14. Bonus Mentality 🔗

A thread on cultivating an ‘unexpected bonus’ attitude to work that catalyzes actionable insights, discoveries, inventions, and spillover societal value.

Interestingly enough, the trick to this lies in a dilemma within the mundane, everyday problem of valuing effort for pay.

Whether you make money on a salaried, hourly, project-based, or outcome basis, people generally don’t want to pay for either effort OR output.

They want to pay for apparent effort visible in output, with 20/20 hindsight, with no obvious lower-effort paths than the one taken.

Nerdy point: This is ex-post modal rationality: it’s like conducting a Vickrey (2nd-price) auction of counterfactuals. Whoever did work “wins” but is paid bid price of the fictitious second-price producer who could have done it cheaper with benefit of hindsight shorter path.

So unexpected elegance in output can end up devaluing the effort that went into creating it. 20/20 hindsight represents a risk in creative work that leads to imagination inhibition.

And no you can’t prescope discovery: “I will stumble on 2 insights while coding this feature”

This means things that take a complex path to get to but can be vastly simplified with hindsight insights once you’re there — the essence of art+science beyond craft — are systematically undervalued. This is the reason for a lot of obscurantism in presenting the output of work.

The maker’s dilemma: if you DON’T make the obvious simplifications apparent with hindsight, the customer might spot them in the output and think you’re stupid. If you DO make them, they’ll assume you put in less effort than you did, based on the apparent visible effort.

This dilemma is inherent in all types of information work, but especially kinds where there are ‘unreasonable effectiveness/elegance mechanisms’ like math, algorithmic structure, or laws of physics. Hidden “nature’s gift processes” entangled with the work processes.

Sometimes the dilemma is avoided by the essential insight being so non-obvious, you can act on it and reasonably make the case that you couldn’t have anticipated it. But this is often much harder to do than people think. Insights have a bad habit of appearing obvious ex-post.

3 ways to mitigate, 2 bad, 1 good:

a) Obfuscate potential simplifications and deliver needlessly complex output 😖

b) Obfuscate elegant output so apparent effort equals actual effort 🤮

c) Parlay elegance from hindsight simplification of original work into BONUS output 😎

A bonus is low-marginal-effort/high-marginal-value unexpected extra output that cashes out discovered elegance in a solution to a problem via speculative scope expansion.

You basically create & pick low-hanging fruit people didn’t think was within reach, and weren’t aiming for

It is exceeding expectations but not to demonstrate a superhuman work ethic. Instead it is exceeding expectations as a consequence of unexpected discovery. You’re saying, “this turned out to be more delightfully elegant than we thought when scoping, here’s a cherry on top!”

Your own expectations of effort/reward ratio were pleasantly violated and you’re capturing and passing on some of the excess reward. As a result, total apparent effort equals total actual effort but everybody gets more value than they expected, with no dumb obfuscation.

For this to happen, a bonus needs to feel like a good gift. Something that expands minds by showcasing the abundance you’ve stumbled across. It should address a subconscious want that’s outside the plan, rather than a conscious need that’s within it. Not 20% more; 20% different.

The thing about discovered elegance (ie potential for hindsight simplification in the output of complex effort) is that it’s not necessarily “efficiency” in the sense of achieving a goal with less resources, gaining “savings”. You’ve already sunk inelegant effort. So what to do?

If you’re on an iterative learning curve, maybe future instances of effort can be cheaper. For example, in doing a manual analysis, you spot an elegant algorithm for automating it that makes future instances much cheaper and faster. That’s close-ended learning. Lean learning.

But discovered elegance is rarely that limited. Nature rarely hands you “lean” gifts that can only be used to make the next instance cheaper. Nature is not a “25% off next purchase” coupon gifter. Nature’s gifts have unexpected “fat” spillover potential, like a cashback.

But to actually claim the gift, you have to open up the scope of what you’re doing. You have a hammer in your hand you didn’t expect to have. You must look around for nails you didn’t know were hammerable. If you don’t, and only look within existing scope, you will likely lose.

The hammer in this metaphor can be thought of as discovered IP. Depending on the nature of the work context, you may have some claim on the IP itself (for example my former employer Xerox had a mechanism to assign IP it had no use for back to inventor employees).

If for example, you invent a better mousetrap while employed at Mousetraps, Inc. you may lose some pay for sunk effort (it looks like a day’s work, actually took a week) but get a patent bonus, and maybe rights for non-mousetrapping applications. But these are side issues.

The deeper point here is developing a bonus/spillover ‘lucky’ mentality and actively looking for elegance in everything you do. Even at the risk of lower immediate reward due to maker’s dilemma. In the short run, in specific gigs, you may lose rewards.

But in the long run, you’ll develop a reputation for being unreasonably lucky and inspired. A “done, and gets things smart” genius rather than a mere “smart, and gets things done” worker-bee. See Steve Yegge post on this: Stevey's Blog Rants: Done, and Gets Things Smart

A bonus mentality is also the trick behind “talent hits what others can’t hit, genius hits what others can’t see”, can you guess why?

It has to do with “obviousness” in where you’ve come from versus in where you could go.

If an “obvious” insight at line 800/week 3 of coding V1 of a program leads you to actually deliver a 20-line V2 that takes 1 hour to write, your client will feel cheated if you charge more than a day.

But the 3 weeks are not waste, they’ve refactored your perception!

The client is the beneficiary of a more cheaply hammered nail, but you’re the one with the new hammer, capable of seeing the nails others can’t see. They will... after you point them out, and hammer a few bonus nails to teach them.

Those bonus nails are how you capture more value from your insights AND ensure everybody groks the potential so it’s turned into spillover societal value.

That is the big prize. So don’t let the maker’s dilemma in creative work inhibit your openness to discovery.

Carpe diem!