My first real obsession was the question, ‘what drives human value?’ I wanted an explanation to cover innovation and consolidation, wealth and poverty, both Chanel handbags and HR software. It’s funny, after looking through dozens of paradigms and never finding an exhaustive one, I did accept a framework so simple that I can’t ignore it: time is a core axis, which is then qualified by joy or pain. ‘Human value’ is then simply defined as the sum of the area ‘under the curve,’ or a fancy
An aside: this is why it is foolish to believe that faster is always better. One of my all-time favorite anecdotes is from creative genius Rory Sutherland, describing the error of economists and engineers who wanted to improve the Eurostar by simply speeding it up. Instead, Sutherland suggested they should have provided free wifi, and hired supermodels to hand out the wifi password along with free champagne (’people would be asking for the train to please be slowed down!’).
As simple as this sounds, this paradigm gives a crystal clear direction to creating value: make each unit of time less painful/more joyous, or make joy longer and pain shorter. This will always be true. And while it’s impossible to quantify joy/pain, time can be measured (okay yes, actually what matters is the perception of time, but pain makes time feel longer, so bear with me for now). Cue Mr. Bezos:
What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' […] In our retail business, we know that customers want […] fast delivery. […] It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now.’ - Jeff Bezos
Another aside - the uncertainty of waiting (pain) is usually worse than the waiting itself (time), so if one can’t make the wait shorter, it is actually deeply valuable to just tell the customer how much longer they have to wait - even if it’s semi-made up. I credit this simple innovation as the core driver behind Uber (’do I have time to run to the bathroom before my cab gets here?’) and the Domino’s tracker (’how much longer till the pizza gets here? I’m starving’). But technically, since pain affects the perception of time, reducing the perception of ‘painful time’ is actually just reducing pain.
While it might not explain the value of luxury handbags or social media, our time as joy/pain framework allows us to confidently delineate the world of software that pertains to ‘making pain shorter.’ This is effectively computational reduction: what used to take X steps, can now be done in <X steps.
This is typically done by choice-less steps while keeping choiceful ones. This is a fancy way of saying ‘automating the busywork:’ the parts that people don’t enjoy, being compressed by software. Excel in the 80s: instead of manual calculations, save time with auto-calculations. Expedia: fewer steps to compare flight options. Zapier: fewer steps to transfer data across tools with stock integrations.
So, want to make something that people find valuable? More joy, less pain.
For further reading on computational reducibility, I heartily recommend Stephen Wolfram’s essay on a possible unifying theory of physics, but be warned, it’s roughly 25,000 words or ~100 pages. Or start with his Ted Talks.
