Future Scalability: Hacking the Psychology of Tomorrow TPS-0144

Whereas earlier in life, when you're spending most of your time living for the weekend for the most part, and not thinking too much about the second half of your life, what it's gonna start to feel like when you slow down and you stop being so enthusiastic about everything in the immediate timeline of the weekend.

You start scaling up and scaling out your time horizon to what am I gonna do to be taking care of myself as I start to lose more of my abilities, faculties, energy, resources…you don't have much time left to F around, whereas you had lots of time to F around and find yourself and chase people. If you know what I mean, and just be quite a bit more carefree.

Now, as I'm probably squarely in the second half of my life, beginning the second half of my life, statistically speaking, spending more time thinking about not just the weekend. I certainly have some fun weekends to look back on, to reminisce and be nostalgic about.

But the responsible thing, and the thing that's unavoidable now really is spending a good percentage of everyday consciously and unconsciously, very intentionally planning for and designing for the future. So the reason I thought of the word scalability is that when I was back in the corporate world, a lot of us are in the corporate world and not in such a glamorous way that we get to be rubbing elbows with the C suite of executives. But I was able to do that being at a venture funded start-up where the ground floor was filled with the C suite of executives.

So I got to be a part of that journey for a while and that was where I learned about pitching a pitch deck to venture capitalists. It was all about what your plan was for scalability as a tech company with so called brick and mortar elements.

So scaling products and services across the map of physical space, also scaling the business infrastructure for serving that expanded geographic domain.

So a definition was given: doing more with less would be scalability.

So ideally, the market that you're able to serve, potentially the whole planet, depending on the product or service and how it's delivered.

Ideally, you would not have to exert the same amount of effort at every inch that you grow your business.

You're hoping not to have a one-to-one ratio of infrastructure.

If you can possibly keep the overhead and the infrastructure as minimalistic as possible, while expanding within your addressable market then you should be able to have bigger profit margins.

Because if it takes you essentially the same amount of effort and materials to provide product services to one person is almost the same as serving ten or a hundred people then you're very scalable, because you can continue to expand out into that market and not have to have this very tight and limited profit margin.

That's one way of looking at. You could scale, technically speaking, where it takes the same amount to serve one customer as it does to serve the next. As long as there's some profit there, however tight the margin is, then you should be able to scale.

But ideally, again, any way that you could possibly reduce costs as you scale, reduce inputs to the system as you scale and get outputs that are able to expand across the market, obviously you're gonna make a lot more money.

So that's the name of the game. Scalability is doing more with less, a sort of lean and efficient, evolving scalability that's very self aware and self critical, and not just, oh, "it works don't fix it". It's like, no, "it works, so optimize it more".

I learned those concepts in a business environment where we were evolving and scalability was obviously a moving target.

A lot of mistakes were made in trial and error. Issues had to be resolved that forced the equation to be revealed.

So we learned a lot about what not to do, what we had done wrong. And once that sweet spot was achieved, the scalability, the efficiency was improved, then it really took off.

So I've experienced that, and I think about how now in my own, in my semi retired status, and certainly being very independent and doing the kind of projects and doing a kind revenue generating activities that I enjoy the most and that I feel most aligned with…

It doesn't feel like I'm punching a clock or doing a nine to five or working for the man, certainly.

But I love hard work, I love hard play, I do both and I'm not done working in this life but I'm certainly working in a more independent and more designer type of way so to that end, I'm aging, returning to that original point of what it feels like to be not as young as I was.

Thinking more about the future than I ever did, my own future, my own life, how I'm gonna live, who I'm gonna be, what I'm gonna be doing, what kind of relationships and friendships I wanna be having, and making that ecologically intelligent, ecologically literate, ecologically correct, if you will.

And so scaling into the future makes me think about what am I doing now?

What's my lifestyle now and does that scale into the future? If it does, do I want it to, how much effort and energy I'm putting into whatever I'm doing today? I can't just assume that's scalable into the future, because that is a diminishing resource that I can't replenish. And I'm not in a position to hire a bunch of people to maintain whatever energy level and output I have today.

I have to now start to design a future where, as time progresses, I'm going to be, in some ways, less resourced. How do I account for that? How do I adapt to that?

I'm teaching myself now saying you need to think about scalability in the future. If you're in your forties now, what is life gonna look like in your fifties, sixties, seventies, even eighties, possibly.

That's several decades that I am projecting my lifestyle into the future.

There are certain things my that previously, they probably couldn't scale into that future in a very elegant way. They would be very inefficient or impossible and very frustrating to try to sustain.

So a lot of those types of things, behaviors, ambitions, dreams, modes of operation, had to be deprecated, like drinking a six pack at a time. That's something that does not scale into that future. It doesn't even scale into now, things like pulling all nighters don't scale into that future.

