Structure, People, and Chaos
Your Ideal Structure
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Chaos
Human beings face an infinite and hopeless battle against entropy. Our cells are sentenced to mutate and die, our buildings to crumble, and our values to be forgotten in the wind. Amidst all this chaos, we grasp for structure. But in an over structured world, we should protect our chaos–it’s what makes us human.
There is a foundational structure of the universe. That structure manifests itself in financial markets, companies, mathematics, and even our own instincts. Beauty can be found in chaos and clean structure. We should seek beauty and nothing short of it.
Structure
Humans have adapted to like structure. It keeps us safe from the storm, it keeps us on track, it allows us to organize our world so that we don’t have to think about it much at all. Sometimes, lost in the gaze of our phones that feed us content structured to capture our thoughts, it feels that we no longer think at all. We are trapped in our own kafkaesque structure that reinforces itself. The worst part of it all is we built it ourselves. In order to create, you need novel inspiration, chaos, wandering, and irreverence towards existing structure.
In a world of likely, persistent, and entrenched structure, we are the giants held down by 1,000 strings. What truly makes us human is our ability to break and reorder the universe’s structure. What makes us masters of the universe is our ability to command entropy and turn it into art, science, and beauty.
Our Own Structure
When I write this, I am creating structure, but it is my own. There is a stark difference between writing and editing. Editing is unnatural, like trying to paint new art inside a “color by numbers” exercise. You are trying to fit into an existing structure. This constrains the human mind and limits its capacity to create new things. Sometimes, the most human thing we can do is color outside the lines.
We see that when we create structure around neural networks today and limit the activation of certain features, they actually become dumber (Scaling Monosemanticity). If you know that the world is round, and someone wants you to write a paper with the underlying assumption that the world is flat, it will be incapacitating. Every neuron in your brain hinges on your implicit understanding and belief that the world is round.
I sometimes find myself in stages of confusion, like working on Nephra or a new product, creating something from nothing in a time of complete ambiguity. Seeking answers in literature, others’ essays, etc. A quote from someone else’s mind represents an idea that is a good temporary band aid that adds structure to my mental framework where there was none. This band aid only exists because the ROI and cost of developing your own belief may not make sense at that time.
Over time, your brain fills in these gaps and the band aids are covered up with a more nuanced paint of knowing. I look back on some of my essays written with these band aids and think to myself, “I only partially believe that.”
But for every essay that poured out of me, years later I find I believe it more than I did when I wrote it.
Instinct
Creativity and instinct is something like gathering droplets of inspiration into a bucket over a period of time. Writing an essay is like pouring that bucket onto a piece of paper in a way that creates structure from the chaos. Our unconscious mind is smarter than we understand. When I am looking for advice, I may seek it from my own past writing. That writing may not be perfect advice for someone else, but it aligns with my understanding of the world, unique to me. Seeing this happen over and over again, where your instincts are proven correct, teaches you to think for yourself and trust in your own convictions.
You can continue to climb every mountain of existing scaffolds of structure in the world, and you will learn from each of those experiences, and they will add to your mental framework, but there comes a time where you need to have the courage to depart the trodden path, trust in your own instincts, and scaffold your own mountain. Knowing when to do this is hard, but if you live your entire life by someone else’s structure, you are ignoring the ingenuity and instinct that makes you human, and potentially making yourself dumber in the process.
When to Carve Your Own Path
Intuitively, it makes sense to do this when you are much older, when you have maximized your learning from existing scaffolds, but that may be misguided. So much of the world was created by people no smarter than yourself who followed their instincts and so many of those people were young and plastic in their thinking. Alexander the Great was around 25 years old when he conquered most of the known world, as he became king of Macedon at the age of 20 and achieved his major conquests within a few years following that point.
I trust my own instincts only because I see that they are often right. There is a question for each individual of whether they are at the stage in their life where they can trust their own instincts. This is a question only you can answer and it is a risk no matter who you are. In a world where people don’t think for themselves, you should. Walking around Silicon Valley, there is a lot of noise. The world has recognized the archetype of the visionary founder, so you have many people who mimic this behavior. But they aren’t thinking for themselves. I often struggle with this too. It’s easy to find band aids. It is hard to think for yourself.
