M&Ms: Fortune Tellers
How 2023 might play out in the 86th edition.
My grandmother sat in awe as her friend read her coffee cup.
That's right, in Albania and many other parts of the world, reading the coffee cup after it's been drunk is a form of fortune-telling. It is a way to tell you all about your future.
My Grandmothers friend, the fortune teller, told her about the money that would soon be coming into her hands.
I was maybe seven years old, but something struck me as odd to watch an adult I admire believe in that. But my grandmother isn't alone; Kings used to hire fortune tellers to read sheep's guts. This practice of telling fortune from the guts of sacrificial animals even has a name, haruspex. If Kings can be fooled into believing in fortune-telling, then it's a shame to blame my grandmother for wanting her Turkish coffee read back to her.
Turkish coffee, by the way, is especially easy to read fortunes from.
Turkish coffee is made with finely ground coffee beans. But coffee is dumped in the water, stirred, and boiled together with the water. This process differs from water filtered through coffee, which is how American coffee and espresso are made. Think if American Coffee was never filtered but served with coffee grinds, and you get the idea. This process makes for an incredibly strong coffee and a thick liquid full of caffeine. There is no way anyone could drink the whole thing because, by the time you get to the bottom, there is nothing but coffee rinds left. Those coffee rinds make for perfect fortune-telling.
As a seven-year-old, I was fascinated by how the fortune teller could tell my grandmother's future. So I asked her, how do you do it? She said, "You flip the cup upside after drinking the coffee. Then all sorts of lines, dots, symbols, numbers, and letters appear. Then you look at those things and make sense of them all. Dots mean you will soon get some money; see how your grandmother has all these dots here."
A short few months later, the completely unexpected happened.
Communism fell in Albania, and things went from bad to much worse for everyone, at least for a few years. There was total chaos in the country. Instead of getting money, our family was nearly starving.
I thought back to that fortune teller, my grandmother's friend, some fortune teller she turned out to be. Instead of getting money, we were all starving. But to be fair, who could’ve predicted the fall of communism?
Charlie Munger says, "People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future... Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep's guts. It happens over and over and over."
As we approach the end of the year, a lot of people are going to be telling fortunes and telling us all about what might happen in 2023. I might partake and try and make some predictions too. It's fun; it can even be good entertainment.
But I want you to remember how right my grandmother's fortune teller was. I want you to use that same lens for all the predictions you're about to see and hear about 2023, including mine.
Three Tweets: GPT4, Trends of 2022 Visualized, The 90-9-1 rule.
I like these predictions because they remind me of my grandmother and how often she liked having her coffee read.
A fun visual of trends for 2022 and how long they lasted.
Once I understood the 90%-9%-1% rule of the Internet, it made me want to change my ways from a passive consumer to a creator.
It is Pareto distributions everywhere you look.
Three Articles: Talent in 2023, Doers into Managers, 2022 Software Engineering Salary Report
This is a fun article with many reasonable predictions for talent and people changes in 2023. By someone with insights into the industry.
Check it out but do remember my Grandmothers fortune teller after you’re done reading it; no one is infallible when it comes to predictions.
This thought-provoking article about turning doers into leaders.
As someone who pretty much promoted all of his managers from within, I wholeheartedly agree that “doers” make for the best leaders. They have immense advantages over career managers.
This is not to say that everyone should be a manager; it’s not for everyone. But it is to say that all managers should’ve been doers at some point.
The levelsfyi report for 2022 is excellent. And unlike my grandmother’s fortune teller, it’s not telling us what might happen, only what just happened.
And let me tell you, entry-level software engineers in the U.S. made bank this year.
Two Memes: Side projects of 2022, Junior Devs talking to Senior Devs
Shout out to the small bets community for pointing out this fun meme.
A Junior Engineer explaining to a Senior Engineer all the features Product promised to the Execs in a meeting that the Senior skipped.
As always, thank you for reading.
-Louie
P.S. you can reply to this email; it will get to me, and I will read it.
I can tell by studying the spacing, paragraph, and word patterns in this current post of yours that you're going to have a great year.
I enjoyed every part of this episode! I instantly had to make a note about the 1% rule, it's so obvious, but I never thought about that in that precise way.
By the way, I'm afraid a bunch of American friends will start some coffee experiments these days xD.