Ask yourself, what if I’m wrong?

This was originally posted on LinkedIn.

When was the last time you asked yourself if you might be wrong?

I just finished reading “Hell Yea or No” by Derek Sivers. The book is about how to make decisions, and one part, about how we perceive our own abilities, really landed with me.

Sivers talks about how most people think they are above average at any given thing. 93% of drivers think they’re a better driver than the average driver, 94% of professors think they are better than average teachers. Obviously, half of these people are wrong. Sivers’ revelation was to assume he was one of them.

This reminded me of a time I did something really stupid. Many years ago I was running a video game subscription business (think DVDs by post, but for the Playstation 2). The business was undercapitalized and failing, and we were all struggling. One day one of my co-founders wondered out loud if we could take the platform we’d developed for video game rentals and use it for something else.

“Like what?” I said

“How about razorblades? People buy them every month, and they’re small enough to mail. You could do a subscription for razorblades”.

My business partner, Ian, had just invented Dollar Shave Club, ten years before Dollar Shave Club did. And I talked him out of it.

I don’t think I was rude, or dismissive, or closed to new ideas. In fact, at that moment, we were all desperate for a new idea. We talked about it, and the idea just didn’t make sense to me, and in the end I convinced him that it didn’t make sense to him either. 

Of course I was dead wrong. 

How might life have been different if I’d assumed that I might be wrong? Maybe Ian should have argued harder for the idea, but equally I could have made us find out what even 10 or 20 people thought, rather than just the two of us, and maybe I’d have changed my mind.

I don’t hugely regret that incident, there is no reason to believe we’d have been any better at growing the shaving business than the video games one (and we sucked at that), but I do try and bear it in mind when people bring me ideas now. 

Even if you think you’ve properly considered something, you might be wrong.

The New York I love will come back

This was originally posted on Medium.

I’ve lived in New York for 866 days. 164 have been under some version of a lockdown. For nearly six months the city I’ve fallen in love with has been sick with a disease that has left it on life support. I’ve walked the empty streets and felt the same as seeing a sick a friend in the hospital — shocked at something you love looking so different, so unlike them.

Almost every day I read something about how New York will never recover, written by someone with too much money and not enough perspective. I’m a hopeless optimist and I love this city too much not to stand up for it.

New York is sick, without doubt. But it won’t die. Like the majority of the people who’ve caught this disease, New York will recover. Here’s why.

The arguments for New York’s imminent passing usually say the same few things. New York is too expensive. You can have a much bigger apartmentsomewhere else. The subway is terrible. Other places are so much cleaner. So people have already left (on this point, the talented and otherwise sensible woman who cuts my hair insists that “everyone” has left, a comment she makes whilst we’re both in her Midtown salon, lending the conversation a pleasingly existential edge).

All of these accusations are, to a word, completely true. However, all of them have always been true.

Covid didn’t set the rent, or give us the terrible landlords, or the garbage smell in the summer or the “fuck-it’s-so-cold-i-think-my-face-is-dead” winters. It didn’t make us all live on top of each other in a city that is hilarious overcrowded, lacks the most basic infrastructure, is so noisy that you can never really sleep and (I‘m being generous here) is so badly run that often it barely functions at all.

Living in New York has never made any damn sense, and it never will.

Except, of course we love it. We love it because in this city, you can feel things, that you’ll never feel anywhere else. Walking in The Ramble. Watching the sun set over the Hudson. A rooftop bar in Williamsburg with friends you know you‘ll never lose. Losing yourself in The Met. Heading to a house party and find the host has a nightclub in his basement (this happened). That view from the ferry. Yankee Stadium. Street art in Greenwich. The guy in Washington Square Park who lets you lie down under his piano, and the million other random things you can see just walking thorough the city for an afternoon.

New York only started to make any sense to me once I realized that it’s basically ten million people expressing themselves simultaneously. This place is pure fucking magic, and the people who live here know it.

Look what we built.

Other cities have parks, and museums, and rivers, but they don’t have these ones and they never will. I read one story that argued New York was dead because the author knew someone who had left and moved to Phoenix. I’ve been to Phoenix, a lot, and it is a city of fine people, but that’s like watching a friend with low self esteem decide to date someone who is way below their league — you’re polite about it, but you know they’re wrong and at some point they’ll get the therapy they keep talking about.

