Sriram Krishnan calls Tyler Cowen one of the best talent spotters.
I take a few life lessons from Tyler, who I consider a mentor even though we’ve spent, at most, dozens of minutes together in the past several decades. (Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work!)
- He has blogged consistently on Marginal Revolution since 2003. As he learns he shares, and that’s a lighthouse beacon attracting smart people around the world with similar interests. So the lesson is: blog!
- He keeps himself open to engagement, with his email address being public. He reads and responds to his own emails.
- He treats everyone with with respect. I was a kid no one had heard of when I met him at an economics conference in 2003, but he spoke to me with the same respect and attention he gave to Milton Friedman, who was also there.
His advice to me was simple but true: Write every morning. Be more ambitious. Because it was coming from him I took it seriously. It’s all very open source. (I’m very curious to see how economic theory and open source intersect in the coming years, I think there’s a lot in the open source world that is novel and useful.)
I’m inconsistent compared to him in those three things but I look up and aspire to the example he sets, especially within the WordPress community where I keep myself easy to reach on the community Slack or talking to people at WordCamps. (Like WordCamp Europe in Turin next week!)
I am curious where do you see these intersecting? In an executive way and also cultural?
I can see it can with some economy modeling, survey mechanisms and academia too. But at policy level where do you think open-source way would be useful?
This would need to be explored, but with a decline in participation in most social community institutions including religious ones, I wonder if participation in open source is correlated with any other positive outcomes including possibly lowering all-cause mortality. There are a million variables to explore.
Thanks. I did not think from the angle of positive outcomes from participation rather than just the outcomes of a project regarding open-source.
And a hard agree. The engagement and gains from participation in open source, to getting a sense of belonging, to mental health, to professional skills, to just finding meaning to life would truly be worth exploring.
I made a typo in the title, which bled to the permalink! Luckily WordPress is smart enough to redirect now that it’s been corrected. This is probably why I always mis-pronounce Tyler Cowen’s last name. Sometimes your brain gets stuck in weird ways.
>Don’t constrain your mentors by their availability, engage with their work
Love this line! So important!