Inborn Structure
“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
Structure exists so you go to class consistently and we don’t all kill each other. However, in the same way that our brains map and overcome complexity and grow to our environments, we grow within our existing frameworks and systems (Human Instinct - General Personal Embeddings). This comes through multiple stages as Nietzsche outlines: we are first encumbered by the system and bear the weight as the camel, before entering the stage of the lion where you push back on constraints and command the system, and lastly enter the stage of the child, where you are reborn and no longer reacting against old rules—you’re free, curious, and creative.
There are always stages of deference and submission to the system. If you reject a system and cannot command it, you lose. But if you reject a system and can command it, you overcome it. Romulus and Remus teaches us an important story about the world and the importance of not missing your mark.
Too Much Structure, Too Much Opportunity
My intuition tells me our intense craving for structure is a bug of the human condition. Naturally risk-averse, we hedge our bets in many ways and have a strong compulsion for conformity. We did not evolve in a world of rapid technological change, where the surface area of possibilities is larger than it has ever been, or a world where we have been bestowed with freedom and the pursuit of happiness. We are stuck in the past. Curiosity, ambition, and especially irreverence are rare in the modern world because evolution selected against these traits to maintain stability. Whenever I feel I am being too irreverent in the moment, I often later find that I was not being irreverent enough.
The problem in a world of 8.2 billion people is that there is always a better structure to be in or a better job to have. So people are forever trapped in the stage of the camel. Good school → Good job → Better Job → Better Job… And in some sense, that is okay, you are re-entering the cycle of the camel and the lion and growing. But you are missing the point that there are no jobs that truly reflect your values, you are only making marginal progress towards self-actualization. And the only way to attain true self-overcoming is to be reborn and create values for yourself. People in the world today never enter the stage of the child. They submit to the structure they are given, never harnessing the maximum impact of their human instinct.
The reason for this is people never take the time to understand themselves. In order to define where they belong in the world, they first need to define their own belief systems. Understanding the self is hard and requires isolation and wandering, which are not valuable and incentivized in existing systems. If you could understand yourself perfectly, you would make better decisions and create your own values as the child.
My Period of Wandering
When I started Irreverent Capital, I created a window of time for myself with no structure to just follow my own curiosity. In an overworked and over structured world, when was the last time you had months of free time? Summer vacation when you were 11 years old? You may think this responsibility is just and righteous because the world told you it is, but it is not. This arbitrary morality is for the existing structures.
The output of my wandering was having several extremely valid and foundational new lines of interest, a deeper understanding of the world, new experiences, multiple projects created, having learned to code, having read foundational textbooks in machine learning, and most importantly a revived energy and optimism for my own future. Instinct-driven decisions also enabled me to actually come out the other side with more money than I started without any work. I no longer had structure, but I was living a life pure to myself. New complexity was new territory to map out. It was a breath of fresh air.
This isn’t really that surprising, I knew it would work. I’ve itched for autonomy since high school, and I knew I wanted to achieve it through starting a business. I recognized the phenomena that we revert to our natural state when alone even when I was 12 years old (Being Alone). Society is broken in that it doesn’t support creativity. When you think of a creative kid in high school, you probably picture a wallflower that doesn’t quite fit in anywhere–but that chaotic unbounded creativity is what makes us human.
“No human’s path is the same. We are all here to fulfill our own destiny. The problem is that spending time with others is often dilutive to achieving self-actualization. When we are alone, we tend towards our natural selves. Being around others can be constricting in that sense, it pulls from introverts’ internal energy. It can feel like we are being strangled from our creative energy. Society isn’t set up to support this type.”
But you can’t wander forever or else you’ll never actually do anything.
My Own Structure
I’m a pretty restless and chaotic person, and I find myself in a rut in both times of wandering and times of execution. If you wander forever, you’ll never arrive anywhere meaningful, and if you execute forever you’ll never pick your head up and may find yourself as a 30 year old intern.
These feel like the two opposing forces of my life so far. Most of my writing has this common underlying theme, always straddling the line between:
Abstraction and first principles
Creativity and execution
0-1 and 1-n
Unlikely things and likely things
Non-linear step functions and linear growth
Human intuition/instinct and calculation
System 1 and System 2 thinking
Indeterminism and determinism
Theory and practice
The Neurostructural Basis for this Dichotomy
This persistent tug-of-war between chaos and structure has a neurostructural basis.
The default mode network (DMN) lights up when we daydream, introspect, and consider abstract possibilities—this network thrives in states of wandering, generating the creative sparks that form new insights.
