Secrets versus Coordination Costs

A Conspiracy of Loners

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

—Howard Aiken

“Game creation is 99% programming and 1% game design.”

—John Carmack

Peter Thiel, Zero to One: 

“What to Do with Secrets.

If you find a secret, you face a choice: Do you tell anyone? Or do you keep it to yourself? It depends on the secret: some are more dangerous than others. 

As Faust tells Wagner: 

The few who knew what might be learned, 

Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, 

And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, 

Mankind has always crucified and burned.

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody — and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

—Peter Thiel, Zero to One

Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe:

“Most of my career has been spent selling ‘plans of action and programmes of collaboration,’ whether to Rexall to start up Pronto Markets; or Bank of America to buy out Pronto; or landlords; or vendors, many of whom have been very skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, my plans; and above all to my employees. If you want to know what differentiates me from most managers, that’s it. From the beginning, thanks to Ortega y Gasset, I’ve been aware of the need to sell everybody.

That’s why, throughout my career, my policy has been full disclosure to employees about the true state of our affairs, almost to the point of imprudence. I took a cue from General Patton, who thought that the greatest danger was not that the enemy would learn his plans, but that his own troops would not.

I also was taught (perhaps warped is a better term) by Bud Fisher, who could be shockingly frank — even if it was against his own interests. That frankness was one of Bud’s secrets in gaining and keeping the loyalty of everyone from the janitors to the executive vice presidents of any company he ran.”

—Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe

Sid Meier, Sid Meier’s Memoir:

“The idea of not wasting time is perhaps the most important factor in my whole career. Each new version of a game — or anything else it suits you to make — is another opportunity to take a step forward. The more iterations you can rapidly cycle through, the more precise your final product will be.

…

Mistakes are a given, and the important thing is to catch as many as you can, as fast as you can. Ideally, you’ll reevaluate your creation every single day, perhaps even multiple times a day, and each iteration is an opportunity not to pat yourself on the back, but to figure out where you’ve already gone wrong.

This is not to say that every step needs to be tiny. Efficiency is the goal, which means many iterations, but also getting as much information as possible out of each iteration. One of my big rules has always been, “double it, or cut it in half.” Don’t waste your time adjusting something by 5 percent, then another 5 percent, then another… just double it, and see if it even had the effect you thought it was going to have at all. If it went too far, now you know you’re on the right track, and can drop back down accordingly. But maybe it still didn’t go far enough, and you’ve just saved yourself a dozen iterations inching upward 5 percent at a time. Less than a month before Civilization was published, I cut the size of the map in half. Of course a game about the entire history of civilization has to have a large map, but it turned out that the size wasn’t as important as the sense of relentless progress. With a smaller map, the game moved faster, and that in turn made the map feel more epic than it had when it was twice as big — and if I’d been afraid to deviate too severely from what we already had, I never would have gotten to the right size in time before the game shipped.

This is also why I never write design documents. Some managers are irrationally devoted to them, expecting to see the entire game laid out in descriptive text and PowerPoint slides before a single line of code is ever written. But to me, that’s like drawing a map before you’ve visited the terrain: “I’ve decided there will be a mountain here.” Lewis and Clark would have been laughed out of the room if they showed up with a design document. Instead, they just said, “We’ll get back to you,” and started walking. The mountain is where the mountain is, and your job is to find it, not insist where it should have been.

…

The best working relationships are between people with complementary skills. Bill Stealey filled in my gaps on the business side, so he and I worked well in that regard, and obviously the sound and art guys were better at doing their jobs than I was. But when it came to design, I had been predominantly alone, or else collaborating with people who were skilled in all the same ways I was. I’m very good, for example, at ruthless self-evaluation. Even talented people have mostly bad ideas, and it’s critical in creative fields to let go of your ego and immediately bag anything that isn’t pulling its weight. But sometimes the wheat gets in with the chaff, and Bruce often saw a glimmer of value in an idea that I was ready to scrap. At the same time, he never got distracted by the parts of the game that weren’t finished yet. I could hand him a broken prototype with terrible graphics, overpowered enemies, and a crash bug three turns in, and he could look right past these immaterial complaints into the heart of what the game was really about. Where there was potential, he saw potential, and he could isolate areas for subtle improvement without getting distracted by what we both knew was easily fixable.”

