HAVE CONVICTIONS
What's stopping you from being you? Hint: It's you
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”
- Steve Jobs
Quit
I want to start this by saying that this world is your world, you aren’t just living in it. You are the main character. But try saying it to yourself in the mirror, it feels funny to me at least. For most of our young adult lives, we are funneled through family home life, then high school, then college, all of the time being held to others’ standards (grades, house rules, etc). I was interested in STEM, so it wasn’t a big deal, but I hold a lot of sympathy for those who wanted to pursue their dreams in the arts. These people aren’t wrong in any sense, they are just misunderstood, they have different fundamental beliefs, and discussions devolve into arguments because neither party realizes they are speaking different languages. Your interests are actually largely defined by your genetic makeup and upbringing (for instance, you can accurately predict liberalism and conservatism based on big five trait conscientiousness). The usual rebuttal is you aren’t going to make enough money, but for someone who truly has withdrawals when they aren’t working on something they love, that passion should be celebrated, not put down. Remarkably, it usually works out for the people who are truly connected to their work. Once you understand this world is just as much yours as it is anyone else’s, you will interface with it differently. Henry Ford is quoted “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” An overused quote for sure, but it is true, the problem is there aren’t enough people taking shots on goal. Why? What are you going to regret when you’re 80 and dying–you are going to regret that you didn’t take the risks, not that you played it safe. A university will always accept you and your tuition dollars open-armed later and there will always be a business who needs an employee, the risks are smaller than you think. My approach is being thought through in the succeeding paragraphs.
The context to these thoughts I’ve been having is the natural lost feeling that new grads have when they start their jobs. At first it’s amazing, they’re paying for nice dinners, work happy hours, your colleagues are nice, you’re working on interesting things. But then you start to think about why they are treating you so well and what you are giving in return. It’s somewhat unsettling that the constant happy hours buttering you up are a tactic found in 1984’s Victory Gin. They are paying you a market value because that is what they value your time at. In order to numb you and keep you content, they fill up your Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (a theme I continually return to). That is to say they are providing you with the monetary reimbursement for your time to cover rent and food expenses, they are providing you with colleagues to feel like you are a part of a community, they are strapping you to the company’s goals and visions so that you feel like you are a part of something bigger than yourself. All of this is done to make you feel content and turning good work product day-in and day-out. Truth is, I actually really enjoy my job, and that is the scariest part. I could live and float around on others’ equity or I could live life on my own terms and not spend ~50% of my finite time on earth on someone’s payroll, but rather scale my own life.
This is fine and good if you genuinely don’t mind, but it leaves a constant bad taste in my mouth. Not only am I spending some of the last formative prefrontal cortex years of my life on someone else’s agenda, but I look to the executives, no different than I, pulling in millions on the back of my labor. They are experts in their field who no doubt earned their place. But then I took a step back and looked at the seismic socioeconomic shift occurring. Banking is an artifact of old Wall Street, a meritocracy where the best rose in an “up and out” world to those who didn’t perform. The world seemed fixed, the opportunity was in these corporations. But then the internet came, the frontier reopened, people started large companies like ViaWeb, Netscape, Google, Facebook and PayPal.
I started my essay, A YEAR OF STARTUPS, with this quote,
“We are living in the best time to be a Founder in history. IBM, founded in 1896, took 45 years to reach a billion 2020 dollars in revenue. Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939, took 25 years. Microsoft, founded in 1975, took 13 years. Now the norm for fast-growing companies is 7 or 8 years. This trend will only accelerate” - Paul Graham.
People are out-earning bankers creating, rather than fighting for scraps in a sharp-elbowed environment. I then looked at these people, and I found that these founders are also no different than I. In fact, they aren’t even just lucky. Look at the image below of the original founding team of PayPal. People like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, David Sacks, nearly every single one of them went on to create massive value for themselves and others through various ventures.
