“Of three metamorphoses of the spirit do I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: for the heavy and the heaviest longs its strength.”
- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Overcoming
The student becomes the teacher. With this quote, Nietzsche illustrates something that we all already understand. It is only until you pass certain levels, that you can move on to the next stage. Life is somewhat of a step function. To get a promotion, you must first master your current role. To matriculate to university, you must first grasp basic mathematics, science and literature.
The camel, lion and child represent survival, freedom and creation, respectively. At first, you endure. You, the camel, try every day to pick up a weight that you are not able. Only when you have built the strength to move it freely, can you exert your will upon it. The weight no longer controls you. You, the lion, have mastered it and now control the object. Once you are free to control the movements of the object, you have become the child, and you not only move the object, but you command it creatively in a way that expresses your influence upon the world.
In a way, that is all that art and science is. As a scientist, this may mean understanding how the moving parts of a cell interact with each other and how to manipulate it, then mastering the cell (for example, through genetic engineering) and finally altering the cells that you selectively create. As an artist, you become a part of a certain movement, and eventually you branch off in a new distinct way that expresses something that others hadn’t quite captured.
I think this symbolic overcoming of self is a relevant symbol that we can view our own lives with, and how we view the obstacles that we would like to overcome. In at least some ways, life is just overcoming obstacles.
What is on my mind right now
Well, I just got some good sleep at last and a relative breather at work. I can muster the time to focus my thoughts and express what concepts I am struggling with through this essay.
What is on my mind often, and what I think is on many peoples’ minds is what the fuck should I be doing right now? Adulthood is leaving the nest of determinacy. You are an independent person. You can do whatever you want within society’s bounds.
For most things, you use certain actions to complete certain goals. If you want to make pasta, you execute certain motions in combination with certain ingredients to get a boiling pot of water and noodles. If you want to get an A on a test, you study efficiently to prepare yourself for the questions that test will likely have. School was “easy” because it was at least directed. If you wanted to exceed, you just did what everyone else was doing, but better.
The problem arises in life when you realize that there is no test, so what do you do? There is nothing at all. This is what I have noticed in some, not all, of my friends.
There is meaning
Well, there is at least some meaning. “I think, therefore I am.” I am, therefore, I am one with the universe. I am a part of something, therefore, I have some role and stake in it. While this is all entropy, the human body is enthalpy. We can create our own meaning as Dostoevsky would prescribe. We are animals, and animals have instincts. There is nothing wrong with living life by the rules that were given to us. We can create our own values within the bounds of our existence and innate drive.
That can manifest itself through Nietzsche’s will to power, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Christianity, Taoism and other value constructs. The truth is, it doesn’t matter, as long as you are practicing what you preach and you preach what you believe.
I think at this stage, I am progressively drawing thinner lines in the sand for what I believe. Then I simply act within those bounds. The problem is not having a North Star. People just need direction.
What is my meaning
I thought it was funny that one day I just decided to find the meaning of life. I thought it was even funnier that I actually made some headway. It’s always been taboo, kind of like how people are okay with the fact that we are all dying every single day. It’s taken years, but at least I’m getting somewhere that is my truth.
I think that our meaning is dynamic. I remember in Psychology class, we learned about self-actualization at the top of the pyramid. But what exactly would “self-actualization” entail? Someone please operationally define it for me.
I think that it doesn’t exist. I remember thinking that I could end up in a state like the Buddha if I tried hard enough of pure nirvana and transcendence.
But then I also think about a younger me. One whose only ambitions were to be better at chess. Equally as ambitious as I am today, at that particular snapshot in time, what I had in life was significantly less than now, in both material possessions and intellect. My understanding of the world was extremely limited, as mine today will likely be in 20 years if I am lucky enough to make it that far. But most notable is the fact that I have probably already exceeded my younger self’s entire lifetime ambitions. It wasn’t even within my grasp that this was possible, and I now realize how relatively little I have achieved universally. Probably, my ambitions extend beyond reality and reason, but I don’t really care.
And this is of course just human nature. The constant is our want for more and the delta is what we have.
Nerd tangent: I saw a presentation with Ilya Sutskever, where he makes an interesting point that humans’ loss function, essentially optimizing all variables in our lives for a certain outcome, is optimized for survival genetically. I think societal norms probably recalibrate this loss function towards other things like making money in capitalism, but it is still an interesting point.
With this fundamental nature, philosophies diverge. One solution is to accept and practice a constant state of acceptance, contentment or submission. Another is to continue to want more and have a sort of pain along the way with some “reward” at the end.
Truthfully, the answer here is not clear to me.
The first way is somewhat an act of hedonism, you do not sacrifice and you do not see reward, and so you live a content, simple life, but you do not achieve your potential.
The second way, you may achieve a relative amount more, but you will live a life of relative suffering.
Some propose that you can practice both at certain times. Maybe you can be happy with what you have and also want more, though I do think that is a bit of a paradox.