On the other hand, the executive control network (ECN), often working in tandem with our attentional circuits, propels us into focused, goal-directed action. It dominates when we need to bring order to complexity, parse through data, and execute tasks efficiently.
Constantly switching between these networks—between the dreamy openness of the DMN and the purposeful rigor of the ECN—mirrors the cycle of exploring chaos and then carving it into structured outcomes. This neurological dance underlies why extended periods of wandering eventually nudge us toward meaningful execution, and why stretches of relentless hustle hint at a need for creative renewal.
In my life, I notice that my DMN is active during relaxation. And when I pile on responsibilities, I become an ECN machine. Both have a purpose. The ECN has been the only one to provide me value in existing structures.
Growth ∆
While Nietzsche talks about the camel, lion, and child as a form of mastery, I feel that this cycle is never complete in my own life and that my life is rather an endless compounding step function, where I execute until I hit the next non-linear step function. You need both to progress. The stage of the child always feels like the calm before the storm.
This September, I determined that I had reached enough conviction that my wandering phase was coming to an end (Return). You begin to trust that you’ve mapped out enough of the problem and that the next step is to ground your vision in practice. What is our goal, and what activities are the highest ROI right now, tomorrow, next month, and next year to realize it?
It is not enough to tell yourself that you need to start executing. When I was working on Nephra, we fell into the same trap that a lot of students do. You end up applying to tons of grants and going to tons of startup events. John Thode used to remind the students at UChicago “don’t mistake movement with progress.” I realized that throughout my life, it wasn’t a winning strategy to question what you should be doing. You were all taking the same classes. What mattered was winning. But the world is not this way, when you leave structures, it matters that you create your own. It matters to be thoughtful when honing in on the exact problem you want to solve. In a world where people no longer think ideas matter, they do. Many engineers are working on really dumb shit in SF, seriously. I do believe that it is best to have a bias towards hustle and action. You learn by doing.
But without enough structure and execution, I find that I wake up and have to rethink my entire vision from the beginning. This is too expensive. What makes more sense is to understand your problem deeply and define the scope you are going to view it through, over time creating increasing structure to maintain focus without sacrificing your own beliefs, limiting creativity, and losing flexibility.
Minimum Viable Structure
What you want to achieve is a minimum viable structure. You should create a structure that maps to your personal identity, beliefs, values, and preferences as well as the problem at hand. Once again, if you are adopting a structure out of a book, a twitter thread, or from your boss, you are missing the point. These can be band aids, but you need to unearth it from yourself, or you will choke on the exact structure you build. The value of reading On the Genealogy of Morality and Zero to One is these are not guides, they are denouncers of guides and champions of the reader. They tell you that the world’s structures were set arbitrarily and that you should create your own scaffolding upon your own values, following your own instincts.
The best way to identify what structure needs to be built is by looking at things that you have to do repeatedly or by finding the common denominators across time. Find structure that heightens your strengths and suppresses your weaknesses. What has been true, is true, and will remain true across your life and the company’s life? This is your world and your life. How do you want to live it? Before I wrote on deriving “the things I return to” from my own writing, which has proven very powerful for self-understanding.
If you lived your life right, you should have overcome multiple structures over the years. What were the most productive environments and how can you extract that inspiration when architecting your office? Which chaos should you let ride and which should you extinguish for maximum long-term productivity?
Your life and company are both learning machines in the early days, with limited structure. The perfect structure is like Occam’s Razor. Over time, they are concretized, optimized, and honed for a specified objective. Routine removes the need to think. A good structure is beautiful and simple. Buffet tells us this is important.
Openness
We start our lives as plastic, white sheets of paper when we are young. We are maximally curious, absorbing and making structure out of all the complexity of the world. But that necessarily cannot go on. Over time, we need to focus on what matters.
We are optimized to the structures we partake and the goals we set for ourselves. With this in mind, it makes sense that we should set bigger goals for ourselves. We should throw ourselves in the deep end early, else you end up the 40 year old in the kids pool receiving odd glances from nearby parents. If you are optimized for becoming the President of the United States, you will hold yourself to higher standards.
We gradually increase focus and stubbornness throughout our lives.
People, Ideas, and Work
This thread of openness and structure runs parallel across different tracks in life. In the people we spend time with, the ideas we think about, and the places we go.
