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Unlike the typical seaweed collector, Durant was not a British woman but an American man, an inventor and scientist. Born in 1805, he seemed to assume, like many educated men of his era, that no aspect of the mechanical, physical, or natural world was beyond his ken. His biography is a litany of claims-to-fame.16 With a hot-air balloon ascent from Battery Park, New York in 1830, he made his name as the first American aeronaut, staying aloft for two hours in a balloon he’d sewn himself. His second ascent, in 1833, was attended by President Andrew Jackson and thousands of others, during which Durant dropped leaflets featuring his own ecstatic poetry. These poems, about the virtues of ballooning, seem to have been the world’s first instance of aerial propaganda. He was the first US manufacturer of silkworm gut, a filament used for fishing line, and his raw silk and cocoons took high awards. He turned his attention then to Mesmerism, a faddish belief in clairvoyant hypnosis that was sweeping the nation. After infiltrating Mesmerist circles by pretending to find the practice credible, he wrote one of the first anti-Mesmerism screeds to be published in America, in which he debunked the supposed science with great relish.17 After that book, Durant became interested in hydraulics. He maintained a year of technical correspondence with Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Boston’s waterworks, and soon-to-be engineer of Chicago’s sewage system. Their letters were published as Hydraulics: On the Physical Laws that Govern Running Water (1849).

Charles Durant went on to write the first American book on seaweed, and according to this article, at least, the best one. The whole article is worth reading, especially if like me, you’re interested in seaweed.

The geography of the industrial revolution in Britain was shaped in part by the corrupt, rentier economy of London in the eighteenth century. The various by-laws, regulations and tax regimes in and around London largely precluded the establishment of new industrial processes. This drove industrial investment to the midlands, and especially to the steep and narrow valleys of Yorkshire, Lancashire and South Wales, where there was abundant water-power to drive the new industrial machinery. The need to efficiently pump water provided the impetus for the development of steam, driving industry forward.

From Does Britain Exist by Tim Watkins. You often hear about regulations constricting growth and leading innovation to happen elsewhere, but I think this is the first time I can remember someone citing a specific example.

Thanks to the Browser for the recommendation

I love this post by Uri Bram on export subsidies and how they could be applied to personal skill development.

Here’s Uri on export subsidies:

South Korea is one of the greatest development stories rarely told. In just 60 years, they've taken 50 million people from largely rural poverty to a higher GDP per capita than Japan's - it's a bonkers achievement. How did they do it?

Through export subsidies. For the full story, read How Asia Works, but the short version is that Korea strategically brought its manufacturing sector up to scratch by subsidising firms conditional on them successfully exporting products; that is, on selling things abroad on the open market to people who had plenty of other options and no particular reason to buy Korean.

His really interesting idea is how you might apply this to skill development:

So paying your kid's costs while they do a writing degree is not an export subsidy, it's just a regular-subsidy. But promising to match any money they make from submitting freelance articles to magazines? This is what we'll call a Personal Export Subsidy. By supplementing the money they make from successfully placing freelance articles, you're letting an impartial external arbiter (the various magazines) decide whether your kid's work is actually worth something, while acknowledging that in the early days you'll need to increase that "something" for your kid to survive while climbing the ladder.

I’ll add to this that you think of things like the YouTube Shorts Fund as a sort of export subsidy for short form video creation. Another example of this is venture capital, particularly at early stages where funding is pretty directly tied to showing some form of commercial traction and the bar for company traction gets raised as the company matures.

Product management is a generalist’s field. You do a little bit of user research, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of design and a little bit of engineering. Everyone you work with is better at what they do than you are, yet you still have to find a way to help them.

Within a field of generalists, I am a generalist PM. I’ve worked across agriculture, ad tech, consumer social, and most recently fintech. This makes me doubly a generalist.

Perhaps because of this, I am especially appreciative of the art of being a useful generalist, which Ross Simoini captures so well in this article. Here’s an excerpt:

In this way, the generalist must have a high tolerance for complexity, confusion, and uncertainty. Generalism does not offer the clearly tiered progression offered to the specialist. Working across various fields means you will likely spend long periods being unskilled at them. The generalist can acquire new talents, but they are also a perpetual amateur in a cycle of discovery and failure. There are benefits to this process: slowness encourages a certain quality of attention; novelty encourages a sharp perspective; and an outsider’s position keeps you immune from the insider’s tunnel vision.

Specialism, on the other hand, offers an easily measured form of success. In fact, specialization usually defines a spectrum of success and failure.“Best” and “worst” can exist only when the boundaries of success have been narrowed to a single parameter: the best RBI hitter in baseball; the most dividends earned in a single day.

I left this article thinking there should be a Society for Generalists the way there is are professional groups for specialities. Worth reading the entire thing, especially if you’re a generalist.

A brilliantly insightful speech on how to foster creativity . Here's a quick summary:

Now here's the negative thing: Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating…

You see when I say “a way of operating” what I mean is this: creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have.

It is, for example, (and this may surprise you) absolutely unrelated to IQ (provided that you are intelligent above a certain minimal level that is) but MacKinnon showed in investigating scientists, architects, engineers, and writers that those regarded by their peers as “most creative” were in no way whatsoever different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.

So in what way were they different?

MacKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood — “a way of operating” — which allowed their natural creativity to function.

Cleese describes an “open mode” where sort of meander or play with a problem. In open mode, there's no right or wrong. Crucially, it's extremely difficult to be open with time pressure. He tells relays this story about how Alfred Hitchcock would help move his writers into “open mode”:

“When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say “We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax, it will come.” And, says the writer, of course it finally always did.

Then there is a “closed mode”, where we implement our solution and are rigorous about speed, efficiency, details, and outcomes.

The most creative people as ones who can move most quickly between these two modes.

Cleese then gives 5 tricks for getting yourself into open mode:

1. Space where you will be undisturbed at least until a specific time.

2. Time to get into open mode, usually at least 30 minutes, where your mind wants to go back towards execution. Then after about 60 more minutes, usually the most creative time is past and you need a break.

3. Time to play with the problem, to stick with the discomfort of not having a solution. The most creative people spend the most time in this space of not knowing or considering alternatives before picking a path.

4. Confidence in yourself, to handle the discomfort of not knowing the answer, and to be wrong as you try things out.

5. A 22 inch waist (humor) , Cleese's way of reminding us that nothing moves us into open mode faster than humor.

I have bookmarked this to read again in 6 months. Sent to me via the Flux Collective .