as a stochastic type of model until it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t work for 20% of the cases, we can do better.
This is why I love venture. My favorite trick of the trade is learning from failures. Who cares about success? I’ll take respectable failure over so-called serial success any day. This is where the real power comes from. Turning that water into wine. Taking a failure and making it respectable based on what you learned. I’ll take all the failure I can get, even if I didn’t have to do that failing personally by hand. I can still learn from it. Knowledge is power and knowing is half the battle. Even with ChatGPT we’re still doing knowledge work, and the failure-driven learnings are the ones that let you break out of that stochastic parrot effected mindset. Don’t become a statistic, don’t become stochastic, etc.
