Hi, everyone. Welcome to Nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. We need to contribute to society in order to survive. And that means having a job, but many people hate their job and find it difficult to feel fulfilled while earning a living. I believe there is a solution that exists at the interface between what we expect from the world and what the world expects from us. There is a way to remain focused on what we love while still delivering on tasks. We don't find enjoyable.
Let's go find out how there was a Gallup poll a few years back that looks at the world's workplace and how a lot of people are not happy. According to a Gallup world poll, many people in the world hate their job and, and particularly their boss apparently. Um 85% globally. And then if you look at the US apparently and 70% of American workers are unhappy or are not engaged, only about 30% are engaged. Um you know, this is obviously a problem, you know, 85% of people not liking their, their job.
Uh you know, because the boss or because of colleagues or the type of work that they have to do, maybe it's the commute. But, um, you know, this is a problem because not just, you know, from an economic standpoint, we need to contribute to the economy, to make the world work. And this is obviously an important thing. It's, it's that, you know, so much of our life is tied up in working hours. Right.
I mean, if you, if you take out the sleep, the only thing that we left is working in a few hours left to do what we want. And then, and then of course, whatever we get on the weekend, right? But the majority of our waking hours uh for, for the most of us is related to the work that we do to the jobs that we go to. So what do we do about that? I mean, you know, you could say, well, you know, get a different job or, hey, but that's not particularly useful.
You know, it's not an option for a lot of people to just simply get, uh, you know, up and move and get a different job that takes a lot of work that takes a lot of effort and again, just might be downright impossible for many people that's not particularly useful. So, what do, what do we do? I mean, it's a, it's a big part of our lives. Uh We have to contribute to the economy and uh and we should find our work fulfilling. It should be enjoyable.
It should even be, I would argue fun and I don't think fun should just be something that comes after work. You know? Uh, I don't think you should just work to play as opposed to play, to work. I think you really should have play at work. I think you need to be having fun. You need to be, uh, feeling fulfilled with what you do. You need to find meaning in life and you should be able to find that through the work that you do. So what can we do about this?
Well, let's talk about um just our contribution to society in general and how we need to do that to survive and then we'll start to pick this apart a little bit. So life doesn't just happen. I mean, we have to carve out an existence by taking actions that facilitate our survival. We make decisions each day that hopefully move us in a fruitful direction. We interact with others, take jobs, produce value and get compensated.
There is a cost to becoming fulfilled and that is the time and effort we put into our contribution to society. A job is largely how we make that contribution. Our economy puts in place a framework for the division of labor so that people can add to the things that companies build. The economy, rewards us for our time and effort by way of a salary or business revenue for running our own company.
Through the years, we acquire more skills, increase our earning power and deliver greater levels of value over time. Now, this contribution is what the world expects from us by fitting into the system and, and playing our role. We help society function, doing something for the greater good, brings us benefits related to the quality of life. Right? I mean, we get to drive on solid infrastructure, consume safe foods and walk the streets, feeling relatively secure.
In short, our survival depends on our ability to contribute to the economy. And just as society expects things from us, we expect things from society contributing to the economy, grants us the freedom to pursue our own interests, making money means we can raise families, go on vacations and enjoy drinks with our friends. Time and effort are the currency of freedom. Now, whatever it is we're searching for in life, we depend on society to get there.
If we fail to meet what society expects from us, then there's little reason to believe that we will find contentment. Finding meaning in life is not a solo journey. It requires we participate. Now, most of us accept that our contribution to the economy is what grants us the freedom to pursue personal interests. But working hours take up like I said at the beginning most of our day, right, the real goal in life is is therefore to kind of find employment that it is itself fulfilling, right?
This is why we find ourselves trying to get the job or education that both aligns with our interests and allows us to make a good living. But in reality, this is, this is difficult. I mean, while the job or degree title or whatever it is may reflect our passion.
