The Cheat Code.

The Bloke on the Intro

Start with the mixtape.

If you're over thirty five you know exactly what I mean. You'd sit by the radio with your finger over two buttons, record and play, because one without the other did nothing. You'd wait. Sometimes for two hours. And when the song finally came on you'd hit both at once and hope.

Then the DJ talked over the intro. He always talked over the intro. You kept it anyway, so half the songs I owned as a kid had a bloke's voice on the front of them. I can still hear him now.

It was a terrible process. Slow, unreliable, and the thing that came out the other end was flawed. Beautiful and ugly at the same time.

They deleted it. They were right to.

But I kept those tapes for fifteen years. I've never once kept a playlist.

The Algorithm

There's a method for what happened to that mixtape. It has a name, it's taught in business schools, and it's the best manufacturing philosophy anyone has produced in fifty years.

Jon McNeill, who was president of Tesla, wrote it down in a book called The Algorithm. Five steps. Question every requirement. Delete. Simplify. Accelerate. Automate last. His line is that speed rarely comes from addition. Speed comes from subtraction.

I want to be completely clear before I go any further. It works. It's brilliant. I've used it. Every founder I know has used it whether they've read the book or not, because once you've seen it you can't unsee it. Every process turns into a list of steps waiting to be deleted.

Point it at buying a car. Two weeks of showrooms and a bloke in a bad suit, down to six clicks.

Point it at buying anything at all. One click. They patented the click.

Point it at not having the money. Gone. Three payments, nothing today, and it's yours before you've earned it.

Every one of those got called progress. Every one of them was progress.

It's a cheat code. That's all it is, and it's a magnificent one, and every single person reading this has used it today without noticing.

And then it got out of the factory.

Then It Got Out

Here's what nobody accounted for. The algorithm was built for factories and it escaped into everything else. Once it's in your head you stop seeing life and start seeing requirements.

So look at what has been run through it.

Being in the room at eight o'clock on a Saturday or missing the programme forever. Requirement. Deleted, first by the video recorder, then by the box, then by streaming. Better every step.

Getting off the couch and walking across to the telly to change the channel. Requirement, and a stupid one. Deleted.

Getting dressed and travelling to a building to do work you can do at your kitchen table. Requirement. Questioned hard, mostly deleted, and people are still arguing about it.

Having a body that keeps a running total of what you put in it. Requirement. There's an injection now. Eat what you like and the sum gets settled somewhere else.

Read that list again and tell me there's one line on it you'd put back because it built character. There isn't. It didn't build character. It was just annoying.

That's what makes this so hard. Taken on its own, every single one of those deletions is right.

The Guest List

But a requirement isn't only a cost. It's also a reason, and a schedule, and quietly, a guest list.

Saturday at eight wasn't a broadcast. It was the only appointment in the country that everybody kept at the same time. It put a whole household in one room, facing the same way, for an hour. And here's the part that matters. Nobody in that room chose the company. The schedule chose it. Your dad was there because it was on. Your sister was there because it was on.

When the requirement went, the room went with it. Nothing built since has managed to put a family in one place at one time and make them stay.

The office is the same story told twenty years later. That building was never producing work you couldn't do at your own table. It was producing something nobody has a name for. The acquaintance layer. The two hundred people you knew well enough to say something to and never well enough to arrange to see. Nobody has ever scheduled an acquaintance. That layer existed entirely as a by-product of being made to be somewhere, and when the requirement went it went with it, and it has no advocate, because almost nobody knows what to call it.

And back to the mixtape. Two hours, most of an afternoon's attention, and it came out flawed with a bloke talking over the beginning. A playlist takes eleven seconds and comes out perfect.

The perfect one is worth nothing.

Here's why. A thing is worth what it cost to make, and people can feel the price of what they're handed. That isn't sentiment, it's signalling, and it's older than all of us. It's why the expensive ring works and the cheap one doesn't. It's why the mate who drove two hours to stand in a cold field and watch you finish something means more than a thousand people typing. The two hours were the message. The watching was almost incidental.

Which brings me to the thing this whole series has been circling without ever quite saying.

