Why You Should Avoid the Field of Battle
Do you remember the kind of copy shops that were around ten or twenty years ago? They were simple places with a couple of photocopiers. In some of them you could use the machines yourself by inserting a coin into a slot. Copy shops today are a very different proposition. They’re more like small printing houses, offering full color and a hundred different types of paper. Sheets are automatically bound in high-tech machines—hardback and jacketed, if that’s what you want. Now, you might assume that this technological wizardry has done wonders for copy shop owners’ profit margins, but sadly not. Their margins, already low, have actually worsened. So where did the value of these expensive machines go?
Many young people believe that going to university is a prerequisite for a glittering career, and starting salaries do tend to be higher for graduates than for those without a degree. Yet on balance, after discounting the costs and time invested, many students are no better off or even worse off than their less educated peers. So what kind of value does this expensive and time-consuming process add?
After his bestselling children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll wrote the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, in 1871. In it, the Red Queen (a chess piece) says to little Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place.” In doing so she describes precisely the dynamic that has trapped copy shops and students. Both cases involve a kind of arms race. Originally a military term, its treacherous underlying dynamic can be seen everywhere: people are forced to arm themselves because others are doing the same—even if, taken as a whole, the process makes no sense.
Let’s get back to the two examples and the question at hand: what happens to the value of the invested money? Well, partly it goes to the customers, but mainly it goes to photocopier suppliers and universities. “If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges and universities,” wrote John Cassidy in the New Yorker.
People who find themselves caught up in an arms race seldom realize it. The insidious thing is that each step and each investment appears sensible when considered on its own, but the overall balance comes out nil or negative. So take a good look around you. If, contrary to expectation, you find yourself in an arms race, get out of it. You won’t find the good life there, I guarantee you that.
But how do you get out? Try to find a field of activity not beset by arms races. When I set up the company getAbstract with some friends, one of our criteria was to avoid the arms race dynamic. In practical terms, this meant finding a niche where there was no competition, and for more than ten years we ended up being the only supplier of book abstracts—a fantastic situation.
In Chapter 45 we discussed the importance of specialization. Yet specialization alone is not enough, because even in tiny niches you can often uncover a hidden arms race. You need a niche in which you can operate smoothly and confidently, but also one that’s free of the arms race dynamic.
You can see the dynamic play out in many people’s working lives. The longer your colleagues work, the longer you have to work in order not to fall behind, so you end up wasting time far beyond the point of reasonable productivity. If we compare ourselves to our hunter-gatherer forebears, we find that they worked between fifteen and twenty hours per week. The rest was leisure time. Sounds like paradise—and, without the arms race, we could do the same. No wonder anthropologists call the age of hunting and gathering “the original affluent society.” The competition for goods and possessions could never really get off the ground, because people in those days weren’t settled. Being nomads, they already had plenty to lug around—arrows, bows, furs, small children. Did they feel like burdening themselves still further? No thank you. There simply wasn’t the necessary reward system in place for an arms race.
Things are different today, and not just in the workplace. Even in your personal life, you can end up in the stranglehold of an arms race if you’re not careful. The more other people tweet, the more often you’ve got to tweet in order to stay relevant on Twitter. The more effort other people put into their Facebook pages, the more you’ve got to make, so that you don’t fade into social media irrelevance. If more of your friends are getting plastic surgery, you too will soon feel pressured to go under the knife. The same goes for clothing trends, accessories, the size of your apartment, fitness and sporting pursuits (marathons, triathlons, gigathlons), the horsepower of your car and other social yardsticks.
Two million scientific studies are published every year. A hundred years ago (in Einstein’s time), the figure wasn’t even one percent of that. Yet the frequency of scientific breakthroughs has remained roughly constant. Even in the sciences, the perverse dynamic of the arms race has taken hold. Academics are paid and promoted on the basis of the number of papers they have published and the frequency with which those papers are cited. The more other scholars publish and the more frequently they’re cited, the more everyone has to publish in order to keep pace. This competition is only loosely connected to the pursuit of knowledge. The profiteers are the academic journals.
If you’re keen on a career as a musician, don’t under any circumstances choose the piano or the violin. Pianists and violinists are the unhappiest musicians on the planet, because the pressure of competition is at its most brutal for those instruments. Moreover, it’s continually ratcheting up, because concert halls across the world are flooded every year with thousands of brand-new piano and violin virtuosos from Asia. You’re better off choosing a niche instrument. That way it will be much easier to find a spot in an orchestra, and people will be much more impressed by your ability even if you’re not world class. As a pianist or a violinist, you’ll perpetually be compared with Lang Lang or Ann-Sophie Mutter. You’ll compare yourself, too, sapping your spirit further.
The upshot? Try to escape the arms race dynamic. It’s difficult to recognize, because each individual step seems reasonable when considered on its own. So retreat every so often from the field of battle and observe it from above. Don’t fall victim to the madness. An arms race is a succession of Pyrrhic victories, and your best bet is to steer clear. You’ll only find the good life where people aren’t fighting over it.