The day to day is often anything but right, I mean, the expectations of society cannot really be tailored to the individual society is a group phenomenon, expectations are created out of averages no different than any institutional approach to standardizing the inputs of its members. You know, for example, like scholastic achievement, right?
If you go to school, they got a bell curve, they expect you to perform at least on average or, or be to the right of that bell curve and, and perform even better. So in other words, the way that you're understanding a bunch of people getting together is basically by these kind of fictitious averages that are supposed to, you know, supposed to reflect something real, but none of that really maps back to the individual.
OK. So there's this mismatch between uh an individual and societal expectations you could say and and that mismatch is is necessary in some sense because specific details always subsume into higher level aggregates that look nothing like their parts, right? I mean, an individual is a specific instantiation of something more general. There there is no reason to really expect that that which exists in aggregate should look like that which makes up the aggregate. OK?
And this is why individual needs don't truly map to aggregate level social structures. People are individualistic and nuanced their interests follow idiosyncratic reasoning, not socially aware ideals. Now, despite the individual group mismatch, we need to find a way to strike a balance, right? Some kind of balance. I mean, we have to conform to the social constructs that make our lives possible. But we also need to feel valuable and, and live lives that are meaningful.
Any happy life will exist at an intersection between what we expect from our world and what the world expects from us. Now, most of us would accept that, you know, life is about balance. I mean, that makes sense to a lot of people, at least as a goal of trying to achieve, right? Things kind of sit in the middle. Uh It's rare that we can take an absolutist approach.
Uh you know, without there being consequences, you know, we need to make concessions in life to be both true to ourselves and accommodating life is nuanced. It's, it's neither black nor white, right? Um You know, think about any human interaction that looks to make progress by bringing together ideas right? From a bunch of different people.
I mean, most of us are unlikely to agree on the fine points, but at some level of abstraction, we we have to recognize a mutual set of values, a completely dualistic take, cannot move us forward as a group, a common setting where this plays out is when we bring our opinions to the table at a company meeting, let's say, right, probably have, most of us probably have a lot of experience with this, right. It's unlikely that everyone in the room is going to agree with what we have to say.
But it is important that some of our ideas are taken into consideration, right? Working effectively in society means existing at that intersection between wants and expectations. OK? What we want out of life from and and what we expect and then what the kind of social company, institutional, whatever expectations are something in the middle. So the big question is, well, how can we do this effectively?
Right, because there's this, this dichotomy, you know, I mean, you know, already said that the, you know, the difference between the individual and the aggregate are very different things. And so how can we possibly make those work together? Well, the first step is to realize that structures exist for a reason. OK. We need to accept this. There are, I mean, don't get me wrong. There are no lack of things to rightfully complain about in our education, legal and health care systems.
But in the complete absence of structure, society wouldn't function. I mean, you know, structure provides a place for our ideas and creativity to land on the best parts of those structures are the ones that have lasted centuries, if not millennia and they have lasted as timeless truth. OK?
And so whatever solution exists at the interface between expectations requires us to bring ourselves to existing structures, we need to find ways to deliver on what's expected from us without compromising who we are now, whatever it is being expected, the bus can be thought of as a set of outputs that we're expected to deliver to deliver. OK. So let's think about this as kind of the mechanism, right? What's going on here? Well, pick this apart a bit.
Now, I think about, you know, maybe it might be a maintenance of a piece of equipment, a quality scan of a patient's body part or uh you know, a presentation to to stakeholders based on strategy or something like that. Whatever our vocation, there are people on the other end of our actions that are expecting our outputs, right? We need to, we need to deliver the set of outputs. The problem arises when we feel it's unnatural to produce these expected outputs right now.
While a good number of them should be aligned with our interests. I mean, why else did we take the job to begin with? I mean, a fair amount of people probably take the job because there's at least some general interest there to begin with, right? But there are always tasks that you don't want to do, right?
