Btw saying you're not good as leadership is a classic humility move and makes us enlightened Losers more eager to follow you into the pits of Protocol Mount doom. Hehehe :P

It would be if I could think of ways to actually scale and focus energy to get a lot more done. 🤔

Here I mean specifically energy level. Good leaders generally do a lot more coordination work, which typically requires an order of magnitude more communication. There’s a reason leaders are typically scheduled wall-to-wall with meetings. It really does take that much work to manage a non-trivial org. You get a few hours every week for solitary philosophizing at best, if you try really hard to create an afternoon free.

In fact one of the reasons to lead with protocol structures rather than traditional is that you accommodate lower available leadership bandwidth with more subsidiarity and decentralization. Which means you can’t steer or focus as much. In the limit, everyone is a leader/nobody is a leader. But this doesn’t mean the collective has been reduced to directionless random-walk wandering.

Matthew might want to incorporate this idea in his book.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v1

I can do the wall-to-wall meetings of an executive but my revealed preference is clearly not doing that. Very ENTJ vs. INTJ — ENTJs want to organize the outside world and me as an INTJ can do that if necessary (helps to pretend people are systems haha) but it's a much more natural focus to be furiously organizing ideas in my head.

Being an early stage founder has been a nice fit because I get to do some of both.

Part of the reason protocols appeal to me is it feels like the right leveling up per Venkatesh's mediocrity series and fits how I like to focus on things.

My OSS work is also essentially protocol type work too — part of its long-standing appeal.