A random musing I had.Change happens at the margin.Music evolves at the intersection of different genre and culture.Space expands into the frontier. Everything happens at the edge of some thing. If you’re walking along the edge of some thing, you risk losing your balance if you’re not focused and distributing your weight appropriately. Maybe being at the edge of something requires thoughtful balance. One foot firmly on the ground, and the over the edge just enough.Nothing ground breaking or earth shattering — just what’s on my mind.

Warren buffet cites Ben Graham, author of “The Intelligent Investor”, as a principle inspiration earlier in his career. Warren said he would look for “used cigar butts, and try to get a few puffs out of them” before selling. Charlie Munger helped Warren revise the strategy and focus on investing in good companies, and good prices (undervalued), and holding for the long term. There are people without college degrees, low to medium status pedigrees, and with disabilities — all three signal to some employers, “this is a bad hire.” Perhaps an employer might get turned off by someone with ADHD as being unable to focus. Maybe an employer thinks someone without a college degree lacks domain knowledge and skills — perhaps commitment. If you and I search for talent the way that Warren and Charlie search for stocks, we would take a different approach. You and I would focus on looking for people high in conscientiousness, drive, sturdiness, generativeness, and that are happy and fun to be around. We would look for people that others might have looked away from — you and I might find a “disability” signals “potential highly developed abilities.” Like an investor, you and I hope to retain the talent at a good price — undervalued. You and I would hold the talent for as long as possible — nurturing its growth and productivity. Later, we would need to let go of the now much more valuable talent. Exploitative? No. Investing in people, nurturing their grow, and then helping them achieve something better is a great and fine pursuit.

If you know people that can talk about the future as if it was happening today, then you know someone likely high in generativeness. Generative people tap into a broad and deep reservoirs of knowledge and insights collected from broad and deep forays into work and self-improvement. They enjoy sharing ideas that may have real-world applications. They keep the big picture in the front of their mind, and want to help make that happen with and through people. If you are standing up a project, you want generative people on the team. And there’s a simple test.Ask the candidate/prospect about a thing/subject they obsess over.Ask the candidate what they would change about that thing.Repeat step two by asking lots of “Why” and “What Else” style follow ups until there is nothing else.You’re looking for three things.Frequency a candidate brings up potential real-world applications or impacts of their ideas.Frequency of how often you are engaged by the candidate in ideation. The quality of how well the candidate expresses the limits of their knowledge.

“It’s funny how much we’ve worked and done yet forgotten how much we did.” - DadThat could ring true for any person.

Sturdiness seems, from what I’ve learned thus far, to be composed of two factors:Energy managementStress responseIf that’s true, then improving sturdiness requires two things:Improving your system’s ability to convert potential energy into useful energy. Improving your system’s ability to adapt to stress.Easier said than done. Requires you to think about the inputs you give your system so that you’ll have useful energy to draw on later. Requires you to stop and take an inventory of the situation before deciding to respond. Improving the quality and quantity of thoughtful decision making is a good place to start.

I think of sturdiness as the capacity of a system to maintain consistent useful output and internal order over time. And I believe this personality trait is worth thinking about for a minute.When you’re looking to build or launch a thing, you want to engage people who consistently produce useful outputs while keeping it together. I think of session musicians — musicians who show up and do a record/soundtrack with very little-to-no time to prepare and execute at a high level while being a great person to hang out with — as fine examples of sturdiness. If I was building a team or helping a company jump into growth mode, I would test for sturdiness. I would look for people who talk about projects that had seemingly insurmountable odds. I would look for two things: How well did the candidate manage their energy? I would inquire into their outputs and how much utility it generated for others.How did the candidate manage failures encountered along the way? I wouldn’t be afraid to challenge the candidate if I felt they were hedging in their answer. Sturdiness + conscientiousness + drive = strong hire!

The most interesting thing about conscientiousness is that it appears to be an interplay of many (though not necessarily complex) things — culture, our nervous systems, inherited chemistry, and how we have adapted to survive. If you want to improve how you express this trait, it’s possible you’ll need to look at the whole versus the part. What are you trying to improve? Sense of responsibility?Goal orientation?Thoughtfulness?Efficiency?Self-discipline? Attention to detail? Organization?What’s getting in your way?Fear?Brain chemistry? Perhaps you’re made a certain way and you’ll have to learn strategies to leverage your uniqueness.How you interpret the world? Perhaps you’re quick to judge. Nutrition?Something else?Do you know how to change it? Do you have strategies? Have you done something like this before? Do you know best practices?Do you have access to people who can help?Is it worth changing?Ultimately, you have to determine if the return of improvement exceeds the cost of change.

Conscientiousness is a personality style. Generally, it means to be dutiful, reliable, express attention to detail, persevere, exercise good time management skills — to have a thoughtful and efficient work ethic. Hiring a conscientiousness person is hiring a person that is committed to doing their best and fulfilling promises. A way to test a candidates level of conscientiousness is to examine how they make decisions. And a fine model to use is an After Action Review. Here’s how you might use this model.Ask about a previous and consequential decision that a candidate made in a previous project/job. Ask about the outcome the candidate hoped to achieve. Ask about what the candidate knew going into the decision. Ask about what first, second, and third order the effects the candidate considered. What was most likely to happen? Ask how the candidate brought others into the decision making process. How did they query the brains of others for inputs? How did they assess those inputs? What ultimately was incorporated into the candidates analysis of a go-forward plan? What decision did the candidate make? How did they communicate the decision? What were the effects? What learnings were pulled forward? You can see, most of the meat happens at questions 4 and 5 because that’s where decision making friction happens — the anxiety of “what if”. Conscientious candidates demonstrate thoughtful decision making processes that incorporate many inputs from many types of people, thoughts about the second and third order effects, and continuous improvement implementations.You can use this same framework for hiring artistic talent talent too.

When starting a new role or tackling a new problem, first answer the question: “what does normal look like?”Then, you’ll have an easier time identifying and tackling the variances of life. Inspired by Robin Hanson’s conversation with Tyler Cowen:Hanson: “The first thing to understand about anything is the middle of the distribution. If you’ve got that wrong, you’re just way off. You need to get that roughly right before you can start looking at the variance in the distribution and along which dimensions, higher or lower variance.”Application for leaders: teach the middle of the distribution when onboarding new team members.