![]() Out of the field of about 8-10, I came in second. At the University of Michigan, I organized an informal tournament at the residential scholarship house I was living in at the time. ![]() After that, I still mostly got beaten by R, my regular partner (who was fundamentally more talented than me), but I actually began winning the occasional match, and all games were a lot closer.įast-forward 15 years. S put me through half an hour of very basic forehand-to-forehand top spin practice rallies, and it completely changed my game. He had an almost robotic level of perfection in all basic elements of the game. S was the sort of calm, unflappable guy who simply cannot be psyched-out or forced into error. Then one day, I managed to convince S, whose father had been a state-level champion, to practice with me (there was no point playing, he would have beaten me 21-0, 21-0, 21-0). Errors would accumulate, and I’d invariably choke. The net result was that I was beaten mentally and physically. ![]() He selected his shots better and executed them better. He knew his strengths (defense/offense, forehand/backhand) enough to always pick a better strategy for each game. He was only slightly better than me, in just about every department, but that all added up to him beating me nearly every time. It wasn’t that I was getting creamed every time I’d occasionally take a game off R. The score in nearly every 3-game match would go something like 21-14, 21-7, 23-22. We were regular partners in a loose clique of serious players at our club, comprising approximately a dozen players. R and I played table-tennis nearly every day in high school. But the little story starts with my table tennis clique in high school. The big story is how the economy is moving closer to C-driven allocation of creative capital. There are seven other significant numbers in this tale: 0, 1, 7, 150, 8, 1000 and 10,000. That’s the story of C, the optimal size of a creative group. The free-agent planet under-organizes it, and the industrial economy over-organizes it. It is scarce and it is horrendously badly allocated in the economy today. Collective attention is: the coordinated, creative attention of more than 1 person. “Attention,” as an unqualified commodity is no longer the critical scarcity. I believe we are experiencing the first major bottleneck-shift in a decade. The reason we focus on scarcity is that at any given time, the economy is constrained by a single important “bottleneck scarcity.” Land, labor, factories, information and most recently, individual attention, have all played the bottleneck role in the past. Chris Anderson’s Freeprovided me with the insight that helped me put the whole package together: economics is fundamentally a process driven by abundance and creative-destruction rather than scarcity. This article is also about an argument that I’ve been unconsciously circling for a long time. ![]() I’ll define this number - call it C - in a bit, but I believe its value to be around 12. This article is about a number I call the optimal crucible size. ![]()
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