Say you take a new management position in a software company after, you know, spending six years writing code, well, maybe you took the position to get a more holistic view of the company's work and its impact. Ok. That's fair. And, and maybe you're good at thinking strategically and believe that a managerial position would allow you to flex this particular muscle, right? But as you settle into your new role, there are expectations, you find mundane, right? Inevitably.
And uh while you still get to be strategic, at least some of the time there is also, you know, setting up and attending countless meetings, giving boring presentations, putting out fires and regularly interviewing candidates, uh, you know, to help the company find talent right in any job or career, there are going to be many expected outputs, right? Outputs that are expected from us that don't align with our interests and yet, you know, failing to deliver on those would be detrimental.
We need to do our job right now. You can kind of step back and just take the approach that unfortunately, I think a lot of people do, which is, you know, just suck it up. Right. But just sucking it up. Never works in the long run. Right. There's nothing more soul sapping than showing up every day to a job that you can't stand. It takes us away from ourselves, getting paid is never enough. We need to feel fulfilled. Ok. So what we can do, what can we do about this?
Well, in order to not compromise ourselves, yet, still deliver outputs that are misaligned to our interests requires that we dig deeper than the superficial labels attached to expectations. OK. So human activities, whatever it is, whatever job title, whatever label you give it, these are not singular things, they are better thought of as kind of a distribution of actions at a bunch of different uh kind of actions that go into that one label, right?
So, so that new management position that I talked about, well, there's gonna be a bunch of mundane objectives there that, you know, let's say the if, if this is you and you take in the new management position, you have a boss that's above you or hire a manager, they're gonna give you a bunch of objectives that you're expected to deliver. And uh a lot of those are probably going to be mundane. I mean, it's not really why you took the job, it's highly unlikely you want to do everything, right?
But those, those mundane objectives are just a few of the activities expected in management. We can deconstruct the management title, right? The job into kind of a distribution of possible act uh activities or different actions that you would do. OK. So imagine, you know, taking the title management and then blowing it apart and say, well, you know, what does that really entail?
Well, management is everything from, you know, reviewing plans and hiring candidates, you know, promoting individuals, delegating work reporting to the C Suite, so to speak, uh scheduling meetings, uh evaluating performance of the people that work under you, right? Resolving conflicts, uh assessing performance, measuring progress, guiding tasks and monitoring budgets and things like this. There's a whole set of things that go into what it means to be a manager and to do management.
Of course, this is going to be specific to uh the job that you take in the company that you work for. Every company has a unique culture. And so that distribution, if you can imagine that being kind of a uh you would app plot those different tasks and each of those tasks have a different maybe likelihood of popping up for that job. It would be, you know, kind of like a probability distribution, you'd have this shape, this curve or it would go up in some parts and down in others, right?
So every job that you take, every, every company's culture would kind of produce this unique shape of tasks that have a certain likelihood of occurring on the job. OK. So there's no definitive definition of management in the real world as with all things, meaning requires context. Remember I talked about this in my last episode, right? Uh If you take a word in a dictionary, that word by itself doesn't have meaning, it just has a definition.
You need to see that word embedded in surrounding words like in a paragraph or someone's speech in order to know the context. Right. Well, same thing with any kind of job, doesn't really mean anything to say. I'm a manager. You know, what does that mean for the company? What are the set of tasks that you are most, most likely to do? It's better to think of management as a label that is arrived at by a distribution of various activities.
Ok. Now we can take the exact same approach with the area that we are passionate about. OK. So imagine again, this is, is if this is you and you were doing a bunch of coding before, you know, programming uh and, and you just love to build things. That was your thing. That's why you took that job originally and now you're going into the management position. OK?
Well, maybe your six years in software development reflected a genuine passion for building things and, and regardless of your reasons for wanting to now view things holistically, right? With a new management position, it's building things that truly drives you. So let's be a little more uh specific, let's say it's building A I data products, OK? Um Building A I data products is, is, is where your passion is. That's what drives you, that's what gets you up in the morning.