Showing up was never a virtue. It was a bill. The world sent it to everybody, at the same time, without asking. You paid it or you missed the programme.

We deleted the bill. And then we started calling the people who still pay it disciplined, and the ones who don't lazy, as if something had happened to human beings rather than to the world they're standing in.

The Man Who Made You Find a Lamp

One person ran the algorithm backwards and won, and it's the cleanest example I know of.

Gunpei Yokoi was hired by Nintendo in the sixties to keep the machines running in a factory that made playing cards. He wasn't a designer. He hadn't been hired to invent anything. He ended up building the things an entire generation grew up holding, and he had a phrase for how he did it. Lateral thinking with kareta technology.

Kareta reached English as "withered", which more or less killed it, because withered in English means dead. In Japanese it means seasoned. Settled. Matured in. It's what you'd say about a good pan, or a wooden handle worn into the shape of a hand.

His argument was that the old part is the strong choice, not the compromise. It's cheap, because nobody is bidding against you for it. It's reliable, because every way it can fail has already failed for somebody else. And it needs no explaining, because everybody already knows it.

So in 1989 he shipped a grey plastic brick with a screen that showed four shades of grey and no light of its own. You played it near a window. Or under a lamp, tilting it until you could see.

Two years later it was up against a machine with a colour screen lit from behind, better on every axis anybody could measure. That machine sold around fourteen million. Yokoi's grey brick sold around a hundred and nineteen million.

He didn't delete the requirement. He kept it. He made you go and find a lamp.

He had the cheat code. Everybody had it by 1989. He was the one man in the room who declined to use it.

And a hundred and nineteen million people went and found a lamp. Most of them children. With the easier machine sitting on the same shelf, in the same shop, at the same moment.

A constraint isn't a hole where something better should be. Four shades of grey is a decision about what a picture is. It's why those small games still look like themselves forty years later, and why the machine that could draw anything is remembered for almost nothing.

Nobody Ran Step One

Question every requirement. It's the first step and it's the good one, and in thirty years of running it on everything we have never once run it on the algorithm itself.

Nobody asked what a requirement was for before deleting it. The method has no way of seeing that. From the inside, a requirement is only ever a cost. So it can't tell the difference between a step that wastes your morning and a step that is the entire reason eleven people are in the same place on a Tuesday.

Both read as friction. Both delete cleanly.

Essay seven was about the friction we built into YEETHER® on purpose. This is the other half, and it's the bigger half. The friction was never really in the app. It was out in the world, holding things up, and we've spent thirty years pulling it out because every individual removal was correct.

So here's what we built. We send you a bill.

Before you do the thing, you have to say you're going to do it. Out loud, in a room, in front of people who know your name and will notice on Thursday whether you did. You put Yatoms® against it. Nothing is bought and nothing is wagered. You're being made to pay something in order to say it.

It's a requirement. We could question it, delete it and simplify it, and the app would be faster and smoother and better on every axis anybody could measure. And it would be worth nothing, because the price is the message.

We're not trying to make anything easier. There's a queue for that. It's very long and everybody standing in it is better funded than we are.

We're building the lamp you have to go and find.

The Line and the Circle

Look at what we're all obsessed with now. The hack. The cheat code. The prompt. The arbitrage. The shortcut somebody else hasn't found yet. Every conversation I have about work is somebody trying to get to the answer without going through the middle of it.

We chased the polished, the filtered and the optimised. We caught all three. And somewhere in the chase we stopped being able to see friction at all, which is a problem, because you can't keep a thing you can no longer see.

Here's a thought I can't put down. We picture progress as a line. It goes up and it goes forward, and anything behind you is behind you for a reason, and the only direction worth facing is the one nobody has been in yet.

There's another way of drawing it, and it's older than ours. A circle. Seasons. Things come round again. A thing that got put down isn't finished. It's resting.

Kareta belongs to the second picture. That's the whole word, and it's why "withered" was such a bad translation. Not dead. Seasoned. Still here. Waiting for somebody to pick it back up and find out it never stopped working.

So no, I'm not asking anyone to go backwards. There is no backwards. There's only the thing you left on the ground on your way past.

Question everything. Then keep one thing.

Phone down. Show up. Pay the bill.