#05 | What we owe others
#05 | What we owe others
🗻 Are our accomplishments all our own doing and other dark sides of meritocracy
Welcome to the 5th edition of Day One - a newsletter designed to cultivate your curiosity and bring humanity back to entrepreneurship. Thanks for being here! If this email was forwarded to you, get your own here
Hello from Lisbon! 👋🏽 This edition is shorter than usual, but comes with additional curiosity snippets. Would love to hear your thoughts on this format.
👏🏼 What we owe others
Over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about meritocracy - a system by which advancement is earned according to merit. As knowledge workers, it's empowering to believe that we get to where we are as a result of our own hard work. We have been wired into this thinking from early on, when school grades start dictating your future opportunities. But while meritocracy demands equality of opportunity at the starting line, it also legitimates those inequalities that follow as a result of innate differences among us.
“Even a perfect meritocracy, in which opportunities for advancement were truly equal, would corrode solidarity. Focusing on helping the talented clamber up the ladder of success can keep us from noticing that the rungs on the ladder are growing further and further apart”
— Michael J. Sandel author of The Tyranny of Merit
This relentless emphasis on rising and striving encourages the ones on the top to overestimate their own work and dismiss luck and circumstance/context, often looking down to those who lack those meritocratic credentials. Meanwhile, those that didn't rise, are pushed further down the system.
I used to blindly believe in meritocracy myself, preaching that "you can make it if you try" - but this, I saw from a privileged bubble. The reality still is that someone that grew up in hardship will not have the same starting line as someone that was born into a privileged socio-economic context.
While we continue to work on narrowing this gap, I recommend you start by looking into yourselves, your experiences, your achievements, and asking: was this all my own doing? what do I owe others?
Recommended reading: What's wrong with meritocracy
☕ Curiosity snippets
🗞️ Early work. Paul Graham's take on what holds us back from doing great work and how to solve it - changing our attitude towards our early work.
🗞️ How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time. Staying too long on a job can strongly affect your career - but who hasn't done this? I certainly have. But a year wasted on an ill-fitted job is throwing out about 3.3% of your career! Apoorva Govind has created a framework to identify when it's time to move on.
🗞️ Drive growth by picking the right lane. Lately, I've been diving into a lot of growth reads - and this one has been one of the most thorough playbooks from the past few months. We tend to believe that, in order to grow customer acquisition, we need to use multiple stoves. This guide by Dan Hockenmaier and Lenny Rachitsky makes a point to figure out one driving force, and focus our efforts in it.
🗞️ Don’t drown in email! How to use Gmail more efficiently. This one might be an oldie (2013), but a real goodie. If you're like me, emails are a massive time and energy drainer. Andreas came up with a brilliant system to easily manage your emails and win back time to do stuff that is a lot more productive.
🗞️ A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air. I don't usually write about COVID-19, so for this article to make it into my snippets should be proof of its worth reading it. Also, it's quite interactive, which helps drilling the content into our skulls.
🗞️ The twilight of the ethical consumer. Few long-form articles have shackled my belief system like Elizabeth's on ethical consumption. We need to stop trying to create social change by changing our consumption habits alone, and instead, hold firms and governments accountable.
"When we compel companies and governments to change, that change becomes available to everyone, instead of just the consumers who know about or can afford ethical products"
— Elizabeth L. Cline
💫 Thank you
Thank you so much for reading. If you have thoughts/feedback or any interesting content to share, I'd love to hear from you! And if you believe a friend might enjoy this newsletter - I'd very much appreciate you sending it to them by sending them this link or clicking below.
Thanks for being there!
— Kat