I have approached life in a different, third way, which at the time makes sense to me.
Investment horizon
I view life like a compounding investment. I always have. Even though I work in and studied finance, I swear I thought this way before and I’m not that cheesy.
I view the content life as hedonism–short term benefit for long term sacrifice.
I view the aspirational life as dissatisfaction–short term sacrifice for long term achievement.
But at the end of your life, you will have to face what you have made of it.
The content person will not have much to show for their life, but they will still be content.
The aspirational will have done great things, but they will be dissatisfied.
Sacrifice is important. The more money you have, the more leverage you have, and the more you can potentially accomplish and the closer you can come to self-actualization.
There should be a third way.
If you sacrifice early, you can have the benefits of reaping the rewards later. The rate at which you sacrifice can vary by person. And perhaps you can decrease the amount you sacrifice at each stage, so that you can enjoy relatively more of your 30s and relatively more of your 40s and eventually you can ride off into the sunset in your 70s doing what you enjoy while also practicing contentment. This is my strategy for now. I still enjoy life as it comes but I will sacrifice. I probably worked the hardest in my life while I was in high school. The goal is to optimize the net future value of your life.
Jeff Bezos lives like this. He gets less attention than Elon, but he obviously worked very hard. Now, he prioritizes sleep, creativity and leading the life that he wants to live. Same thing with Paul Graham.
What to actually spend your time doing?
After that has been determined, it is a matter of determining what you want to do with your life, an increasingly complicated question for me. This is complicated for me, because, once again, it changes.
Few people I know have found their calling. Most of them are delusional about it, but those who have, it is hard to not be envious. I have a friend that told me their meaning was just “to do what they love until they die or it kills them.” And it seems that they are doing just that and doing it well. Perhaps I tend to overbake things, but I always come back to the question of what do I love, and why?
What interests me? What is the root of interest? I’ve whittled away at this question for months and have been figuring out several things that make sense to me. Mostly it boils down into that you should do what you are passionate about, that you also are good at, and that you can make a living at, and then the money will come. Your “ikigai.”
Essentially, you are trying to find your life’s work.
Like I said before, my younger self would have thought that I had already found it! But no, I’m not there yet. I saw someone say recently that your life’s goal should be something that you are not one of the best at or even the best at in the world. But you are the ONLY one who does it in the world. In other words, you have been the camel (maybe even in different fields), you have been the lion and you are now forging a new creative path as the child. One that no one can keep up with you at. One that also provides value to yourself or others. I do not believe there is anything wrong with being dissatisfied with the present. We should strive. We should aim to find our life’s work as soon as humanly possible and then push the boundaries of our field.
The great men we know throughout history did not just carry out convention, they blazed a path with a light so bright you could not avoid noticing even if you tried. They are iconoclasts. I think this creativity is part of what makes us human.
What gravitates us to a particular field / space?
Once again, a hard question. But I think probably this is a mixture of randomness in what you have been exposed to in your life / what has trained your neural net, your societal backdrop / culture and also that people are interested in things that solve a sort of characterological developmental hurdle in their lives (Jung). These things that interest them help them understand a “truth” of the universe or help them gain something. Like the first carpenter who used a hammer must have loved that tool.
For better or worse, capitalism also plays a significant role in how we view our life’s work. The way we have structured society clearly rewards those who carry out work in a way that creates utilitarian value for the masses, or those who capitalize on economic / regulatory inefficiencies. Once again, for better or worse, I am not playing judge here.
I think of investment banking as the most capitalist job in the world. In this system, money flows efficiently between parties. The spigot that directs these funds has people who facilitate the transfer of this wealth. Investment bankers have positioned themselves so that they help transfer trillions of dollars. By receiving droplets of that wealth transfer, they earn extremely large sums of money. But truly that they also provide outsized unitary value, they are the gears of the economy and by doing a good job increase economic efficiency. The left and right will take different stances on this but it is a fact of reality.
So if you are interested in something that doesn’t make money, should you abandon it?
At this point in time, I believe it depends. I am happy with the system. For me, it offers an efficient sandbox to allocate my time and resources in ways in which I can be rewarded. If I were an early human, maybe fire would interest me. If I were in Florence in the 1500s, maybe I would be drawn to astronomy and the arts. If you were interested in something that forced you to be a peasant or women wouldn’t talk to you in the time, it would probably force your hand into a different interest, unless you were such a strong believer in that ideal
But the date is April 29, 2023. My reality is that I live in an age of rapid technological progress and an opening frontier of science. The idea of that is interesting to me because of the potential for it to increase my own life. I was really interested in quantum physics for a time in high school. I am not smart enough to make a living in that, so I avoid it.
This is a taboo reality of my life, and maybe a reality of many. It took me a lot of introspection to realize it, but I think it is true. And moreover, I don’t think it is a bad thing. This system isn’t perfect, but it is what we have, we can only expect to make incremental change. As a constituent of the system, I will earn what I can, and hopefully I can provide a lot of value to others along the way.
