Welcome back.
Nice to see you again. This episode today has really nothing to do with money or investing.
It has to do with work and the kind of work that so many of us do today.
John DeRoccafeller was the most successful businessman of all time.
He was also a recluse. He spent a lot of time just by himself.
He rarely spoke to other people. And he deliberately made himself inaccessible and remained quiet if you happen to catch his attention at the company.
He was a refinery worker who occasionally had Roccafeller's ear at work once said, quote, he lets everybody else talk while he sits back and says nothing.
But he seems to remember everything. And when he does begin to speak, he puts everything in its proper place.
And there are so many examples of Roccafeller doing just that.
One of Roccafeller's favorite poems that he recited very often at work said, quote, a wise old owl lived in an oak.
The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why aren't we all like that old bird? So look, Roccafeller was a strange guy.
But the more I read about him, the more I realized that he had just figured something out that now applies to literally tens of millions of workers today.
Roccafeller's job was not to drill oil wells or load trains or to move barrels of oil.
His job was just to make a good decision. And making decisions requires more than anything else just quiet time alone in your own head to think a problem through.
So Roccafeller's product that he delivered wasn't what he did with his hands or even with his words.
It was what he figured out inside of his head. So that's where he spent most of his time and energy, quietly alone inside of his own head.
Now back in his day, more than a hundred years ago, that was pretty unique.
That's all jobs during Roccafeller's time, required doing things with your hands.
In 1870, 46% of jobs were in agriculture, farming.
And 35% were in crafts and manufacturing. That's according to the commas Robert Gordon.
So few professions relied on using your brain or your decisions.
You didn't necessarily think you just labored without interruption.
And the work that you did was visible and tangible.
You could see it. Today though, in the modern economy, those numbers are almost perfectly flipped.
38% of jobs are now designated as managers, officials, and professionals.
And those are by and large decision-making jobs.
You're making a good decision with your head. There's another 41% of jobs today that are qualified as service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions and your labors.
So here's a problem that we don't think about enough.
Even as more professions look like Roccafellers, they are thought jobs that require time to think a problem through.
By and large, we are stuck in the old world where a good employee is expected to dislabor.
Visibly, without interruption. The point I'm trying to make here is that being productive in today's world does not look like what being productive did for most of the history of work.
If your job was to pull a lever in a factory, then you were only productive if you were pulling that lever.
But if your job is to create a marketing campaign or to be a manager, you might be productive if you're just sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking about design, thinking about a problem.
The problem that we have today is that too many workplaces expect their knowledge workers to pull that proverbial lever.
And then sitting at their desk, clicking a mouse, typing on a keyboard, 40 hours a week, when they would actually be better off doing things that look lazy but are actually very productive.
Of just sitting, thinking, maybe talking to other people.
So the result is that most people have what I call thought jobs without being given much time to think.
Which is the equivalent of making a ditch digger work without a shovel.
It's the opposite of what you actually need. And maybe this is a wild theory of mine, I don't know if anything backs us up, maybe that is why productivity growth is so much lower than it used to be.
So look, if you anchor to the old world where good work meant physical action, it's hard to wrap your head around the idea that the most productive thing that a knowledge worker can do these days might be sitting on a couch, thinking, or he was staying home and thinking, but it's so clear that it is.
Good ideas rarely come in meetings, or even at your desk.
They usually come when you're in the shower, or on a walk, or on your morning commute, or you're just hanging out on the weekends and all of a sudden something pops into your head.
I'm always amazed at the number of famous ideas that allegedly came to people while they were in the bathtub.
Einstein talked about this, Winston Churchill talked about this, Alan Greenspan talked about this all the time, that some of his best ideas came in the bathtub.
Look, we'll think his ideas weren't that great, but that's where he got his thinking done.
But if you tell your boss that you require a midday bath to do some thinking, you know what that response is going to be, of course.
But if you look at the famous thinkers who didn't have to impress a boss, they didn't have to look busy.
You start to see a theme. They spent a lot of time doing stuff that did not look like work, but in fact was stupendously productive.
Albert Einstein once put it this way. He said quote, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head.
If my work isn't going well, I lie down in the middle of a work day and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.
Mozart said something very similar. He said quote, When I am traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.
This all meshes with a Stanford study that showed that walking increases creativity by 60%.
And I've often thought this as a writer myself that by far not just the best but just the majority of the work that I do as a writer does not take place at my computer when I'm typing.
It takes place when I go for walks with my dog or if I'm going for a run.
That's when you do the most quote unquote writing.
And then going back to your computer is when you're just digesting the things that you just thought about.
When you are doing something that did not look like work, but was actually the most productive stuff of your day.
So obviously everyone eventually has to go sit down and produce their work.
And they are held to the responsibility of their goals and their quotas.
But as the economy continues to shift to more knowledge work, particularly with AI coming down the pipe.
We should respect that what actually produces good work can look lazy and vice versa.
In investing where there's the potential to win my pure luck, it's wise to judge somebody by their process rather than just their outcome.
Good work might be the opposite. You should judge people by their outcomes, not by just the visibility of their process, which is often hidden inside their head.
That's it for this episode. This episode was brought to you by my friends at public.com and their podcasts The Run Down, which is a short weekly podcast going through what's going on in the stock market and the economy.
Short and sweet just like this podcast. If you're interested in more, go check it out.
