I was brought up to believe that there was no such thing as a free lunch.
“Everything has a cost," my dad would proclaim, always urging me to consider things with a dose of skepticism. “Nothing is really free in this life."
With the gift of historical context, I now understand why he believes this. Brought up in the fresh aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, my dad had seen many tragedies in his childhood.
Some were obvious — the tragedies of famine and poverty, for instance. But others were psychological. And one of these psychological imprints was this deep sense of mistrust of one's own community.
Mao Zedong's regime pitted neighbour against neighbour, rewarding those who listened for signs of dissent and denounced their fellow community members. Coupled with the scarcity of food and other resources at the time, it's no wonder that my dad — like many other Chinese people of his generation — came to believe that there was no such thing as a free lunch.
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Lately, I've been thinking about positive sum games. This was inspired by one of Naval Ravikant's short podcast episodes, on playing long term games with long term people.
In a long term game, it’s positive sum. We’re all baking the pie together. We’re trying to make it as big as possible. And a short term game, we’re cutting up the pie. [1]
I think I have seen the world of Silicon Valley through many different lenses: jaded tech engineer, wide-eyed startup founder, curious student, and hopeful craftsperson. In the latter few, I've increasingly gotten the sense that this is a positive-sum world. People are in this game for the long haul. People are in this to create value, to grow the size of the pie.
And when people understand that the game they are playing is positive sum, free lunches, metaphorically speaking, are abundant. Giving away resources doesn't diminish the giver in any way. It's done in service of creating more value, of strengthening relationships, of increasing opportunity and potential.
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