DRMacIver's Notebook

Developing new capacities

Published

2024-01-20

There’s a general phenomenon that I think of as “capacities” - your ability to do things.

A capacity can be anything. It can be a broad skill, it can be a narrow trick that you know how to solve some particular problem with. It can be a physical item. It can be someone you know who you can do the thing for you. It can be some complex emergent combination of all of these thigns.

A capacity is not just that you can or can’t do the thing. It’s how you do the thing, and a crucial part is how easy it is for you to do the thing.

A good illustration of this for me is cars. I’ve owned a car, for the first time in my life, for a bit over a year. Previously, whenever I needed a car I rented one.

From a financial perspective, I’d probably still have spent less money on my car if every time I used it over the last year I rented a car instead. We’re getting to a point where it might be close, but I think I’d still have spent about 50% less money.

In actual fact I’d have spent a lot less than that of course, because most of the times I’ve used the car over that year I just wouldn’t have bothered. It’s not just about the financial cost, it’s about the fact that my car is literally right there and I can just get in and drive. Renting a car adds a significant effort overhead that makes small transactions not worth it.Yes, I’m aware of Zipcar and the like. In my experience they’re exactly optimised for use cases I don’t have, and end up strictly worse for almost anything I care about. In theory, owning the car doesn’t make me able to do anything that renting a car wouldn’t, but in practice the different effort levels involved make it a very qualitatively different capacity.

Also, as well as the cost and convenience, having the ability to casually drive means I get better at driving because I do it more regularly. This makes driving less stressful, so I’m more willing to do it. Having the capacity teaches you to use the capacity, and thereby enlarges it.

I did know this prior to owning a car, but I probably still undervalued it. The main thing I bought a car for was to be able to drive to and from my parents’ house - it’s about an hour’s drive from me by car, and essentially has no public transport options to get there in under three hours.In actual fact, I would probably still just about be ahead on cost if I’d taken a taxi to and from my parents’ every time I’ve visited them since buying this car. It would come to maybe £200 for the round trip, and I’ve probably visited them maybe 20 times since then, which is only £4,000. But also many of the trips would not have happened at this price tag - it’s easy to pop around for dinner on a whim with a car, but that wouldn’t happen with a £200 price tag and the need for advance planning that comes with a taxi. It was very much a response to a particular problem I had.

But once you have a car, you can just use it for easy things. I use it for shopping from time to time, I use it for moving big things. I can bring a giant stack of firewood back from my parents’ place if I want, which a taxi would side eye me on. I can pop over to the next town easily.

I probably still underutilise the car to be honest. Part of this is that I feel at some level I shouldn’t be driving too much (I think this is true but that I’m probably overstating it). Part of this is just that I’m still used to a mindset that I’ve had for most of my life, where I don’t own a car and can’t do car things as a result.

This seems like something I should fix. The car is useful, and expensive to maintain, so I might as well figure out how to make use of it.

This is a much more proactive mode than I often remember to deploy. I’m all about “That does seem like a problem. Have you tried solving it?” but this is much more “That does seem like a solution. Have you tried finding problems to solve with it?”. It’s worth doing, I just don’t habitually do that.

Importantly: I don’t know that I could have done it nearly so well without owning a car and starting to recontextualise how useful they are. Once you have the capacity and you figure out how to use it well, you unlock a lot of hidden value that just thinking in terms of what problems you already have that could be solved with it, because it doesn’t just solve existing problems for you, it opens up things that you don’t even think of as problems because it doesn’t occur to you that you can do them.

Part of why I’ve been thinking about this recently is that my income has gone up a lot over the last year, and money is very much a capacity, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways to deploy that capacity for life improvement recently. It’s going pretty well. There are fairly modest low hanging fruits available that you just don’t think about when money is tight, and aren’t even that expensive once it’s loosened up a bit. For example I paid for an ironing service recently, because I like wearing collared shirtsAlthough I haven’t actually started wearing them again yet. Lost the habit and I’ve been busy. but hate ironing. It cost about £20 to get literally every shirt I own ironed. Not free by any means, but very affordable.

Another capacity I’ve been working on that flows out of this recently is that I realised that my household would very much benefit from some additional help with admin, so we’ve hired a part-time PAHow did I find a PA? I posted on the local Facebook group asking if anyone was available for such work. Another thing I recently discovered existed, and thereby developed a capacity I previously lacked. on an experimental basis. We’ll basically give her odd jobs and pay her weekly at a rate of £15/hour for however much work she’s done during that week. This is an extremely early days experiment, so there are loads of things that may or may not work about it, but I’m very happy to have done it nevertheless.

One of the interesting things about this decision is that I don’t really know what sort of tasks we’ll give her. The specific prompt was I wanted someone to offload a search for a good cleaner to, but that’s totally something I could do myselfAnd has been totally something I could do myself for months…. We’ve got a bunch of other small tasks like that, but there’s a very real possibility that we’ll just work through a TODO list and then by done.

But I don’t think so. I think having someone like this to offload tasks to is going to be a really good capacity to have, and I’m looking forward to finding out ways to use it.