OK. So let's deconstruct a data product development if that's what we're going to call that into, again, distribution of technical activities. OK? So again, it's not just software developer or you know, data engineer or data scientist or data product development, you know, those things are labels, let's deconstruct it. You know what does that involve? You got everything from planning road maps and analyzing requirements to learning the domain.
And then of course, selecting data, analyzing data, choosing features, cleaning data training models, you know, you got to validate those models, deploy the models, create interfaces and resolve bugs, let's say. So there's there's all these kind of tasks that fall under uh this, this, you know, kind of data product and developer role if you will. And and let's say that's what you're truly passionate about, right? So now we've got these two distributions, right?
We we've deconstructed the management position with all those different things, hiring candidates, promoting individuals, delegating work all those tasks that kind of uh you know, draw out a shape of, of, of the the the probabilities of those things actually happening, right? And then you got the ones for data product development, you know, um learning a domain, analyzing data training and validating models and all that.
And so we've got these, these two kind of distributions of tasks, right, as distinct things. But what you can do with distributions and what people do all the time, at least in science and engineering with distributions is that you can mix and match them in all kinds of different ways, you can add them, you can subtract them, you can multiply them you can find differences and distances between them and all this kind of stuff.
And when you do that, when you kind of mix and match the distributions of things, they end up revealing things about, you know, the uncertainty of situations. But more importantly, they uncover information that can be used to make decisions. Now, of course, you could get pretty technical about this. You could get into like how are we actually going to make some match these distributions?
We can look at, you know, conditional and cross entropy and mutual information and you know, divergences and you know topological spaces. But you know, again, the distribution is literally just we're breaking apart these labels into the individual granular tasks that make them up. And I'm saying that what we can do is we can mix and match those two different distributions to get something new out of it. And when you do that, it can actually tell you something worthwhile.
But one thing that you can do with these distributions, uh these, these kind of collections of individual tasks that you've, you've kind of broken apart for these labels of management and software development or whatever the two domains are that you are comparing is that you can kind of mush them together and get something called a joint distribution.
OK. And so just as we have these collections of tasks that define management or these collections of tasks that define, you know, product development or a I product development, we can mush those together to get a new list, a new set. And what that list represents are the probabilities of any two tasks co occurring. Now, to be clear here, we're talking about one task from each of those kind of blow apart distributions that we made.
OK. So, so you take something from management, maybe it's something like uh promoting individuals, right? Or evaluating performance and then you take something from the other kind of blow apart list that we made like cleaning data or or validating a model. And what you're saying with the so-called a joint distribution is that there is a probability a likelihood if you will to speak in the vernacular of two of those occurring at the same time. That's all that means.
OK. So you take two areas of life, one you're not interested in and then one that you are interested in and you blow them apart into the granular tasks that, that make up those definitions of those things, right? This is what management is all these tasks, this is what development is all those tasks. And then the joint distribution just says, you know, there is a chance that any two tasks from each of those different domains could occur at the same time. That's basically what it is.
OK. And that that kind of new distribution that you form is the joint distribution. OK. So what does all this mean, you know, in the real world. Well, let's say, you know, the, the the one from uh the the management was hiring of candidates, right? That was one of the tasks that went into the title management. And uh one of them from, from the software development or the A I product development, one was, was creating a user interface, right? Something common when you make software.
OK. Well, what would it mean to observe both the hiring of candidates and the creating of a user interface? Like why would those happen at the same time? Well, let's consider the following situation. Uh We, we take the new management job and one of our expected outputs is to work with human resources to help hire new talent to the company.
OK. So this requires pouring over submitted resumes analyzing them for relevant content and you know, justifying the eventual hiring uh of the best candidates, right? That would be the expected outputs there. Well, there's a good chance none of that sounds particularly interesting to you if this is you were talking about and you're the one taking that management position.
