Keeping Up With The Knowledge Jonses

Gary Vee, who is a bit of a charlatan, has some great core ideas. Keeping up with the Jonses' is what he yells at broke people who ask him how to get rich. "Stop keeping up with the Jonses' and go sell coffee mugs you find at garage sales!"

Technically he is right. Save well, make income, and you'll do fine financially. Benjamin Franklin said the same thing, "A penny sav'd is a penny got."

We engineers, famously frugal and income driven, do the same thing! Just not with money.

Most of us do it with knowledge. It's a problem.

Why is keeping up with the Jonses' bad? I'm an engineer and a writer so I'm going to ride this metaphor into the dirt. Then I'll explain how engineers do it.

Keeping up with the Jonses' is the idea that if you compete with others for status by accumulating the same wealth signifiers, you will probably go broke. The Jonses are not just the average family, they are a mythical family. Sometimes the Jonses' are nice, sometimes judgemental, sometimes the Jonses are deep in debt, sometimes they are so rich that the flaunting you compete with is less than a percent of their actual wealth.

The point isn't the Jonses', it's you. When you see you are lagging behind in something, do you overextend yourself so other people will see you as equal. Is your lifestyle sustainable for you? Can you let go of external judgement and live a life that makes you happy? Will the rolex make you less insecure, or will it start a neverending pit of debt that just adds to your problems?

This is a natural human problem. What I mean by that is that it's wired into human psychology to look at others in your peer group and compare yourself.

And comparison is the thief of joy.

We have to practice things like acceptance, patience, and gratitude to live in modern times with a human mind. Our natural state in the modern world might be chaos. But we are not stuck there.

Knowledge is not a number. You can't rack up knowledge until you have enough of it that everyone knows you're smart. People who know less than you on a subject will be more confident (Dunning-Kruger.) There will almost always be someone who knows more than you in your favorite domain, and there will always be someone who knows more than you in almost every other domain.

People also "argue in agreement." This is a great term a mentor coined. Two parties, with almost identical solutions to a problem can get stuck arguing about whether a minor detail should have implementation A or B. And often if you let them know they are arguing in agreement, they can often check themselves, realize they're on the same team, agree on a solution and move on.

Knowledge as a form of security or control is a very real thing and it's very emotional. People won't tell you this about personal finance but it's incredibly emotional too.

The biggest problem that separates knowledge Jonses' from finance Jonses' is that knowledge doesn't show up in a paycheck that you get after you get home from work. It is your work. And it's rarely clear exactly what will and won't be useful. More money is better. More knowledge means you may actually forget old things. You may burn out and not learn as quickly.

We need something to help us navigate. With finance, set a budget. Track your habits. Allow a little failure and learning, and eventually you'll start to adjust your life based around new spending habits.

With knowledge, your job is often to consume new information at a consistent pace, sometimes eclipsing a realistic pace of learning, and not always allowing for the necessary breaks the brain needs to properly digest that new information.

In addition there are so many guideposts pointing in every direction. Here are the big three I see quite often.

Your peers. They're all geeks (like you are hopefully.) They have some obsession they've been working on their entire lives. You can't just say I'm good at coding and call it a wrap. There are people who are really into compilers, ML training, IOT, hardware security, frontend code composition, ETL pipelines, custom API architecture, code as art, the list goes on and on.

Your work. They have specific needs for day to day and month to month goals. Something needs to be fixed which involves understanding the codebase better. It may involve a new skill under your umbrella or a completely new sub specialty within software development. Your job is literally to solve these problems so it's not going to stop. You just have to consistently ingest what you need to and output solutions.

The industry. The industry is made of geeks at companies (and the people who ignore them, wink.) These create paradigm shifts that rip entire industries apart. Brick and mortar transitioning to web storefronts. AI. Cloud infrastructure. Big Data. Video games going 3D and then persistently online. Facebook and Google ads. Music going from storefront to mp3 to streaming.

They're all run with new architecture, C, C++, C#, F#, Python, Jupyter Notebook, Django, Go, Dart, Haskell, Perl, OxCaml, Laravel, AWS, AWS Lambda, AWS AI compute, on and on.

