Apperceptive Mess #5: Print-Making, Leadership by Persistence and Building Trust, and Self-Maintaining Organisations
Hi friends!
I’m writing to you this week from Coronado, where my partner (Ari) and I have decided to come spend the long weekend.
For the last 2 years, while we were maintaining our long-distance relationship, we celebrated Valentine’s Day only by sending notes/homemade goodies/chocolates/presents via mail. I was resolute in wanting this year to be different and special.
I scoured the inter-webs for the best things to do in San Diego bay: a kayaking tour of the La Jolla sea caves, clay-making at Liberty Station, an evening at the local comedy club, etc. The goal here was to find something new for the both of us to experience, so we can mark our first Valentine’s Day together in the most special way possible.
And this is what I settled on: a print-making workshop at the San Diego Museum of Art.
We started off with a docent tour around the museum, saw how different cultures expressed love through art, and ended off with an actual workshop where I tried not to embarrass myself.
Conversation of the Week: Abigail Africa
This week I sat down with Abigail Africa, the president of SparkSC — the premier entrepreneurship club at USC that aims to cultivate the spirit of entrepreneurship through on and off-campus opportunities. Abigail was also the first (and to date, only) intern at Notion last summer.
Abigail grew up around parents who placed a strong belief in education as an investment. As a result, they always strived towards orienting their lifestyle towards her ability to be exposed to the highest quality of education possible.
Reminiscing about her time at elementary school, I was shocked to learn about her exposure to literature like the Communist Manifesto at fourth and fifth grade; where they were encouraged to engage with the material, ask questions that felt counter-intuitive, and surface them through conversations in the classroom.
If you’re not American like me and wonder, “what’s fifth grade?”. That’s ages 10-11. Needless to say, I found myself speechless as I remembered my own literature class at that age: I struggled to even understand why Charlotte was talking to animals.
With an early exposure to such breadth of works, Abigail became a self-professed nerd for tools that helped her better organise her mental latticework. That drew her to Notion.
She made Notion her “second brain” — took all her notes in class with it, organised previously disparate pockets of information into new knowledge for herself, and made working and learning feel like a more tightly integrated process.
Recognising the huge benefits, she decided to send a cold email to the team, who brought her on board as their very first intern to work on guides that aim to enhance the beginner Notion user’s experience.
If her story to date has given you any impression of the level of persistence she possesses, it will not be a surprise for you to also know this: despite being an intern, her persistence for lobbying to make Notion free for students eventually paid off. When the decision was made, the ball fell onto her court to lead the user research efforts around shaping the end-to-end experience when you sign up for Notion as a student. And she delivered.
In the Army, I observed that strong leadership manifests through the ability to operate optimally under pressure with great endurance; because you have to keep at it day after day. You especially have to possess the precision to make the smartest possible decision at any given point.
As president of SparkSC, she helps members and committee leaders at every level make smart decisions by constructing empathic social and organisational systems using her skills in design consulting. They are actively encouraged to develop structural systems to parse information, make and deploy firm decisions on their feet, and be methodical when recovering from mistakes.
Her meta-cognitive talent also shines through her personal principle as a leader: help every member succeed as contributors regardless of capacity. Placing a strong emphasis on building a community, she leads by example by always keeping a look out for everyone’s morale in relationship to their participation within the club.
The story of Abigail so far is a demonstration of a work ethic I really want to learn from — her ability to create the trust among her peers to build a consistent track record of sound decision-making is admirable. And if you ever meet her, you will realise she does this with no fan fare — day in, and day out.
Meditation of The Week: Maintenance by Design
Vaughn published a wonderful essay on his newsletter about maintenance, and how organisational structure should be designed around core primitives of an organisation’s social contracts, so that they do not require maintenance by deliberate intervention.
The key philosophies are: malleability and transparency
a) Transparency: focus on how to create social contracts that enable the operations to continue even as environments change
b) Malleability: allow for system reverts/restructures (based on learnings from a)) to accommodate iterative improvements in a system.
Since memorised sequences are no use when most systems do not tell you what went wrong, we learn pretty early on in our professional careers regardless of field that we cannot rote-learn the real world. Therefore, designing an organisation that can make micro-adjustments to its behaviour (without failure) on it’s own will make it more adaptive in the long haul.
And you already know how the rest of the Darwinian story goes.
Read of The Week: History is Only Interesting Because Nothing is Inevitable
A look back into financial history leading up to the Great Depression and the world war that came after. The piece further reinforces that important events in history/life will exist at the long tails and the corners of our eyes — for better or for worse. And we just have to do our best to “be like water” when they happen.
Another great long-form piece by Morgan Housel. Very much looking forward to his upcoming book this year.
Quote of The Week:
What we make of our time — the work we do, the stories we tell, the people we love — is what gives our lives meaning. Whether anything we produce has a longevity beyond our bodies is never as important as the act of living
That is all we have for the week! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it.
If you have any questions/suggestions/complaints/feedback, please feel free to reach out and let’s learn together.
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