Promoting People To Their Level

At a recent party, the group was discussing exclusivity as a "benefit" in relationships and to what extent this should align with one's "title" as boyfriend versus just someone I'm dating. It was quipped, "he has to consistently perform above that level before you promote him!"

Shaun Maguire recently revealed many secrets of Elon's practices when it comes to identifying talent and allocating responsibility accordingly. Indeed, he calls the granularity of a 15-level technical excellence segmentation a kind of "grandmaster superpower" underlying Elon's rare leverage-generating swarm of lieutenants. His enabling characteristics include high conviction predictions, speed to promote, and a ruthless lack of forgiveness for certain error classes in employees' execution.

Previously, I thought Elon's superpower was more of a suicidal urgency to shift humanity's cone of potential upwards to a better future—i.e. sustainable solar energy infra, autonomous vehicles + robots, and becoming a starfaring species. Because he's truly not willing to live in the alternative world, he embodies relentlessness better than anyone else, working 12-18 hours a day. Every day. (This is what he has in common with Bezos, who frames his own "regret minimization" framework more gently and digestibly to the public.)

But maybe both traits are critical simultaneously. Being quick to fire someone demonstrates a deep understanding of both resource constraints and mission alignment. In order to achieve excellence, the best leaders ensure the highest possible enrollment of teams. Folks holding things up must go elsewhere.

Trump won the debate against Biden for me when he asked, "Who have you ever fired, Joe?" This question shows managerial competence and a taste for execution. It happens that the Presidency can be thought of as the chief executive managing our national resources, implementing the will of the people as defined by Congress.

The Peter principle tells us not to expect true leaders ascending to this role, for the simple fact that it is indeed a role and the President is in fact an employee of the government.

People wrongly conflate morality and the appearance of good character with managerial execution / leadership ability. Indeed, it seems the masses anti-correlate competence and resultant success with the appearance of "being a good person" and thus vilify business figures. People are even recently starting to stab them (oh, poor Luigi, how today's publicly-funded education system has failed you).

Let me emphasize the profound principle behind being the original "you're fired" guy. Trump's seemingly whimsical or blustery brand of charisma was groundbreaking reality business TV, packaging the "eye for talent" concept as educational entertainment. When viewed in this light, he may have been the original "mainstream spokesperson for capitalism" pre-internet and post-Ayn Rand, at the height of mass media. This is the target I've recently been setting up to define and occupy.

I'm not sure if I ever published my draft blog post on "meritocratic lag". I believe this human systems concept is an essential thing to understand because it's the main reason young people in their early 20s lean socialist on accident. I certainly did as a 19 year old first-time founder, unable to open my eyes to the necessities of pivoting away from our nonprofit's unsustainable model.

I didn't find a path forward and quit rather abruptly. I fired myself on July 4 2016, leaving our team completely hanging, mostly because I didn't really know how to look for the right path. I moved up one layer of abstraction, where I knew how to search in my personal "idea maze of life" a bit more easily. I just didn't have words for these concepts back then.

Elon is the current apex capitalist by public renown. He might dominate our political future 10-20 years later, the same way Trump did. Or it's just happening already today since free information flow accelerates everything and the pandemic + Tesla wealth inflection + Twitter moment solidified a decade of him already being the GOAT.

Thankfully, Elon has the best track record in the world at being strongly anchored to ideas and reason as opposed to status, which indicates our political future will be more closely tied to ground truth principles. I foresee my market of interest growing because I'm speaking the math of humans clearly and articulately to this receptive political mainstream. I'm excited to write a book in 2026 as the basis of "Capitalism Unlocked" to package these ideas in a public launch vehicle.

I'm happy to merge my movement with Elon at the right moment someday, become his subordinate, or otherwise capture his audience. My early tweets indicated this but I guess sometimes you have to spell it out more deliberately as opposed to spewing no-context memes (which then aren't actually memes lol). Otherwise people call the cops, confuse you, and put you in the psych ward. I'm iterating.

Fail fast, break things? Suffer consequences.

I'm experiencing this meritocratic lag myself right now. I have less than 100 subscribers and followers across all channels. And that's OK, as long as I don't act with too much self-importance. In fact, this blog post tells me I should under-weight my self-importance. We have now re-derived the common sense wisdom of "be humble".

Most people are hesitant to promote others before they've demonstrated results mainly because it's an uncomfortable conversation to demote someone later. Our rigid systems and old rulebooks also create extra work if a cog tries to buck the system and re-org job levels or titles every month. We don't yet have live elo scores for work performance in a truly fluid gig economy. Things have not been designed to the highest standards of modern efficiency.

Along with the primacy of truth and reason, financialization is coming too.

It's true that there's complacency danger in letting folks hang around in positions past their performance level, but it happens all the time. More generally, most people are poor talent detectors. They wait too long to calibrate and enforce a change in responsibilities, down or up. Someone else ends up creating signal, recognizing good work with press or an award or a Bill Ackman tweet. Or maybe a scandal happens, and reality eventually makes things obvious. Cough, Harvard, cough.

You can use this same idea to your advantage. Seth Godin talks about how early in his career he printed a weekly newsletter one-pager for everyone's desk in the office each Friday. By discussing the projects his team shipped and the change they were making, pre-email, he built an asset much more substantial than a performance review or resume. He built trust, he built relationships, he built permission for others to promote him. This kind of voluntary proactive signal-generation certainly doesn't hurt one's chances.

If you don't proactively take ownership of trickling signals and stories about yourself to decision-makers, depending on your sphere of activity, it can take up to 5-7 years minimum for one to "demonstrate" communicable results—meaning, to get your views across at the level of the poor talent detectors' threshold. The virtue of your work products alone, without a story, relies on outperforming reality to barely reach and convince humans who simply don't care as much as you do.

Isn't this how PhD students become professors? With lots of patience, grit, and hard work to publish a thesis. Hoping the research results and eventual citations speak to the talent of the candidate. Maybe this is just how it works, or maybe this is completely backwards and unnecessary for those who choose to operate outside such yak-shaving paradigms. A la Shaun and his PhD adventures. A la Andy and this blog being a "PhD in life". It took me nearly 30 years to research and spell out today's blog post.

But one should expect potential girlfriends to be quite intuitively savvy on this and adjust one's sensitivity-levels accordingly... Women are very good at understanding, and sometimes subtly hinting at, when the time is correct to give their man a promotion.