From Words to Watts

My life KPI appears to have changed

Welcome back. The newsletter is now officially off-hiatus, and billing is back on for paying subscribers.

Over my 7-week break from this newsletter, I was mainly busy with a big spike of work across my consulting projects, but I also managed to finish reading a big fat book about Istanbul, (my review here), and get halfway through a book I’m really enjoying, There is No Antimemetics Division.

I also had an essay from this newsletter, The Extended Internet Universe (May 2019), where I coined the term cozyweb, get published in a neat little limited-edition print anthology called The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (details here — the first printing sold out in a week; this is the second printing, so if you’re interested grab a copy while they last).

But most importantly, I was able to take a lot of long walks (7-8 miles) and long runs (~5 miles, longer than I’ve run in a decade), thanks to the improving weather here in the Seattle area, and do a lot of the sort of unsystematic reflecting on my life that I used to do a lot more of, but rarely indulge in these days (at 49, my life feels half over, so there seems to be less of a point to such reflection, but it doesn’t yet feel entirely pointless). I find these days that I can do this best outdoors, walking or running (embarrassingly slowly, 12-14 min/mile). Brainstorming in cafes doesn’t work as well these days. Words and drawings seem to obscure rather than uncover the kinds of very basic insights that seem worth digging out these days. I’ve already worked out most of the details such paper-based introspection can reveal. I’m down to mostly wordless bedrock layers of introspective foraying; stuff you have to feel your way into rather than think your way into.

I realized during some of these walks and runs — a slow dawning rather than a lightbulb moment — that the KPI (key performance indicator) of my life has changed. I no longer measure my life in terms of quantity of words. I measure it in watts.

Back at my most productive, I was probably moving about 10,000-20,000 words/week, counting both serious reading and serious writing, as well as speaking and the words involved in consulting and managing. I kept count of a subset of the words, but never bothered to track energy output. Youth takes energy for granted. My words throughput is declining somewhat (maybe down 25% from 2010) though the pie chart looks different.

According to my Whoop strap, my energy output is between 1700 kcal/day on a sedentary day (82 watts average) and 2400 kcal/day on a long-run day (117 watts). According to a Dexa scan (a fancy body composition scan), my basal metabolic rate is around 1480 kcal/day (~72 watts), so really my actual surplus aliveness level above simply existing is between 220-920 kcal/day. Or 10-45 watts.

Not much, huh? Puts things in perspective.

Now the shift from words to watts is not a like-for-like shift. Watts are an input effort metric across all activities. Words are an output metric for a specific class of activities with a typical leverage range in terms of value of impact. The two are related by this effort/leverage graph I made, which also shows my other major activities.

Exercise is not just high wattage. Counter-intuitively, it is very low-leverage. Sure, sure it promotes broad well-being and increases odds of success at other stuff, but all that is indirect. You need the direct leverage of other activities that require more complex capabilities and learned skills, to “realize” the indirect benefits of exercise. By itself, exercise just increases dumb life wattage.

Words are at the other extreme. Trafficking in words in any way is probably the lowest-effort thing you can do in terms of watts, but has really high leverage. You can be barely alive in watts terms and change the world. More importantly, it is the domain of strategy, where working smarter has far higher returns than working harder. By slightly changing what sort of word-work you do, and where, you can change outcomes by 2x-10x on any value-metric you care to track, with almost no change in input wattage.

The cluster of green activities that dominated my life in the last few decades all revolved around words (code and math, which I don’t deal with much these days, are special kinds of words). All seriously handled words fall within roughly the same range of (high) leverage, with some allowance for skill and personality. I hate to admit it, but my own words-based impact probably peaks with direct management activities (which includes consulting), not my public blogging or my technical work long ago. There is something depressing about that, but oh well.

I find that my attention these days is increasingly shifting to the red end of the spectrum. Activities that have high wattage, but low leverage. These are all non-strategic activities. There is not much upside to working smarter. The grinding is the point. The only way to increase impact is to increase input wattage.

In between is the yellow range. A cluster of medium-effort, medium-leverage activities with very varied input behaviors best measured by a very vague KPI I’ve never liked: “success.” These are also activities that are mid-strategic. Neither near-pure strategy like word-work, nor near-pure grinding like running. Success is a class of proxy metrics defined relative to narratives rather than a real metric defined relative to low-level activities. Like Jeff Bezos, I dislike proxy metrics. You can count words and watts but you can’t “count” success. This doesn’t mean you can’t measure it. You just can’t measure it at a close-to-physics level. You have to use things like prizes, famous friends, news coverage, net worth, history denting, parties you’re invited to, and so on. It’s a lot of meta-work of a sort I dislike doing, but if you don’t do that meta-work, the actual work feels futile and empty. Purely instrumental with no intrinsic value.

By contrast, words and watts feel intrinsically worthwhile. The stuff of life-flow. No proxy metrics and elaborate narrative justifications needed.

Not only do you avoid tedious meta-work, you free up an important life resource, your narrative bandwidth, for more interesting and creative uses than measuring “success.” This is perhaps the biggest value of avoiding the middle and sticking to the two extremes of words and watts. You get to self-author your story for interestingness rather than enslave it to the proxy meta-project of tracking success. You get to use your story to measure the universe rather than devote it to seeing how the universe measures you.

There is an elegant simplicity to saying “my life is so many watts and so many words/day and my story is my measure of the universe, not the universe’s measure of me.”

You can’t and shouldn’t entirely avoid the middle (that’s just precious snowflakery) but for me it’s something to satisfice at mediocre levels. I’m probably a mediocre success by many commodity narrative rubrics. Good enough. Move on.

I’m curious to see what happens to my words in the future now that watts are the KPI. One thing that’s already happened is that I can now see my relationship to words more clearly, since I’m no longer as attached to them, and my identity is not as closely tied to them. I casted this thought that I think is going somewhere interesting.

Type A’s are the yellow-range “success“ people. Type B’s are the Red+Green people. Words+Watts people.

I think my words have always been about groping for things for which we have no words, and when I succeed, people usually say I put words to thoughts they didn’t know they were thinking. That’s pretty high leverage/low wattage. I’ve been doing it guided by unconscious intuition for decades, but I’m starting to see the workings of the process itself now. I’m hoping that conscious awareness does interesting things to the words themselves. We’ll see.