It's 1:26 AM and I'm wide awake. Again. It's been like this for a while now and I know exactly the cause: Steemit.

The science isn't complicated. When my head hits the pillow before 4 AM and I close my eyes my brain immediately comes alive with ideas. Blog posts. Videos. What's Steemit going to look like in 5 years? 10 years? What if I got three funny friends to sit around a table, try to make each other laugh, and filmed a show called, "Be Funny?" Somewhere around 4 AM whatever cocktail of benadryl, weed and bodily exhaustion finally wins out and the next thing I know I'm waking up after 6 hours of sleep and running to the computer to see how my last post is doing.

While many people on here understand intuitively what I'm talking about, I don't think many understand consciously why this is happening. It's not addiction. It's not a malfunction. Steemit is not exploiting some personal weakness. What I am experiencing is the feeling a human being gets when they are placed into an ecosystem in which they are free to thrive.

I recently saw a Q&A of Gabe Newell, CEO and Founder of Valve, which I believe provides some insight into what I am experiencing.

GABE NEWELL: How to Create a Valuable Company

Step One: Pay For Talent

"We decided to buy the most expensive talent you can afford. Those are the people least correctly valued... Talent is a word I hate, I just mean the ability to be productive... We started from the assumption that even though it's easy to see that there is huge variation in software programmers there was probably that same variation in a lot of other roles. So when we designed Valve we said that's what we're trying to do. Everything goes back to this fundamental question of, how do you attract and retain the most highly productive people in the world, because if our thesis is correct that's where we're going to create our greatest incremental value."

In other words, ideally you pay your talent in direct proportion to their productivity

Step Two: Free Your Talent

Free your talent from the controls and influences that come from being a publicly traded company

"Valve is not a publicly traded company. Being a publicly traded company adds a bunch of headaches and it didn't really solve any problems for us. It meant that control and decision-making now involved 3rd parties. So for the developer at Valve there's the customer and they're the person you're trying to make happy ... There's no approval process. If you make a bad decision it's 15 minutes till you fix that problem. You don't go to board meetings where the board argues about what the third series venture capital is worried about ... The whole point of being a privately held company is to eliminate another source of noise in the signal between the consumers and the producers of a good."

Free your talent from the artificial boundaries that come with "titles"

"The kinds of people that we thought fit this model don't need titles. Titles are actually their enemy and not something that makes them more productive. Often times their solutions in one generation are different than their solutions in the previous generation and an explicit organization captured in titles makes it less likely for them to have the insights to build the next generations of whatever is going to be exciting ... Titles in organizations keep people from properly encapsulating the problem at a point which allows them to be most productive."

Titles can remove freedom by leading people to believe that they are either not capable of solving a problem, or not allowed to solve it even if they are capable of solving it.

"We have no QA department. We have no marketing department. We have one guy who calls himself the Vice President of Marketing because it confuses people if he doesn't tell them that when he's talking to them. But we assume that it's everyone's job at the company to talk to customers."

Free your talent from management

"Management is a skill. It's not a career path. We assume that everyone is a mix of individual and group contribution and there are a set of tasks that evolve over time relating to project organization and keeping things going. And usually people refuse to do management twice in a row on back to back projects. Because it very much is a service job. My job is to entirely define myself in terms of the productivity that I enable in other people. That's a very stressful job and it's very hard to measure your own productivity. Everybody else says, 'Jay, you did a great job, you should do it again,' and Jay's like, 'Screw you guys.' So usually we look for some younger sucker to give the job to. Someone who has some old notions about management as having authority in a hierarchy related to decision-making and then they find out that it's working really really hard to make other people be more productive."

Management should exist to facilitate the productivity of workers, not to restrain them.

Free your talent to self-organize

"I'm a big believer in one person one office. I treat DeMarco's Peopleware as a Bible. I hated cubicles with a passion and a vengeance. You know they grew out of this dated general philosophy that if you're screwing your employees you're probably doing something right. So I thought everyone should have their own office and do not disturb button on your phone and a door that closes ... and people kept sneaking into other people's offices and then they started tearing doors down. Everyone had their own office but no one was ever in it. They were all congregating in our conference rooms and so we had all of these empty offices and all of these clusters in conference rooms. That's when I realized they were making the right decision. Deciding that there were benefits to being in close proximity to other people and that Gabe's rigid adherence to one-person-one-office was actually hurting their productivity. So now everyone designs their own office space and the largest single space we have seats 80 people ... What you think about is what's an optimal work environment for the goals that you have. Desks are all on wheels ... You can pack up and join a different group of people in 15 minutes ... So we just sort of said, 'OK, each person has to make their own decisions about what they work on, who they're working with, what're the tools they need and what their offices ought to look like."

In Summation

According to Newell, one of the most successful and respected people in technology, the key to creating a valuable company is to maximize productivity. The first step to maximizing productivity is to find the most productive talent and pay them what they're worth. The second step is to free this productive talent from constraints so as to enable them to choose what they work on, who they work on it with, and where they work on it thereby fully unlocking their productive/creative potential.

If we think of Steemit content-creators as employees of Steemit, then we are all being paid in direct proportion to our productivity and that determination is made directly by the customer a/k/a the user. We have no set titles or roles within the company and are in fact not bound to the company at all. We can choose to work with whomever we wish on whatever concepts we're interested in, or we can choose to not work at all.

What does this have to do with my insomnia?

In other words, Steemit is arguably one of the best designed enterprises for maximizing the productivity of its employees because they are totally free to work on whatever they want and they will always be paid exactly what they deserve according to the customer. And what happens when you turbocharge the productivity of your employees? Well their body seeks to create even during times it would typically reserve for rest. Hence, why I am writing this post right this moment.

I doubt it is a coincidence that as the clock nears 4 AM I am winding this article down. Having produced something my brain now feels comfortable shutting down various sectors until I'm forced to stumble over to the bed to crash. But before I do that, I want to leave you with Newell's answer to an audience-member's question:

"How are you able to hire and retain the type of talent you were looking for?"

Newell: "A lot of the times it was just personally pitching people. Saying, 'This is why we think this is an interesting opportunity. Some of the people we thought were going to join us at the beginning didn't. We were like, 'Let's go! Let's storm the castle ... Where did everybody go?' Once you convinced people that you were doing something interesting, then they would start to rope in their friends. So a lot of it winds up being social networking at the end of the day. But we were also willing to take what other companies would say were risks. One of the first programmers at the company, his previous job was Manager of a Waffle House. And he was, and still is, one of the most creative programmers in the industry."

So "at the end of the day" it all comes down to social networking, convincing your friends that you're working on something interesting, and understanding that anyone--even the former manager of a Waffle House--can create something great.

This is an artist's rendering of what it feels like:

Piece by @camilla, check out her post here: https://steemit.com/steemart/@camilla/a-drawing-to-express-the-power-of-steem

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