I mean, maybe you like those things, but there's a good chance that those are the, you know, some of those mundane tasks you don't want to do. But what if it were possible to achieve those outputs as a byproduct of doing something that you are more interested in? Now, that would require that both the hiring duties that I just mentioned and the activities that we actually find enjoyable like related, let's say to software development cour, right? They have to cour OK?
So that coo occurrence is possible if one activity was achieved as a byproduct of the other activity. Now, I want to be clear here and, and I'm gonna explain what I mean this, but I, I want to be clear that I'm not talking about transferrable skills. Now those are valuable and, and those are skills that are portable across different jobs or different tasks like being good at communication, right?
If, if the, when you were a software developer, you happen to be a really good speaker and then you went into management and that's obviously a good skill to have there too because it's really important to communicate or whatever it is. Um That's, that's good, that's important, that's a transferable skill, but that's not what I'm talking about here here. I'm talking about being able to achieve the expected output by working on something entirely different. OK?
So by working on the creation of let's say a user interface, which is the software development side of things.
The thing that let's say you're really passionate about, we can by, by working on that, we can achieve pouring over resumes, analyzing them for relevant content and justifying the eventual hiring of the best candidates we could do this by creating an interface that allows one to upload resumes, have the text extracted and analyzed for relevant keywords which maybe then get visualized into charts and graphs to communicate why someone should or should not be hired.
Ok, so, so we've taken the outputs that, let's say a hire, a manager is expecting of us. You need to go over these resumes. You need to understand those resumes.
You need to look for certain uh you know, skills within those resumes and then you need to be able to, you know, select the best candidates out of that and then you need to communicate to other people that these are the candidates that seem to best fit and yada yada yada and, and, and if you just take that a kind of face of value as though those outputs are the goal that might sound really boring, that might even be depressing because maybe you just don't want to do those things and that's not why you got into management, but instead of viewing those directly as a goal and you instead of view them as a byproduct of doing something else, like I love to build things and I'm going to build this application that allows all these PDF documents, these resumes to be uploaded.
I'm gonna build uh you know, a bit of a data pipeline that extracts the keywords out of that text information. And then I'm going to uh you know, produce visualizations out of that, that shows kind of bar charts of the different skills based on the keywords that were extracted from the PDF documents. Maybe I even build a little A I model that predicts something, whatever it is. I have fun.
I do the thing I'm wanting to do when the hire manager comes back and says, you know, let's see what you have. Not only have I produced those outputs, not only have, I definitely gone through the, you know, all these resumes and extracted them and, and understood which ones have which skills and then I'm able to show him or her something that defends why certain candidates are better. Because that's what my software does.
The point is is that the, the the kind of societal or institutional expectations that were there for me that I had to deliver on as outputs were not produced directly, they were produced indirectly as a byproduct of doing something that I'm generally interested in.
And that's the pattern that I think is, is kind of the solution that sits at the interface between what we expect from the world and what the world expects from us, I think, no matter what the two domains are, I'm using management and software development as an example, you can use any two domains or, or, or just, you know, take the job that you're in and then take the thing that you really love to do.
And assuming you're part of that 85% of people that can't stand on their job or, or at least have some unhappiness with it, this is that pattern that I think can work is there is a way to deliver on the opus that are expected from you, but to do it your way and, and, and, and again, just kind of technically going back uh from, from that technical discussion, it really has to do with the, the, the real world. You know, the reality of a joint distribution existing.
You, you, you take something like a label or a job, a title, you you you can break it apart, decompose it apart into its individual tasks. You do that with two different things, you can mush those together to create, you know, what we, what we call technically a joint distribution. And it just means that there can be a coo occurrence of these things. There can be the co occurrence of you building an interface and pouring over a bunch of boring PDF documents, right?
Resumes there can be the co occurrence of you, you know, helping hr in the hiring, but you also, you know, building something over here like an A I model or whatever it is. This kind of co occurrence is actually all too common. Although we might not think of it in terms of, you know, mixing distributions, right? Think of learning any new skill effectively like speaking a new language. This works best not by learning individual words, but by immersing ourselves into the actual culture, right?