The 3 parts of interest
I believe that the 3 parts of interest that converge are simply what you believe in, what you are good at, and what is possible.
As Richard Hamming put it, philosophy (what should be done), science (what can be done), and engineering (what is possible to be done).
And the most visible way, the Japanese term Ikigai, encompassing “what you love,” “what you are good at,” “what you can be paid for” and “what the world needs.”
Side note, would you ever find this if you were always content? Or would you always be in a state of ikigai?
Like the camel, lion and child, you will go through different stages of development in reaching for this goal of constant self-attainment.
Step functions
I worked like a dog when trying to start my prior startup, Nephra. Along the way, I made so many mistakes. But I do not regret them at all. I think they were important mistakes that I learned from and helped me course-correct my entire life. For instance, the work ethic that works in school is to just put your head down and grind something out, but I learned you need a functional and aligned team, leadership / skills (I had 0 before), I learned that technical innovation / good engineering is the bottleneck of progress, I learned that you have to pick your head up and that ambition for the sake of ambition is not scalable. I learned that unclear technology first needs to make the innovation clear. When the dust settles, then you execute impossibly hard. I learned that there are holes in the world and that anyone can find them and solve them by focusing incredibly hard on a specific problem. Most importantly, I realized that I really enjoyed doing this, and I would have never figured that out in school or my current job. I defined a better understanding of what my skills / weaknesses are. I could go on forever, but the point is that incredible anguish and sacrifice led me to a stronger understanding and foundation of the world, from which I can continue to work to level up.
I’ve said this before in my “YEAR OF STARTUPS” essay. But many things in this life are step functions. Whether you want to call it “fake it til you make it” or whether you want to describe it as forming abstractions of knowledge to form future decision making, it comes with time and perseverance. The value that board members offer to a company is pattern recognition. They have seen all this shit before. They can offer advice that they have learned in their merited careers.
You also see that these people value their time differently. I think of time differently now (I will speak to this shortly).
A subtle lesson from this is that work starts out as brute force. As you progress into more valuable careers, you progressively do less bitch work. Suddenly, you have something to bring to the table. Your accumulated experience is actually an asset. You are beginning the stage of the lion.
Another lesson from this is that in our society, your brain matters more than your brawn. Intellect is scalable. There are people today that can snap their fingers and make a few calls that will earn them more than an entire household will earn in a lifetime.
The final thing that I learned from Nephra, and one that I only recently accepted, is that your skillset matters greatly. It is not enough to just want to start a company in an area you subtly believe in. You have to embody that mission. You have to know everything about your area and more, because one day you will compete. This matters more in established fields like law and finance. If you are a leading attorney / managing director, you are the asset. You can create your own company around you. If you are creating something new, it’s fine if you are not an expert, because there is nothing to be an expert in. You are becoming the expert as you go. There is uncertainty here. But those who believe in something with strong conviction and see a future where others see nothing, are the leaders.
You need to have a skill. What will it be? This is what you will develop over your life, choose wisely.
Your career
This is where I am now. How do I want to spend my time to become the person that I want to be? This means a combination of learning, experience, and building a network. It matters what you do in addition to how you do it.
Obviously, you should also try to make money in your career. Like before, I view this as maximizing net future value of earnings. This means a tradeoff of learning or earning at every step along the way. You should focus on learning at the beginning of your career and earning later, ceteris paribus.
You are your own brand. Your network has value. Your skills have value. And the money you may or may not have has value.
I like biotech innovation. I think it will change the world. I would prefer to be a fox rather than a hedgehog (generalist over specialist).
“Having a vision is what separates the leaders from the followers.”- Hamming, so have convictions. You should create the change you want to see in the world.
I like new and uncertain areas. I like trying to map out emerging fields that uncertain, making sense of all the clutter and organizing it into a determinate view of the future, then creating something aligned with my convictions. Determinacy comes from understanding, which comes from reading and any skills / knowledge you possess.
What I also learned from Nephra is that anyone can have a view of the future. The bottleneck is people who can actually engineer the damn thing. So, personally, I think that is something I would like to develop in my life. But at the same time, is that scalable? I think the best CEOs are technical. It may just be another stage that I will have to go through.
Indeterminacy = you should learn
Determinacy = you should execute
You should think about work for what it is. You are giving your time and human focus in exchange for money.
If you are lucky, you can also build skills and networks. If you are luckier yet, you have the opportunity to do exactly your ikigai. If you are yet again luckier, you can have ownership, control and equity in it.
What I like, solving problems. Building. Philosophy. Ambition.
You know my thoughts on Nietzsche, but I admit this was a truly profound piece of writing. Creating the immense luck required to make our life’s work reach ikigai requires both suffering and a feeling of isolation — but the travails are undeniably worthwhile.