How do you manage it all. Because, let's be very honest, your passion project is rarely the same as what drives the business. And the industry has ten times as many fads as it does groundbreaking new paradigms.

There's a kind of benefit to technical debt which is that companies become entrenched in whatever paradigm they lean into early on. It often takes a large restructure to rewrite it. Facebook famously moved from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infra." This marked something like a 3-5 year lag in profitability for the currently multibillion company.

It's really hard to change the fundamental infrastructure a company is built on. But if you don't change enough, you will fall behind.

It's a lot to juggle. I have a quick framework that helps me move through this jungle-like maze of knoweldge pouring out of every computer screen.

I try to recognize 3 things: What I like, where I am, where I want to be.

Most people are not very in touch with what they like, but it's very easy. The trick is that you can't plan to like something. You have to actually try it. We sometimes confuse safety with joy. And we often confuse boredom with disliking something. All you have to do is check in with yourself while you're in the middle of something and note how you feel. For example while writing this article here are my thoughts:

"I like writing this. I like expressing myself. I'm worried that it won't get enough acclaim and I will have wasted my time. I really am not looking forward to editing this. I don't think I can write another article today."

You can see a mix of emotions and hopefully they can help guide me moving forward with writing. The solutions might look pretty obvious to you and that's the point.

Try new things, check in with yourself and it will be pretty obvious what you like and why after you do this enough.

Where I am.

You probably have some work scenario that you engage with regularly that dictates what kind of things you need to know.

I have many friends that work at large companies. They work on a very specific part of the business often in about 1-3 languages. Some of them move teams a lot and some do not. Often they are tasked with a single project to work on with a team as well as putting out multiple fires that either they understand explicitly or no one else in the company has enough experience to fix. This creates a very specific domain limitation: this set of technology, these languages, our implementation, our problem solving process.

Currently I'm freelancing and exploring the space that I would like to work in. I just completed code based art for a music collective. I'm toying around with some company ideas. I've consulted for others on their companies go to market plans. And I've done frontend work here and there. It's obvious that is too much and so my domains are probably: what I can stomach marketing, what is a decent combination of low stress, reasonable effort, and reasonable income.

And finally where I want to be.

Realistically, you will never know where you end up. But you are allowed to dream.

I really love making digital art and describing systems using math. I enjoy a lot of other things, but professionally, I always get hooked on these things. I would rather develop a repeatable description for an algorithm than implement it over and over in multiple languages on different architecture. I'd rather look at those implementations and codify them as variants of the original algorithm and see how it's evolved in practice.

I can't speak to your obsessions, but I'm sure you have something like this. Maybe everyone you know thinks its cool. Maybe they think you're crazy. That's kind of how it goes with obsessions.

Are you still convinced you need to keep up with the Jonses'? The AWS ETL pipeline guru is about to step into this meeting and intellectually wipe the floor with the entire dev team. Your boss might even task you to help them. And when they're done doing that, you're not going to enjoy ETL any more than you ever did. Even worse, you might get better at ETL and have a little inkling that if you devoted the next 6 months to becoming an expert, you could be that person in some gilded meeting in the future.

Life is constantly interrupted by other people. Well, it just is other people. Some people call that hell. I call it Monday.

We need guideposts, and because it can sometimes feel like we're being pulled in every direction.

You should know that you'll never know if learning something was the right choice or not. You'll never know how it will impact your future. You'll never know if it's something you'll even enjoy or care about in 5 years.

So we are just stuck making decisions with limited knowledge and no ability to predict the future.

My suggestion is: Learn what you like and why. Learn what your company needs and how it works. Follow up on new ideas that seem fun or interesting to you.

It's okay to not learn things. It's probably healthy. There are tons of things that you know you don't care about. I won't list mine, but take your pick of things you can't believe other people obsess over.

The trick here is to find a cleaner boundary for that in your own life. There's a lot of knowledge at the periphery of what is obvious to know and what is not. The more complex or impactful something is, often the more time you need to spend learning it. That expands infinitely and you're only one person.