27) Labor Productivity

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Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, Clarity, I reflected on the importance of clear, calm, and coherent thinking for the entrepreneurial rhythm. I specifically discussed the difference between a “red” way of thinking and moving (i.e., fast, fiery, determined), and a “blue” way of thinking and moving (i.e., calm, serene, placid, detached, perambulatory). I explored the need for balance between blue and red activities for any organization. And I specifically acknowledged my need for more blue time in my daily professional life, as someone that wants to lead a multi-person organization and serve many customers, etc. I thought it was a fun post!

Labor Productivity

Today, I wanted to talk about labor productivity. First a definition:

Labor productivity might be the most important metric to measure the technological progress of any organization or social collective. You can chart the development and advancement of the human species over millennia using labor productivity. Fundamentally, for a technology to be revolutionary it typically results in a stepwise boost in labor productivity. The discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, agriculture, industrial manufacturing, medicine, etc., have all contributed to massive labor productivity gains.

AI represents another stepwise improvement in labor productivity—one that could be more significant than the Industrial Revolution—and I think that’s what’s so disconcerting to many people. Because, to say the quiet part out loud, higher labor productivity means you can produce the same economic output with less labor—which most people understand to mean layoffs.

I personally believe that’s short-term thinking, and that whenever there is skills-obsolescence, new jobs and opportunities—that we can’t even imagine—form to fill those gaps. But I do acknowledge the legitimate fear of layoffs—but I also think it’s an inevitable aspect of progress—and that we’ll need to absorb some short-term pain to make long-term abundance gains.

In any case, before we get too controversial, today I want to talk about specific stepwise shifts in labor productivity that I’ve experienced throughout my life. I believe in the “fracticality” of the universe—which I can’t really concretely define—but which generally means that the universe is an infinitely repeating tapestry of behavioral and organizational and individual and social patterns (“fracticality” comes from “fractals”). And so my aim is to better understand societal labor productivity by examining my own life.

Personal Labor Productivity

Reading (~2005-2006)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my labor productivity journey began with reading. But there’s a difference between learning to read / knowing how to read—and really reading. The first time I ever really read for fun was in second grade—and it all started with Harry Potter. I remember seeing someone (it was Will Wachter) across the hall from me reading the third book—and I thought it looked sophisticated and important to be accompanied by such a large tome throughout the course of daily life. And so I think literally that night or shortly thereafter I found the first Harry Potter book in our house and started reading and fell in love with reading. Since then, I’ve read pretty much every night.

Within the context of labor productivity, I think reading is pretty much table stakes for any valuable economic output. But more importantly I think learning to love reading really opened up my mind to the importance of storytelling in daily life and helped expand the boundaries of my imagination. And then it also probably enhanced my comprehension capabilities for reading tasks throughout school which theoretically boosted the future potential of my economic output. But, in any case, you get my general drift here I hope.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (2012)

Really probably the most significant labor productivity gain in my life was learning how to type—and for this I give all the credit to the most wonderful woman Mavis Beacon. I think I can also credit the fragile ego of an adolescent boy with compelling me to compete ruthlessly with everyone in the class on head-to-head typing competitions. As someone who’s always trafficked in red skills, I wanted to be fast—and so typing was just another arena in which I could demonstrate my speed.

I’m being jocose, but really I think learning how to properly type and then practicing such that I could type quickly have probably been the biggest boosts in personal productivity for me throughout my entire life. Especially now with the text-based nature of AI coding tools, I’m grateful for my ability to type properly just about every single day. Now if we eventually enter a world where speech is the primary interaction modality for AI interfaces, then my typing skills may go the way of the dodo bird—but that’s life!

Excel: Drag Across (~2017)

This is a bit embarrassing, but there was a not-insignificant period of time where I used excel without actually knowing how to really use excel. And so specifically there was a period of time where I was doing baseball statistics freshman year of college and I would pretty much like create a function—and then go “really fast” from cell to cell like copy and pasting the function I’m pretty sure. Truthfully, I’m a little blurry on exactly what I was doing here, but I remember feeling incredibly embarrassed about it whenever I learned that you could drag across. Maybe I was only dragging across like row by row or something. I’m not really sure. But the bottom line is that I was manually changing formulae in excel to account for row-by-row / column-by-column changes and it was super embarrassing when I realized I didn’t have to do that.

Excel: Cell-Lock (~2018)

Similarly, and maybe I’m misremembering some stuff here, but I didn’t know what cell lock was for quite a bit of time—or, actually, I didn’t know that you could use F4 to trigger the cell-lock shortcut, and so I would spend time literally going through each function and manually putting the “$” to lock the cells. That was also super embarrassing—and probably was a realization I had around sophomore year of college. Again, really really embarrassing. For someone that now prides themselves on using excel efficiently and expertly, I really spent a lot of time out in the woods bumbling around.

Business-Speak (~2020)

And then the last significant labor productivity gain that I’ll mention here is becoming fluent in the general language of business. There is a different lexicon with which we describe the activities and economic flows of business, and there are ways in which you can sound sophisticated and learned when discussing what really is probably some pretty basic stuff. But I felt that I had earned my business-speak badge around 2020-2021 which is really defined as being able to have real, executive-level conversations with business decision-makers and coming across (hopefully) as credible.

AI-Assisted Coding (2025)

Most recently, AI-assisted coding tools have totally opened up my world. I wrote about this in one of my first few posts, but once you’re able to create code and use the “language of the web” to create web-based tools, you realize that really you can make anything. Because fundamentally any digital deliverable decomposes to 0s and 1s at some point—and so if I can use natural language to manipulate 0s and 1s, then—with enough energy and effort and determination—eventually I can get those 0s and 1s to behave how I want them to behave. A hardcore example is that I’ve started using code to create presentations and updates for my consulting work with clients—and so presentations that might have taken me ~2-3 hours to put together in the past now take me about 5-10 minutes. And that’s the significance of the gains we’re talking about here.

Takeaway(s)

For me, I think this general progression is why I’ve been so excited about AI and why I went pretty much all in so quickly. In each of the above instances, I can almost mark the exact point in time where some “discovery” led me to real, significant, exponential-feeling gains in productivity—where I had this feeling of “how was I ever doing this some other way before?”

And that’s the magic of AI—and the power of its promise on a societal scale. Soon it will be difficult for anyone to believe that we had people manually write summaries or reports or building financial models or answering calls or responding to requests, etc. And it’s all a natural part of the progression and advancement of a developed civilization that leverages capitalism to create cooperative energy towards a more abundant future.

Looking Forward

Labor productivity is my North Star (and at this point I probably have at least 3 north stars, which I know is literally impossible)—but it’s what I’ve been benefiting from and chasing my whole life. It’s not always about working harder it’s about working smarter. And so if you hold effort as fixed (i.e., a constant value of “harder”) then really most of your time should be spent on solving for “smarter” and that’s what I think AI allows for right now.

There’s so much disruption and experimentation in all professional, social, psychological, and personal domains—and I want to be someone that benefits from these developments instead of shying away from them. Because I genuinely do believe abundance can be on the other side of this revolution, and I want to be a positive force in shaping a more abundant future for everyone.

Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Luke