—Sid Meier, Sid Meier’s Memoir

Young artists are always worried about getting their ideas stolen. 

Mostly this is the wrong attitude.

When you first start composing music, or painting, or programming, or building machinery, or writing stories, or filming short movies, almost everything you create will be low-quality. Learning how to execute fast, to be consistent and reliable, to create something purposeful and beautiful — that’s the core task. 

Secrecy is a tactic. 

Like all tactics, secrecy should be abandoned when conditions change… it’s a question of timing. When you are ready to move forward with an idea, attack, attack, attack. It’s useful to bring collaborators on board with a project, or to sculpt a proposal through casual conversation with trusted friends; searching for flaws in the proposal, stress-testing the concept, and allowing enthusiasm to spread. The reverse is also true: when a project seems dead, and you can’t figure out how to move forward, sometimes it’s a good idea to consult a mentor, and ask why the project isn’t working. Two heads are better than one; a different set of eyes can rapidly identify critical flaws, or subtle value propositions, previously overlooked.

Somewhere in between a project accelerating, and a project dying, there is a liminal zone of metamorphosis. 

The idea is finding itself; it needs time to develop purpose, accrue detail, and differentiate from market peers. During this larval stage, the project is fragile… and formless. It’s a mistake to ask for advice too soon, and to pin down what the project could be, by applying conventional wisdom to the unfamiliar. 

Secrecy is a tactic. 

Creativity should be tactful, and tactical, and intractable. 

A general rule of thumb is that one out of every three of your best ideas should be shared, discussed, iterated, and refined with peers who you trust, admire, and share a common aesthetic vision. The other two ideas should be kept secret, developed in isolation, and stockpiled.

Finding someone you trust, admire, and share a mutual aesthetic sensibility with is much harder than developing one brilliant idea. 

There are a lot of misunderstandings about art, or ingenuity, because most people lack any sort of creative vision, and as a result the advice kids are given is a flawed copy of a copy of a copy of what is expressed in the wish fulfillment of television and movies. In a biographical movie of an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs, or an author like Mario Puzo, there’s a short scene where the hero thinks of his special BIG IDEA… and the rest of the movie consists of the outside world’s enthusiastic chain reaction to the hero’s BIG IDEA, a vast ensemble of characters tripping over themselves to embrace the creative vision, falling like a line of dominos. 

In most schools, troublemakers monopolize the teacher’s attention. Talented kids are neglected and often forced to train themselves. Geniuses get bad advice because nobody understands them. Outliers are given the same answers, the same life script as everybody else. The smartest kids often grow into immature, uneven, and emotionally stunted adults, because their enormous strengths can cover for serious flaws. 

Schools don’t teach how to write a business plan, negotiate a contract, incorporate a startup, submit a technological patent. 

If you want to win in a big way, you need to teach yourself.

So there’s a paradox here — between isolation, and collaboration. Between seeds of innovation, and outright copying of what has already been proven to succeed. 

Constant motion should define a good creative mind, the relentless, manic churn of a shark hunting in the ocean, always swimming, always searching for blood, always asking questions, always dreaming along exotic or familiar paths. 

Questions build upon questions. The best insights combine multiple epiphanies into a single leap of brilliance. That’s a sporadic, incremental process. Layers of thought pile upon previous layers… deepening… shifting… solidifying. 

Artistic growth comes from working on small, manageable projects with consistent focus, learning how to execute on a boring, habitual routine, studying flaws in your work, and arranging these small projects to work along a cumulative trajectory, so that a dozen small projects teach you the skills needed to do something heavy.

Artists are afraid of the wrong danger — being robbed of their best ideas.

The real danger is stagnation.

It’s true that something beautiful can be stolen, or copied, or imitated, or diluted. But the more probable, mundane reality is how many creative, talented kids grow into conformist, tentative adults working safe predictable jobs in their safe predictable lives with their safe predictable routines reciting their safe predictable beliefs, so comfortable and complacent and distant from adventure that they never even realize what their lives could have been. 

Life is full of traps. And temptations. And frustrations. 

Don’t allow yourself to stagnate.

Sometimes you need to keep a secret to yourself.

Sometimes you need to share.

And over time, you learn to tell the difference, and how to recognize when it’s time for a secret to be revealed.