This isn’t in isolation, people don’t realize how valuable they are if they just put in the time, per my last essay, human focus is Earth’s most valuable commodity [THE LOGOS]. Y Combinator funds people often with only an idea, and they have created over $1T in market value. Not to mention the Thiel Fellowship. The people that succeed are the type of people that succeed. Then it is a matter of execution [Business == Execution]. The PayPal mafia simply learned how to create a business in the internet age and then proceeded to repeat the steps for new companies like Tesla, Founders Fund, YouTube, LinkedIn, Palantir, Affirm, do you get the point? The largest labor arbitrage opportunity glaring down the face of America is reopening the frontier and creating a culture where people believe in themselves enough to take risks. I hope to do that at www.factionsociety.com. After starting Quant and Nephra, the most amazing byproduct was seeing this realization take hold. Once you start something, you realize you can. You can almost see a progressive reignition of curiosity in your peers' eyes.
Finance was the open frontier at one point, then it became saturated to an extent. This cycle is happening on the internet right now. The interesting characteristic that is self-evident of the frontier is that it is inherently infinite. But there are other frontiers opening like web3 and AI, and that is what’s exciting to me. Capturing the Frontier is the way to build wealth quickly. Doing so is a matter of understanding the history of the world, the present, and the future. To which, I argue that
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Seeing the future is a function of seeing the present. Seeing the future is no different than seeing the present, with pattern recognition</p>— Jonathan Politzki (@ITNAmatter) <a href="
5, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This is the beginning of my personal philosophy into how to engineer the future. This isn’t something you can randomly wander into. Startup founders tend to be philosophers. Or at the very minimum have a belief on a certain matter they are interested in. You have to understand a field enough, map it out, and see what the gaps are. Often, that is just creating a product that you yourself would use, and trusting that there are more people on Earth like you. This video of Quentin Tarantino is all you need to know about founder-product-market fit. He’s making his videos for a very specific audience, himself.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Quentin Tarantino says he makes movies with a very specific audience in mind: <a href="
6, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Balaji Srinivasan is also cited saying, “The only reason you should start a startup is if you need to build something you can’t buy.” Often, you are not alone!
Engineering the future is a function of consuming enough information so that you understand the world, connecting the dots, writing in order to flesh out what you truly believe, then executing upon engineering said world that should exist. It takes creativity to create. The reason this is probably daunting to so many is that it is easy to flow through life and not take any stake. To take a stake in life risks failure, and historically death. Deviant thinking is a rare trait because the independence associated with it mostly meant ostracization by your tribe, which historically meant death. It is the equivalent of taking the red pill in some sense. You are also taking a massive bet on yourself. But I empirically believe that I am an intelligent and driven individual. In my youth, I would question it. “Should I try to be a doctor, am I smart enough?” “I am lucky to have made it to Wall Street, I should dig my heels in and just be happy I’m here.” NO NO NO, I’m glad I learned those lessons, but believe in yourself! This is the fucked up mindset I’ve had all my life. The only limiting factor you are born with is your intelligence quotient. I don’t know my IQ, and a low IQ could be a detriment to your ability to succeed, but studies show it isn’t even that critical. Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator cites,
“There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing. In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.”
The studies show that the utility of IQ with respect to creativity fades after approximately 120. The reason for this, according to Peterson, is that IQ serves the purpose of you “catching up” to your peers. Those with a high IQ are simply faster at getting there, but after you’re there, anyone can connect the dots into a new solution.
So you can either take the red pill and responsibility for your life and success, because it is contingent on YOU, or take the blue pill and float through life like a fucking loser in a world of comfort, worthlessness, and contentedness. Of course, that is subjective, if it makes you happy, go for it (*cough cough loser). My theory is you’re already all-in on life. You were born knowing you are going to the grave. Make the most of it.
How to get skin in the game
Be strong in your convictions! The video that has probably had the most pronounced impact on my life and personal philosophy has been a talk by Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystem and Khosla Ventures, at Stanford University. He’s brutal, but he’s right. Here are some mild excerpts:
"I am amazed at how few people have a belief system, what do they actually believe in?"
"You can [be another cog], or you can discover the edges where things are happening and changing, know that you don't know, and really change the world."
"My personal philosophy is whatever I believe, I should make happen."
