Sometimes I’ll see a LinkedIn post of the kind that everybody mocks.
It’ll be along the lines of “this massive cost is actually a good thing because it’s making me hustle harder.”
And yes, I laugh along, because these people are either deluded or grifters, no exceptions. Nobody should pour huge sums into pointless influencemaxxing or publicised secret masterminds, thinking a big-spender mindset is going to grow them rich, and if anyone claims to, they probably have an eye on what you might be willing to pay them.
But there is a small kernel of truth to the idea. Let’s be honest, lies without a tiny piece of truth are rarely convincing.
I’ll come back to that.
This may seem unrelated, but as I use LLMs to help me with my work more and more, I change my mind about what help I want, to some extent.
One of the things I was initially most excited about was that they are really very good at the drudgery of documenting projects, structures etc. Point them at a load of code, for example, and they can write as much documentation as you like, to whatever level of detail. Architectural decisions, styles, formats, how-tos and READMEs, the lot. Brilliant. Time doing that is never time that clients want to pay for, and anyone who enjoys code projects for themselves will probably admit that they begrudge the time spent not doing things that feel more productive.
However … the longer I do my job, the more I realise that when I’m documenting my work, I’m not doing it for anyone else as much as I’m doing it for me. The next person to wonder what’s going on is almost always me, because I do a lot of stuff and can’t remember it all. And if I haven’t written the documentation, I know and remember less, inconveniently so.
Without the price of extracting what is needed from my brain and setting it down, it turns out, the copious ideal documentation is nearly (not quite) worthless to me. It may be useful to others, but I care less about that, honestly. So I’ve continued doing it for myself.
(I should say, at this point, that I can see a world coming in which nobody, including me, even needs to know any of this, but that’s a separate speculation.)
Slightly more related to the truth-sliver of hustle culture is a little habit of mine. When somebody I know is publicising a special offer or free giveaway, and it’s something I think I need, I note it. And wait until it’s back to full price before getting it. It isn’t too often I need to buy something from a friend or acquaintance, but when I do, I make sure it isn’t cheaper because they know me.
What links these things is the power of paying something for something.
If you’ve ever read or seen anything of cults, you may wonder however apparently intelligent people can stay stuck in what looks like a horrible situation with few upsides, paying a terrible price for the life they’re leading. And while in most cases there may be compensations that aren’t obvious to observers, one key element is that most cults are very good at making use of the power of paying a price.
If you’ve had to renounce something truly important to you, so as to belong to a group, surprisingly the natural human reaction is not resentment. It’s to rationalise the situation by boosting the importance of the gain, emotionally. So whatever things there are that are positive, resulting from that sacrifice, will come to seem incredibly precious. They cost so much, it’s psychologically painful to think of them as anything less. And so it follows that people forced to sacrifice a lot come to think of their lives as incredibly privileged.
So the same applies to my work. When I care about it or have reason for it to matter to me, I don’t want a tool to make it easier, because that’s counterproductive. Of course, if it’s for others and they don’t know either way, that’s different.
And when a friend is selling something that will be useful to me, we’ll both be better off if I pay the fairest price. If they have a book that tells me how to do something, for example, experience tells me that I’ll get more out of it if I paid, the same as judging whether it was worth buying anywhere. If it’s worth the money, it’s worth it, and getting a bargain will subtly cheapen the advice and make me less likely to invest the time and concentration, which is actually more significant.
Obviously there are clear limits to this, as we can see by the absurdity of the hustle influencers. There are also dangers, because there are entire industries built not on value for money, but scarcity and signalling, enticing people to spend more than is wise for an illusion.
But, light side and dark side, yin and yang, anything powerful enough to be dangerous is powerful enough to be used for good. And I do choose sometimes to spend more on purpose, effort or money, as an intentional signal to myself.