Age and Creativity

Marc Andreessen (who is often wrong but never in doubt) has this detailed but very informative post on the relationship between our age and our “output”. Excerpt:

So what have we learned in a nutshell?

* Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.

* This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

* Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. “Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit.” High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.

* The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one’s career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity — taking more swings at the bat — is much higher payoff than trying to improve one’s batting average.

* Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

So here’s my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship — see if you can fit your opinion into this model!

Found: here.

And after reading the full article. you should also check out Naval Ravikant’s follow-up to this article which manages to add more interesting thoughts to this topic. Well worth spending the time required to read these long articles.

The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography

Venkat has just written about a new way to map all our social interactions. The innermost ring is the twitter zone, which he describes as:

The twitter zone is the zone of people about whom you get a constant stream of nonessential trivia, ranging from children’s illnesses to tastes in coffee. In previous ages, the high cost of communication meant that this mapped to your village, tribe, (or suburban neighborhood plus cubicle neighbors). Today it includes anyone who engages you in a bidirectional flow of trivia about both your lives, in a constant steady stream, so you develop a full, rich background picture of their lives. It includes some of your physical neighbors (since in this age of Bowling Alone we don’t talk to all our neighbors) and your twitter and instant messaging buddies.

See full article, which should be read in conjunction with the Monkeysphere that I had blogged about earlier.