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No. 214 · Strategy · General Thinking

Joy’s Law

However strong your team, most of the smartest people work for someone else.

Joy's Law, named after Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, says that however brilliant your team is, most of the world's talent sits outside it. Your organization, friends and advisors are only a tiny slice of what people know.

Use it by building doors for outside minds: share stuck problems widely, run open challenges, ask people from other fields, and look beyond a single source of advice. Just remember outsiders lack context, so pair their ideas with inside knowledge.

In the Almanac

“Harrison’s sea clocks”, 1714–1773 · “Goldcorp”, 2000

Both stories in full, three ways to use it and where it misleads.

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Questions

What is Joy’s Law?

Joy's Law, named after Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, says that however brilliant your team is, most of the world's talent sits outside it. Your organization, friends and advisors are only a tiny slice of what people know.

How do you use Joy’s Law?

Use it by building doors for outside minds: share stuck problems widely, run open challenges, ask people from other fields, and look beyond a single source of advice. Just remember outsiders lack context, so pair their ideas with inside knowledge.

When does Joy’s Law matter?

Joy’s Law is one of the 56 mental models for strategy, the situations where you ask: How do I win when others want the same thing? Within that, it belongs to “Finding opportunities”, alongside Arbitrage, Idea Maze and Local Optimum vs Global Optimum.

What is an example of Joy’s Law?

Two stories show it at work: Harrison’s sea clocks (1714–1773) and Goldcorp (2000). Both are told in full in The Mental Models Daily Almanac, which has two stories for each of its 365 models.

Which mental models are related to Joy’s Law?

Crowdsourcing, Circle of Competence and Echo Chambers. Joy’s Law itself comes from general thinking.