Impedance Mismatch
Friends,
In the notes I call The Essential Paul Graham I saved this passage:
What I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.
A “feeling of disgust when I’m not achieving anything”.
This resonates.
But this is not a hustle-post. I’m not Gary Vee. I’m just someone who wants to save you (or someone you are guiding in life) unnecessary frustration and ultimately time by learning from my own mistakes.
The idea starts with a set of personal observations:
I was aware of #1 by the time I was in college but not #2. This led to a giant misunderstanding about what I wanted from a career. And life.
Let’s turn to Graham again:
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
All this wisdom eluded me in my formative years. All I knew was that feeling:
Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't.
Drenched in that feeling, my last summer before college was not to be wasted on drudgery but a last hurrah of a carefree existence.
As my junior year of college rolled around I had to think about my future with urgency. What was I going to do with my life? You can ask my mother, what I told her:
“I’ll be retired by 40”
I was grateful for my immigrant parents’ joyless sacrifices but determined not to repeat it. I wanted the fastest path to riches with the least amount of work. Trading was a job that rewarded working smart not hard.
[This was mostly true back then which is not fashionable to say. My peak effort moment of my career was when I joined Parallax and had to build from scratch — 12-14 hour days but for 1 year before I could dial back to an 8-9 hour gig — still way less than most high-performing finance people plus zero travel. The career didn’t feel like hard work — it felt like playing a game. It’s frustrating, but you’re not digging holes in the sun.]
Trading also had another nice feature that suited me. It’s a bell-to-bell job. And there’s lots of dull downtime in a trading day. You can use that time to build models or research so you have school hours without homework most of the time. More leisure. No deadlines really. I didn’t manage too many people. It all served what my younger self wanted.
For a while.
But that feeling of self-disgust when you’re not growing that Graham had when he was 13 started happening to me in my early 30s. Really late, I know. Until then I could play Madden for 8 hours straight and feel fine.
What changed?
A lot in a short period.
For starters, I got a 1-handle bonus when I was 29. I quit immediately after they paid it. The money felt nice for a second. I bought a bigger apartment. I had an open-ended job in-hand. Prime International, with the backing of 2 of its senior traders, said they would back me to start a nat gas options market-making business. I told them I was gonna go screw off for awhile and they said the spot would be there whenever I was ready. I took the Spring and Summer of 2008 off. Traveled a bit, got in shape, proposed to Yinh in Napa in August.
I got back to NYC just as autumn was announcing its arrival. I’m bored now. I called Prime. “How long’s it gonna take to get my account set up?”
Like I said in the last issue, the next 3+ years were the steepest learning of my career. I was building the framework that eventually led to my business pitch to Parallax.
By 2011, I was also itching to produce not just consume. I started a blog called Shoxland (named after my trading floor badge SHOX). I published for a few months — the posts I remember best, which is to say not well, was on how newly IPO’d Groupon synthetic futures were priced in the option market and another about how high implied correlation was trading in the SPX (how times have changed!)
I enjoyed writing but between not having an audience and the impending move to SF for the Parallax job, Shoxland just trailed off.
[The writing thing wasn’t completely out of nowhere. I had an unusually large vocabulary by age 12, I picked college courses that graded me on writing because I knew that was my best chance for A’s, and this is more cringe than signal, but I scored a 790 on my SAT II writing which was the top score in my HS. None of this is evidence of any actual skill, but my inner narrative told me there was a plant bending towards sunlight and I should at least raise the blinds].
Picking up the Parallax job with actual developer resources behind me let me wear a dual PM hat — portfolio manager and project manager. Building on this stage was a new feeling. Generative. It had higher stakes — I was asking people to trust me not just with capital but with hundreds of hours of developer time from people I really liked and wanted to succeed.
I felt like a grown-up for the first time…at age 34. Incidentally, On my 35th birthday, we went to the hospital to have a son. Adulting came late, but all at once.
About a year later I went to the internet to learn about investing. I wrote all about that in My Investing Shame Is Your Gain. Everything about my mindset shifted from the transactional and quick-hit to the cliche — compounding.
I started indulging a lot of latent urges that in prior times didn’t seem to have a point because I couldn’t see the payoff right away.
I took copious notes. I built a personal knowledge management (PKM for productivity nerds) system. It didn’t need a goal. It just fed a sense of growth and learning. I didn’t care that there was no obvious instrumental angle.
But as serendiptiy would have it, collecting ideas by topics led to arguing with myself. Trying to understand contradictions. Looking for ways to communicate concepts back to myself in ways that would stick.
All of it would point straight to Moonotwer. Accident after accident. Just producing for the fun of it and letting the work lead me.
Graham feels icky when he isn’t achieving. I’m not there. But I feel icky when I’m not learning or producing. The Moontower deadlines balance how often I can publish without feeling like a chore (and I do take a couple weeks off in the summer and holiday season). Truthfully, it is sometimes a chore but the cadence is such that if I didn’t publish on this schedule I’d get down on myself for not learning at a pace that is necessary to support it. It’s a deadline that my better self requires of my lazy self imposed by an internal governor who knows I’ll regret letting the lazy self have his way.
If I can work at my pace I set, if I feel in control, the work is nourishing. I’ll trade money for independence. But I didn’t understand that you could arrive at such a place when I thought about how careers go. I had a rigid understanding of work — cash for torture or unabated freedom. Neither of those choices are healthy and yet they’re the only ones I conceived. It’s so stupid, it feels insane to admit.
领英推荐
So what should you take away?
The rhythm of school and many jobs leads you to misunderstand how you feel about work. It’s not Work with a capital W you hate. It’s an impedance mismatch leading to inefficient power transfer as opposed to a complete short circuit.
You hate alarm clocks. Or commuting. Or taking orders. Or giving orders. Or constant deadlines. Or not being accountable. Or not thinking your work matters. Or that it’s poorly matched to your skills. Or it’s not outdoors enough. Or you travel too much. Or you don’t get to travel at all. Or you can’t steal an hour to volunteer at your kid’s Field Day.
When I was young, my model for work was joyless sacrifice. This led me to ignore compounding because it was a naively forgone conclusion that I couldn’t suffer long enough to see its benefits. This meant those fleeting bouts of free time were the only time I could be alive. That time was to be used in ways that didn’t resemble work. This created an adversarial relationship between my 2 selves. When I laid it out like that it was clear — there must be a better mix of compromises on the work-life frontier.
Finding it is a technical problem. Ignoring the possibility becomes an existential one.
??Read more
???Anticipating rebuttals
Money Angle
In The Investing Version Of “Nothing Good Happens After Midnight” I talk about my own philosophy that investing should really be thought of as “savings plus” rather than a means to get rich. Keep your wealth pacing with inflation and let your human capital, an area where you possess both “specific knowledge” and “accountability” (to use Naval Ravikant lingo), create upside asymmetry. For 99% of people secondary market investing is a just a high risk/reward roulette wheel when you start sizing concentrated risk.
Jared Dillian’s recent post Life Hedge completes many of my own thoughts but with his trademark flair.
Money Angle For Masochists
Saw this on Twitter:
I wrote an explainer later that day:
The thread breaks it down and uses Moontower Volatility Converter to do the calculations.
From My Actual Life
My eldest finished elementary school this past week. All the kids in the class wore these shirts at the ceremony.
My opinion on this one:
I have a tedious history with this particular sentiment. See My Personal Trigger if you care.
Stay Groovy
??