It's when we are having fun that we end up learning things as a byproduct. I mean, in reality, there is a finite probability of two observations occurring at the same time when we have fun because there are always ways to make actions we don't care about. Be part of the ones we do. I'll give you another example.
I don't find baseball particularly interesting, but I have friends who do and there's this kind of expectation that if we get together, you know, we speak about the player names and the statistics of those players, you know, and I could just sit and nod my head to feign interest or I could try to find a way to meet the expectations, the the these kind of social expectations set up by my friends, not explicitly, but, you know, indirectly they do this II, I could try to meet those expectations by doing things that I find more enjoyable, right?
Perhaps it's, you know, those technical activities that I talked about, right? Maybe I like building things and I like building software. Uh you know, you, you could step back and say, you know, is there a joint distribution between these activities in baseball? Of course, there is, I mean, tasks like selecting and preparing data in the course of training. An A I model would cour with player names and statistics. If those were the data that fed my model, right?
If I had to go get baseball statistics, the player names of uh you know if the rosters would be in there, the batting averages and all these different stats would be in there. I would be exposed to the names and to the stats on a regular basis. I would work deeply and intimately with that data to produce the thing that I want to build and yet not even care about baseball. Right. I just through the exposure, I would learn those things as a byproduct.
I mean, there's a good chance I would learn them even better than my friends. Now, I can imagine creating, you know, a baseball application that allows users maybe to input their favorite players and then see A I predictions on their chances of winning or maybe it visualizes the stats, whatever it is, whatever I find fun, we don't have to change who we are to achieve outputs.
We are not interested in those outputs can be arrived at as byproducts, byproducts to a target that's more in line with our interests. It doesn't matter which two domains we are comparing, we should expect there to exist some joint distribution between them, which provides the kind of, you know what I might call like a byproduct solution that can make you effective at personally misaligned tasks. OK. So it's about delivering what's expected our way.
Now, I argue that learning things as a byproduct is how genuine learning happens all the time anyway, right, both my friends and me learn baseball names and statistics as a byproduct. My friends, they're not pouring over, you know, books of baseball names and stuff like that. To learn those names. My friends are just enjoying watching the game. That's what they enjoy and, and they only learn the names and stats via, you know, this, the, the this natural exposure to the game, right?
I enjoy creating models and learning the names and stats by wrestling to make models work two very, very different things. But you get the same outcome. In both cases, our knowledge emerges as a byproduct of something that we are actually interested in. I mean, one of the deepest problems with the education system today or forever is how it tries to teach others directly, right? Rather than having students learn through context. I mean, I discussed this in my last episode, right?
Math education is the perfect example. You, you, you, you just kind of throw these sterile symbols that are stripped of context, present them to students who couldn't care less and they shouldn't care less, they shouldn't care about things like that. They need the context, they need to do things that are real. Teaching someone. The stripped down version of knowledge leads to shallow learning at best, right? Learning comes from building things.
We have to bring something into the world, you know, and, and, and rather than just merely thinking about how our skills might transfer to some other domain, think about what you love to create and how internal activities when you break it apart might cour with a set of socially expected outputs, uh you know, socially institutional, you know, the job you're doing whatever it is, right? We tend to make a distinction between fun and work, but this is a mistake, right?
Things are fun for a reason, evolutionary reasons, right? What we find fun is an emotional response to activities that drive us that make us want to learn when things are fun. We are the most effective we can possibly be. There is no reason not to be having fun. Whatever expectation society places on us, we can meet them our way, find the joint distribution where outputs cour and you'll find ways to contribute to society without compromising who you are. OK. That's it. For this episode.
If you'd like to take a deeper dive on this topic, I write more technical versions of this material on both medium and substack. You can find them at medium dot com slash nontrivial and Shawn mcclure dot substack dot com. So go ahead and check those out as always. Thanks for listening until next time.