Flight of Fortune

In one of my university courses, the class was split into groups and we played an "airline game", which was a non-visual simulation where each week we would make decisions for our airline company, as to which planes we will buy, routes we would fly and how we would compete against other airlines. Our decisions were inputted into the simulator by the lecturer and we would get a snapshot feedback of what was happening in the game to inform our next decisions.

At the end, despite us trailing the first three quarters of the semester, we finished second - but found out that if it hadn't been for "insider trading" in the last two weeks, we would have eclipsed the competition. We later were told by the lecturer that he had given the calculation weightings to a group who used them to pull from mid-field to the lead. Unfair? Yes - but that is how it goes and the lecturer wanted to use it as a side lesson - for our group specifically.

That all aside though, it was not only a lot of fun to play and discuss, but also educational with a massive benefit, as we were able to make a decision and get relatively fast feedback before making the next, at no cost. This is highly valuable in a trial and error economy, as the "fail fast" philosophy comes into play. Often though, as people are trying to optimize all of the time they are going to trial less and feel that they are failing less, but they are also not going to learn as much in order to succeed more.

This is part of the challenge of having limited resources and a need for those resources in other areas, as it means not being able to invest and lose, even if the "loss" is actually just a lessening of potential gains. This is quite common in many domains, where for example people will stay in a job for the money, because moving job will result in initially less than they are on, even though ultimately, they might make more elsewhere.

Perhaps this can be seen as an "optimize now, pay later" position and while there are all kinds of reasons as to why an individual might do this, ultimately the opportunity-cost in the short-term might be dwarfed by the O-C in the long-term.

In the airline game, there were teams that went out hard, buying planes and jumping into all of the most lucrative routes and they were making gains, but the competition was fierce and the cost of their fleet very high. My team took the less lucrative regional routes but were able to own them, then started shifting into the ones with higher competition, but with far more resources available, meaning we could squeeze out those who were just making ends meet due to fleet cost and, while we could offset our own additional costs through our monopolized routes. This meant our breakeven point happened far sooner and our gains compounded very fast in the closing weeks of the competition.

And I think that this is one of the takeaways from that game, that it is good to consider what the "win" is - is it weekly bragging rights about how well it is going, or is it the final result? Win the battle, or the war, so to speak.

I find that in crypto, while "HODL" is the old call, with a lot of new potential to earn on what is held, there is the potential to chase yield. However, people are largely impatient, so they are chopping and changing their methods looking at the short gains, not the long. However, they are looking at "failure" as the inability to maximize gain in that short-term, not the long-term ability to compound value overtime. This means that they are changing processes, without necessarily learning the lessons from their last process, meaning they are just repeating the same behavior in the hope for a different result, with only the vehicle changing.

While it is tempting to put all the weighting on results, good process will outperform daily optimization most of the time. However, good process is a process of trial and error and constant adjustment, but it still needs some time to see if it is working. For instance in regards to changing jobs for potentially more salary, if it is done too frequently, it is actually going to be detrimental and lessen potential, not increase it, because there will not be enough time to build the value streams in the new position before moving to the next. If staying too long in the one position though, it can be comfortable, but the "roof" gets put on the earning potential and it will only move up incrementally, because not enough new value can be added by the employee. Finding the balance between trial, error and adjustment tempered with enough time to give the opportunity for a process to prove or destroy itself can be hard, especially when looking at the "loss" of gains too often.

I think that this is one of the problems many content creators have on Hive as they look at their each and every post payout as an indication of success or failure and often, they do this in comparison to others on the platform. However, they don't necessarily factor in all of the variables that lead to their or other people's daily results and this can lead to the sense that change is needed, even though the last processes haven't had the time to marinate to create an average result that can be used to determine success or failure of processes.

What most people will find is that consistency matters but it doesn't mean that nothing changes. Most of the content creators here who get rewarded have evolved heavily over time, but they haven't changed randomly through time, nor have they chased every point of optimization. Instead they have used the skills and processes that they have and applied small changes consistently to slowly build their presence in the community. It could be the way they write, the topics, the images they use or their engagement activity, but most have shifted often, but small.

This kind of process evolution is highly valuable because what it is doing is becoming a learning experience that not only improves the processes used, but those processes become part of the current person, making them authentic in the moment. This is why some people are able to change, but are still seen as consistent, because the speed of change isn't through optimization chasing. Optimization chasing looks very erratic, like a work history where jobs are changed every six months, but skill and process growth is a maturing of an individual that can be trusted, as it generally leads to improvement, with failures getting smaller, even if they are still experienced often.

Personally, authenticity matters to me when consuming material and I expect it from myself. However, this doesn't mean that I expect people to maintain the same "authentic self" forever, because we are dynamic individuals, living in conditions that are always changing. If anything, I expect people to change their processes over time and those who don't generally are those who are actually not paying too much attention to the world in which they live, wondering why they get the results they do, often complaining about the results they get.

Hive has a "Learn to Earn" incentive built into it and there is so much to learn here, but it is good to recognize that despite what we say, no one really likes learning. What we do like are the better outcomes from what we learn, but if we aren't actively improving our processes, we tend to stagnate in the familiar and slow our evolution to the point it might be considered devolution, as it increasingly fails to meet the needs of the environment, even though we can feel we are doing the right thing.

There is the saying, "learn something new every day", but perhaps the pertinent consideration should be - how has what you learned today, changed what you will do tomorrow?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]