Recently I took my 10 year old to play a cricket match with kids of his age. It was fun to see tiny 10 year olds with full cricket gear playing with a proper cricket ball. For those who are not aware, a cricket ball is made of wood and covered with leather and is quite lethal when its coming at you with a high velocity. The 10 year olds had limited skills. Bowlers were barely bowling with any pace even with long run-ups, though they were able to bowl reasonably accurately. Some of the batters were good, they were connecting well, but it was still fun to see their un-coordinated stroke making and running. The fielders were the most funny. Like I said the cricket ball is hard. It was an achievement if they were able to stop the ball and throw it back to the stumps.
In the middle of all of this “low skilled” cute comedy of errors, there was a “game” that was going on. The 20 over a side game was very competitive and went to the very last ball. It was fascinating how these kids who were so amateur, were playing so competitively. Then it made me realise that it was the “rules” of the game that somehow tied all these small actions towards a bigger goal. There is a clear goal - the batters have to score runs and the bowlers have to get the batters out. It is this “goal” that forms this invisible string that holds the players together, like puppets, making them operate in a co-ordinated manner. The players calculate the “effort” required to win based on how well their opponents play. Without the “need to win”, the game falls apart.
10 year olds playing cricket
If you extrapolate this on a society level, we are all playing this game. This game is to collect points that people give you when you do something for them. We are all emotional beings that act on impulses and it is this broader game that helps us concentrate our impulses with the goal of collecting points. Once we collect these points, we can make people do what we want with them. This gives us amazing power. If you collect a whole lot of them, people will be nicer to you and respect you. This is partly because they want your points and want to make you happy in the process. This game, capitalism, is what holds us together and most of our “motivation” is driven around collecting these points.
While we are all motivated to collect these points, there are several ways to collect them. You can do so by following rules or not. What other people “value” is also very different. Some people value good quality things, some people value the effort you put in to elevate their own sense of worth (ego), some people value wisdom, some people value entertainment. So you can do so many things to collect these points as long as “you do something that people want” (Paul Graham). Companies are created so that a group of people can satisfy other people’s wants at scale and collect a lot of points.
While the destination is clear (do something people want), the journey is not. On one end of the spectrum, the journey is immaterial. If you do what people want, then you can use the points to do what you want. So it does not matter how “enjoyable” the process is to you in the end. In most cases though the quality of your output depends on your creative process as well. If you are running a restaurant, it is just not making food that people want, but it is also making tasty, healthy and hygienic food. If you are in a market of several other outlets, then you have to do better than others as well. When your destination becomes harder to reach, the journey becomes important.
If you are in a harder “market”, you need to have extremely high skills. Say you are playing World Championship Chess, it is all about how well you have prepared. So the “motivation” you require is to be extremely good at what you do and not just about the outcome (winning). This is what I call as mastery. According to me, while we all like to win, there is inherent joy in mastery. There is inherent joy in reaching a very high level of skill and finesse and creation. This is the joy of discovery, and this also forms the other axis of motivation. This is your own internal journey to become better. At this point, it does not really matter if you are doing something that people want, but the challenge is to do things in a way nobody expected and the push the barriers of what humans can do.
In entrepreneurship and the general business of running companies, what people stress on is “doing what people want”, but as I have shown, that is missing a very important point. There is incredible value in mastery and then using that mastery in doing what people want. Without mastery, your efforts remain mediocre. Hence in my view, a great company is one that motivates people towards mastery rather than just revenue (outcomes). The way (mostly) companies are ranked in the world is based on revenue and valuation, but I don’t think great companies work that way. The best companies are ones that celebrate excellence and mastery, and that leads to better outcomes. This is also how we would like to see ourselves at Frappe, even though the world is constantly pulling us in the other way.
Coming back to cricket, the way India used to celebrate cricket when I was growing up was based on the mastery of its batters, not based on winning (we used to suck at winning). That culture is very different now, batters are not celebrated based on how “graceful” they appear, but how hard they hit the ball (hustle). Ideally our great batters should have won a lot more (we could have, if we had the same culture in other departments of the game). But these days, cricket excites me a lot less, even though we win a lot more. Without art, winning loses its charm.
In the post modern world, there is no one version of truth. Both are legitimate pursuits (winning and mastery). It is a choice that each company must make. My personal model of the world is that hustle will take you only so far, after that it is mastery that takes you to the next level. Mastery takes years to acquire and is by definition a much slower path. The risk is that the skill you master yourself in becomes redundant (like sword fighting). But this is the risk we take at Frappe and it is a deliberate one. We may be slower at adopting new technologies than most companies, but we attempt do a much better job at ensuring that what we build is of good quality. This is what has allowed us to be a very productive team which is now financially stable and growing profitably. I hope this also forms the core of what "motivates" everyone in the team. This is what our culture should be about.