Things like burning the candle at both ends and the daily grind. Even things like being in traffic every day, that does not scale for me psychologically.

I don't wanna continue to do that so obviously this all points to permaculture and homesteading, the idea that what can I reasonably imagine myself doing in those later decades?

Okay fermenting in glass jars with water and products from the garden. Yes, that's something I could do with a bad back, with a cane, with a walker, all those things.

I could hopefully have a comfortable place to sit and a table.

If I can harvest from the garden, and I can put salt and water in a jar, then I can continue that process which is essential to my survival and my health and wellness and well being, and morale and positive mental attitude.

So that's something now where I feel like I've arrived at a practice in life, in my lifestyle, that I'm perfectly happy with, don't really see any need or desire on the horizon to want to change.

That's something I can continue with indefinitely. It's not erratic, it's not unsustainable, it's not hormonal, it's just very simple and straight forward and very rewarding.

So that's why I say, I wanna live a life now where I'm thinking more about scaling in the future.

And that could also apply to things like, tool maintenance and buy once, cry once, buying things that are gonna last, replacing plastic with stainless steel and glass, and even eventually evolving into copper gardening tools. I've used them before, and it's great, and there's a whole esoteric movement around that. For me, it would be mostly practical, but replacing things with more permanent... not just the permaculture of designing human habitat ecosystems and whatnot, but also more permanence in the implements that are used getting to a zero waste point personally, if possible, or at least minimizing things like individual packaging and buying things in bulk.

So the bulk lifestyle of food that I have, to me is scalable into the future... eventually replace all the ingredients with homegrown ingredients.

But for now, if I'm scaling into the future of buying 25-50lb bags of bulk food, making my own trail mix, making my own sproutable mix, and soup mix, having years worth of spices at a time. That is obviously very simply scaling into the future on a cyclical basis.

It's eliminates the need for me to be grocery shopping if I'm growing groceries.

Then with the calorie crops, as it were, being things that I can store as bulk, dry food with long term storage, then that's a practice. The food storage and preservation lifestyle, homesteading growing and then storing the food and relying on it.

That's my thesis on my own inquiry, and hopefully this is something that is worth considering for anyone.

What are you doing now? How efficient is it? Do you wanna be doing in the future?

Can you possibly be doing in the future? Do you need help to do it in the future?

How are you designing, not just for the resources, the time, energy, the effort, the enthusiasm that you have now?

Are you, are you designing for the immediate future or the long term future? What will you be letting go of?

What will you potentially not care to do or not be able to do later in the future?

I'm kind of rehearsing now for those later years and purging as much as I can now, purge now and start to rehearse for and behave in a manner that is how I presume I will be living in that future.

There may be a time where I do not drink any home brew at all in the future.

I hope that never happens but if it does, that's one thing I'm not gonna rehearse too much because I do enjoy having my glass of homemade wine of whatever variety it might be, whatever fruit or honey source it might be, but it's certainly far more austere than it has been before.

I see it as an art form.

I will know that I'm getting old when there will be times that go by in a workday, if I'm working the land, working the garden and I actually choose to not be listening to music or shows of any kind, and I just decide I'm ready to work in silence.

I remember seeing people that I worked with, not listening to things all day long in their ear the way I was, because I still wanted to always be learning things and be on top of current events and be pushed by the music.

I was like, I can't believe these people that work all day outside, and they just won't be listening to anything.

I just feel like I would be bored to death, not that the work isn't exciting but that it would just be mind numbing. But I also thought, it's probably me just being kind of young and immature, and I'll get to a point where I'm content with just the sounds of nature and that I won't wanna hear anything.

I won't wanna hear the news. I won't wanna learn much else that I don't have to learn.

I'll probably make my own beats just on pots and pans, and maybe not be so dependent on all that input.

So I could imagine it, but I couldn't do it, but now I've been starting to do that at times.

So I will just say, you know what? I don't wanna hear what anyone else has to say right now.

I wanna share this moment privately with the work that I'm doing and in silence, and just enjoy it for what it is.

So I guess I'm testing those waters, and that is something, obviously that's scalable into the future, because maybe someday I won't have any electronic devices that work anymore.

Maybe I'll say, this is the last one I'm gonna buy.

I don't see that happening anytime real soon. But there is a sort of mystique to imagining that I could get to a point where I really minimize inputs from the outside world and I say, maybe for a portion of the day, I'll sit down and I will engage with anything that isn't just raw nature and me out there doing my thing.

Maybe it sounds bleak, but I know there's a grace in that.

And at least, like I said, if that's what I have to scale into at some point, it won't be such a shock if I start to experiment with it now.

So I hope that's a positive and uplifting take on aging and the future, and I hope there are ways that we can all scale back into the land, back into nature, where we do get to that point of personal zero waste and we can minimize the stress and anxiety of shifting patterns of energy in our lives.