My point is this. Right now, New York is sick. But it will get better. It’ll take time (we don’t know how long), but the problems this disease has caused are temporary. If people didn’t want to pay the rent, or put up with the rats, they’d never have moved here in the first place, and losing a few dollars off the cost of an office in Midtown isn’t going to kill anyone.

We’ve all lost so much of what we love about this city, and I understand why some people don’t want to be here right now. But all of those things will come back, and the soul of New York will be back with them, stronger than ever.

I can’t wait.

Why we launched More United

This was originally posted on Medium.

This morning Paddy Ashdown is on the Andrew Marr programme to launch MoreUnited.uk, a project I’ve been heavily involved in. The team includes Martha Lane Fox, Dan Snow, Caroline Criado-Perez and Luke Pritchard (yes, the one from The Kooks), plus a wide range of others from across society.

I’ll very briefly explain what it is, and then why we’ve done it now.

MoreUnited.uk is a new movement aimed at the millions of people who believe in open, tolerant, progressive politics but don’t want to join a political party. We’ll use crowdfunding to raise money and support any candidate, from any party, who is prepared to support our five founding principles.

So, why have we done this now?

Firstly, some context. In politics, money matters. That’s a reality that many of us (me included) don’t like, but a reality it is.

Having more money than your opponent can be decisive in a close election, so the people writing the cheques wield huge and often unaccountable power.

On the left, the Trade Unions contribute the overwhelming bulk of Labour’s money. Trade Unions are a great thing, and we need them, but having a party so totally reliable on a single source of income cannot be healthy.

On the right, most of the Conservative party’s money comes from big business, and often from the kinds of businesses that aren’t subject to much public scrutiny. Again, big business are not bad things, but having them wield so much power is not healthy.

Here’s an example. In the recent EU referendum we saw Aaron Banks write a cheque for £11m to support the leave campaign, an amount of money that undoubtably swung the result his way.

Once you realise who’s paying the bills, it doesn’t take long to realise why our politics is being dragged to the extremes, on all sides.

So how can we fix it?

Well, let’s first say what we can’t do. We can’t just wish the system to be different. And we can’t just talk about it.

Right now, the forces of extremism are winning every major fight in our politics. Brexit is merely the latest instalment in an ongoing saga. If the solution to the crisis in our democracy was people who already agreed with each other sitting in meetings and talking then we wouldn’t be in this mess.

If we want things to be different, we need to think differently.

We also need to do something that makes sense in the modern world.

Digital organisations are, one at a time, disrupting every part of our society. Companies like Uber and Amazon succeed because they understand that the internet isn’t just a way to do things faster or cheaper, it’s a way to do things that could never be done before.

That same revolution will come to politics. It’s inevitable.

However current political parties (and I count myself as a proud member of one) are never going to be that distributive force. All parties work on a model that involves a relatively small number of people doing a huge amount of work. Even the smallest useful activity is a big commitment. Not only is it hard to get lots of people to do those things, it’s also the opposite of how most people want to do politics.

It is absolutely not the case that the British public aren’t interested in politics. They’re just not that interested in political parties.

Organisations like 38 Degrees and Change.org have shown us that there are millions of people who care enough about politics to take small actions around specific causes, and critically to tell their friends about them. However rather than seeing those actions as the start of a journey towards the deeper commitment that party politics requires, we need to find a model that makes those actions useful in themselves.

MoreUnited.uk isn’t 38 Degrees or Crowdpac.com. Those platforms exist to provide anyone with tools to advocate for anything they care about, and they’re really good at it. But what they (deliberately) don’t have is a binding set of principles that their members hold in common.

That’s what makes MoreUnited.uk a movement, not a platform.

But we’re not a political party, and we’re not trying to replace political parties. In fact, we need political parties to succeed for MoreUnited.uk to succeed. What we are trying to do is give the millions of people who deeply care about politics but don’t like party politics a way to influence the outcome of elections.

It’s struck me in the last few weeks, as I’ve been talking to people who are “in the bubble” about this idea, how much political people look at the world from Westminster out. The questions I get are all about how MoreUnited.uk will effect the existing parties, is it good for this party or bad for that one, and the underlying assumption that something that’s good for one party must be bad for all the others.

That, to me, perfectly demonstrates our problem.

When we frame everything across party lines we immediately start with what divides us rather than that unites us.

If we’re going to stop letting the extremists win, that has to change.

Will it work? Who knows, but it’s worth a try, because as someone who used to be Prime Minister once said, we can’t go on like this.

You can find our more about MoreUnited.uk at www.moreunited.uk