These resonate with me. Mostly because I, too, always floated through life, never asking questions, just trying to get the best grades/best job I could muster. I got those things, now what? I was playing the wrong game, I was deceived into sorting myself into the roles set by others, “but life can be much broader than that” if you remember.
In order to change the world, you need to understand it. As aforementioned, philosophy is understanding the world, picking apart its moving pieces in isolation and in conjunction for what they are most fundamentally relative to the laws of nature/the logos. Much of our life is taken for granted, but if you really break it down, its absurdity is revealed, like an existential Sartrean moment realizing how odd everything is (e.g. being taken aback from a seat. “Instead of it being the most basic and obvious piece of design, scarcely worth a moment’s notice, the seat promptly strikes him as deeply strange; the word ‘seat’ comes loose from its moorings, the object it refers to shines forth in all its primordial oddity, as if he’s never seen one before.” Taken for what it is, its odd shape, leather-bound and created by skinning an animal and stuffed with artificially created filler, just to be placed on a 4 wheeled machine with a room so more intelligent animals can sit on it and be transported across densely packed concrete structures). Everything is the way it is due to man-made path dependencies. Humans often associate a form of nostalgia looking back on the way they used to view the world in youth, when they would be in awe by the crackle of fireworks. Now numb as an adult as you have adjusted to the phenomena and take it for what it is. This numbness is your body adjusting to its environment, using heuristics to simplify processes, it is an evolutionary adaptation.
The best way to fit your neural network to the ideas of philosophy is to expose yourself to them, with a steady fastidiousness of truth. The best way to do that is to read literature that has passed the test of time. Nassim Taleb, in his book Antifragile, says there is a good reason it has lasted, because people still agree with it. Therefore the longest lasting novels have been continually revalidated. The same goes for companies, Apple fills a very true need in people’s lives and they continue to pay and validate the company’s value.
After you understand the world, and the world that should exist, it is a matter of creating that world. This comes from an understanding of the tools at your disposal and allocating resources effectively to drive that agenda. The most valuable meta-tool is human focus, because humans move mountains. So you need to get the best people on board, because companies are just collections of people. My favorite examples of this are the blogger who traded in a paper clip for a house in 14 trades. Or the YouTuber who traveled across the country and survived 30 days with just a penny. People can do amazing things, they just need to be organized to do them.
These humans equipped with strong technical skills and motivation will change the world, they just need guidance. In essence, you need philosophy to understand what changes should be actualized, and then you need resources and engineering to back into that worldview. The engineering that I’m most interested in is computer engineering and computer science, because you can effectively code a computer to solve any problem, and then scale it to the masses with strong operating leverage.
Why am I interested in these things?
I don’t really know, I try to pin it down and can’t. There probably isn’t a word in the English language for it, but at this point, I’m not going to question it anymore.
It’s an interest in reaching the truth and the logos. I like the following quote from Naval.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Mercenaries work for money. Missionaries build for others. Artists create for themselves.</p>— Naval (@naval) <a href="
24, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
I think about the starving artists, who create because they have to. They don’t have a choice. I think about the traveling Chess player, who knows they are broke, but they have to pursue the game because it would pain them to not.
Chess is actually a really good analog, considering I spent more time playing chess than studying in high school. What I liked about chess was it was seemingly simple, yet infinitely complex. Chess is a determinate game, there is no solution, but the moves you make are certainly important. It’s like life, but you are given perfect information. Furthermore, you sit across from someone and it is the purest form of a battle of the wits. It’s extremely competitive, and I can be very competitive. I made two people cry and few things have brought me such joy. Life is like chess, infinitely complex, but you are given imperfect information. Come to think of it, that’s why philosophy is important, because you are collecting information that could serve to be a competitive advantage. Pure chess is engineering, because you are solving a determinate problem.
I’ve simply channeled these interests into philosophy (finding problems), engineering/innovation (solving problems), and business (ambition/competitiveness). These just so happen to be the traits that the most successful people in our society have, and I will use that to my advantage. If I fail (which I won’t), there will always be things to fall back on.
Finding entropy (finding problems), reducing into a solution (problem solving), and execution (hard work).