You can't have a 4-year plan when Karen has a 4-week plan
On time preference and toadies
2 years ago, in the bullshiatic grasslands of Money Twitter, a wild copywriter appeared:
LMAO you’re such a jeet. English isn’t your first language and you want to write copy in the American market? You’re going to have a tough time. I am going to skin you alive. You are competing against guys like me and probably 1,000 other people who are better than me. I will eat your liver.
He went on to advise against hiring Indians to his flock of followers. I was annoyed. That’s some racist bullshit. But who am I to judge? I literally learned English from rappers and comedians and Family Guy. All of them engage in racial bullshittery in their own artful ways. But still, why should I listen to this marketer who has named his Twitter Space “the cum zone?” What am I even doing in “the cum zone?” Easier to judge than think. Let the crabs compete I thought to myself as I left the cum zone. Mr. Copywriter’s words were not as Jesus as he claimed to be. Also, his Donald Trump impression was terrible.
“Bro Twitter is a mental hospital.”
I agree. But similar situations started to happen at work as well. Karen cackled in her cuckoo voice when I told her I started ghostwriting. “Ghost what hahaha. Most of what you write will never see the light of day hahaha,” she said. “Do you even know anything about running a business?” Kendall added further. Oh how they quacked and quacked. I literally gave them logical ways they can stop spending thousands of Benjamins and Gandhis on stupid marketing agencies and they laughed it off because AI is “a gen z thing.”
If I had not been sensitive to these divine signals from the universe, I would have never grown the frustration and audacity to start Devoted Media.
My very first briefing on long-form Copy was to copy, not even winning Copy but the previous failed Copy, and stuff it with keywords for “SEO-optimization.” Karens and the Copywriters spent 3 hours talking about definitions. I can’t describe the physical pain in my ears and my eyes. Typing bullshit everyday that’s technically correct but (you know within) communicates nothing to the person who will read it. I was traumatized.
Once upon a time, I had to deliver 7 blogs to my corporate overlords. Without reading a single word, Karen saw an em dash — a punctuation mark Emily Dickinson used so much they named her the Queen of Dashes, a mark scattered through Shakespeare’s First Folio, a mark that has existed in English since the 1700s — and dismissed my entire work as slop. But I don’t blame Karen. She had already made it clear that she does not care what I have to say when she welcomed me into the team. I had not delivered on my commitment. She asked for 7. I barely managed to deliver 6. But it all could have been settled with a classic corporate-speak tete-a-tete about “deadlines” and “bandwidth” and “responsibility” and “synergy.” But that em-dash became a judgment about my character, credibility and competence — all fabricated from a piece of punctuation that predates the lightbulb. I got ‘Best Debut’ in Q3 and turned into AI slop as soon as Q4 started. You don’t know dear reader. That day, Karen used all her journalism and copywriting skills, all her linguistic acrobats to write a flawless email about my flaws. I was more impressed than annoyed. When I first met Karen and asked her about our content systems and approach, she shoulder-shrugged at me with a look of confusion and disgust. But not today. Karen was sharp as a tack. Ready for war. It was on sight.
I am gossiping like a Karen to tell you that — never have I ever seen a good business or a creator that is less than 4 years old. You need to stay in the trenches long enough. The math is straightforward. If you have a lower time preference than those you work with, especially those who live by ancient hierarchical models of the inferior and the superior — YOU ARE DOOMED!
Just so I can write “YOU ARE DOOMED!” again, let me gossip like Michael Saylor if Michael Saylor graduated from a small village in Rajasthan:
At MIT, I built non-linear dynamic computer simulations. I studied engineering and control theory. In those non-linear dynamic systems — their feedback is important. And one of the most important parameters is the time constant of the feedback. For example, algae in a pond. If it’s doubling every day and it fills up the pond on day 30, when will you notice you have any algae, right? The time constant, or the life cycle, in dynamic systems — how long does it take for deer or wolves to breed, how long does it take for algae to grow, how long does it take a virus to spread in your body? All of those things figure prominently in sophisticated dynamic simulation models. So the idea of time constant is important.
I wrote my thesis at MIT — a mathematical model of a renaissance Italian city-state where I created (but I didn’t) a computer simulation of Machiavelli’s Discourses. And the Discourses describe the dynamics of government when you have a judiciary branch, a legislative branch, and an executive branch. If the judges serve for life, they have a long time constant. If you change the legislative branch every 2 years, it’s a short time constant. If you have the senate and it’s every 6 years, it’s a longer, more conservative time constant. If the executive is a ruler or a king and rules for life, that’s a very long time constant. But if they’re elected for 4 years, it’s a shorter time constant. So I actually programmed that on a computer and I actually showed all the dynamic patterns under which a political economy melts down. Or thrives.
I am channeling my inner Saylor just so I can repeat — if you have a longer time horizon (or a lower time preference) than Karen/Copywriter — YOU ARE DOOMED!
Say you are building a brand and you want it to be successful over 4 years. And your Karen gives you 12 weeks. She checks you in 12 days and fires you if you haven’t got your cost down and your ratings up in 12 days. You can’t have a 4-year plan when Karen has a 4-week plan. So you have to learn about time preference and time horizon. Anything you do in life or business, you have to have the right time horizon. Some players think it’s the last time they will ever get the ball and only think of shooting the ball no matter how shitty their shot selection. Some players focus on making the right decisions because they trust the game plan and end up making historical comebacks such as the one today in Madison Square Garden.
On another note, Karen has been tasked by her own Karen/Copywriter to assess your performance. She has no way of articulating your value as a marketer. By the em-dash incident, she has already proved to you that she is behind on her daily reading. Karen is paid to grade your economic fate. Because a job is basically doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company. The work you do is averaged together with other Karens and Copywriters in your team. You may not even know that you are doing something people want. Your contribution may be subtle, and goes unnoticed, especially if you are introverted. But this averaging becomes a problem in big companies where most jobs are fake. Assigning value to each person’s work becomes a game of politics and visibility and compliance that defies all logic. Companies are not set up to reward people who want to take initiative. They reward the toadies. You can’t go to your boss and say, I have automated key marketing operations and saved you 10x costs, so will you please pay me ten times as much? The company simply has no way of measuring the value of your work. They will just dump more of the shit that they themselves don’t want to do so they can focus on being toadies.
As the CEO of Devoted Media, if I tank, I cannot plead to God or Claude that I did put in the work. I cannot tell Murphy that he won’t go to the dog spa anymore because currencies are designed to be debased and the government can’t stop printing money.
If DM does badly, I have done badly.
NOTE: Karen and the Copywriter are not separate individuals, but represent the female and male archetypes of people I have worked with throughout my career.