Today, I finished reading the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

One of the premises of the book is that ideas and religions can behave like viruses. This doesn’t have to be a pejorative explanation — it just is an observation of the way ideas spread. Once someone hears an idea, if it’s good, interesting, convincing, or otherwise unique, they might repeat it to another person.

So, most ideas that repeat (such as that funny story you tell a friend, who tells another friend, etc.), will just repeat on. Many ideas (such as lessons in how to use a tool or make a recipe), will be archived away for use in particular circumstances. These are like the assortment of individual applications we may have on our phone.

However, some ideas drive deeper than just their own repetition. They dictate what other ideas we will replicate, reproduce, and execute. The obvious example, emphasized in Snow Crash, was religion. Certain levels of religious devotion will replicate themselves not only by telling the ideas to others — it will encourage you to create habits that spread the idea other ways — such as having children and teaching the ideas to them, and that the ideas are the most important thing in life. In fact, religion will determine what other applications you use as well — it might eliminate the cooking pork applications, but then add in some new prayer applications. In this way, these sorts of ideological ideas can self-replicate and determine an individual’s operating system.  This reminded me greatly of the idea in Scott Adams’ book, How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big. In it, he consistently emphasizes the idea that our thoughts and skills are “software” for our “hardware”, i.e. our bodies.

In the way religion was practiced hundreds of years ago — in that it was the primary consideration behind most actions taken — it could be adequate to describe one’s religion as their operating system. However, hardly anyone (aside from ISIS), emphasizes their religion to that degree in modern life. Now, it’s almost as if our internal “operating systems” have become a set of different modules (as an aside, anyone who has meditated to any significant degree KNOWS that we have different internal modules). I have an American module, a Catholic module, an academic module, etc. We can think of a hundred different ways to apply this.

Snow Crash also had me thinking about another way to build on Scotts Adams’ “talent stack” idea which he discusses extensively in his book. If an idea can be a limited program you execute, a “talent stack” allows you to create a string of applications, including running macros through those applications. For example, PowerPoint is a great application. It’s better because it comes packaged with Excel, which allows you to included charts and graphs in your Powerpoints. Similarly, Excel gets even better when packaged with Microsoft Access. We can then think of some talent stacks as “suites” of applications that work particularly well together. This can help design you overall talent stack. Keep in mind, however, that a “suite” of talents in your stack should just be a general understanding. People find all sorts of useful and creative ways that seemingly unrelated skills work together.

For instance — WordPress is used for blogging. Audacity is a commonly used program for podcasting. These aren’t a “suite” in any sense, but podcasters get great benefits from also running a blog, and might post a blog to accompany a podcast, or vice versa. Similarly, story-telling is a distinct skill from statistical analysis, but if you can tell a great story, it can allow you to explain statistical insight to other people and make great points about statistics (example: Nassim Taleb’s explanations of different statistical anomalies through “Fat Tony”.