When I was younger, I never really understood the point of vacations. It felt like you were still yourself and with the same people, just in a new location. I find that I’ve always been very grounded in people, ideas, and my environment (different from geographic environment).
Now that I’m older, I see increasing value in these three, but I have a more refined taste for the subtle, yet important differences between what makes good people, ideas, and cultures.
Culture
People, ideas, and your environment compose culture, which I now believe to be the strongest, most important, yet hidden force of the world.
Now that I’ve lived across geographies and cultures. I’ve been able to extract and reflect on the differences between them, and they are indeed very different. This has been double-edged. On one hand, I’ve been able to pick apart the beauty of each culture and what I’ve loved. On the other hand, you can see the faults and what goes against your personal beliefs. I falsely believed that I would one day find the perfect culture and integrate myself into it. While you can get close, the reality is that I both love and hate every place I’ve lived.
I love and miss the collective ambition of NYC, but I hate the pessimism and how much of a transactional machine it was.
I love and miss the humility, honesty, genuineness, and trust of the midwest, but I hate the lack of ambition, technology, and curiosity.
I love and miss the interest in ideas, optimism, heterogeneity, and tech-focus of San Francisco, but I hate the delusion and noise over signal.
Cultural Structure
Like the structure in our lives, if we enter cultural structures that we don’t align with, we are crippled, become dumber, and won’t fit in. The ideal culture is one that feels natural, like breathing.
The perfect culture cannot logically exist. Cultures necessarily create social contracts between individuals into groups that are optimized for different behaviors. Because no other person that has ever or will ever exist perfectly matches your internal belief, value, and preference system, you will never align.
But culture is important. It is upstream of everything. It impacts our every behavior. So we need to get it right.
The Perfect Culture
I often think to myself that I wish I could combine these cultures. Somehow take the ambitious people from NYC that are also interested in ideas. Get people that are high-integrity and trustworthy like you find in the midwest. What I am realistically looking for is people who mirror my values. The perfect culture is one where people are aligned.
Like Nietzsche’s camel, lion, and child, I have lived across different cultures, I know what I like now, and I feel that I have the strength to push for what I believe in. I have come to find you can create Minimum Viable Culture with one simple hack.
Isolation
The perfect culture is most easily attained by working alone. At the beginning of this essay, we describe how we develop these natural inclinations by thinking for yourself. This self-understanding is the foundation for how you navigate culture.
When you are alone, you revert to your natural state. You will naturally have instincts for the ideas you want to explore, an inclination for the people you want to spend time with, and the environments that feel most natural to you. You can think about these internally. Let your natural instinct pull you towards the people, ideas, and environments that feel most natural. Draw it up. Describe what you want to taste, hear, think, feel, and see. What experiential learning can you glean from your past?
You can start to build a Minimum Viable Structure for yourself. But you can’t operate solely in isolation, for a few reasons.
You can’t enact sufficient change in isolation. For instance, building a company requires a union of great complementary people running in the same direction.
There’s a lot of great inspiration to draw from the world. What is the pulse of what’s happening in the world today? Where is the culture at? In order to come up with good solutions, you need to be at least a little in the market to know what the problems are.
It can be motivating to work in the same place as other people.
You have natural blind spots that you are unable to see. With great people, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Groups
Groupings of people are very valuable. They can sharpen you in addition to complement you.
For instance, there were a lot of benefits from going to college. The benefits were counterintuitively not the content of the courses, but rather being surrounded by pockets of unique cultures of great people on campus. I ended up in an engineering pocket that I never would have thought I’d be interested in.
There is also value in the idea that cultures and institutions can make you more yourself and sharpen you. You may be a curious and ambitious person in your natural state, but by entering yourself into an extremely curious and ambitious environment, you are entering yourself into an environment that will sharpen you to become even more curious and even more ambitious.
But even in these groups, cultures, and institutions, you don’t magically become better. The personal growth comes from you individually choosing to maximize the outcome of your experience and bear the weight as the camel, lion, and child. I worked hard, explored many parts of campus, poked around it, and even altered its state by starting two new organizations.
So is the answer to join a group? Not quite.
Cultural Density
You should not put yourself into a group for the sake of putting yourself into a group. If I do end up hiring someone, I will be very cautious to hire a certain type of person. If you want to create a 0.01% company, you necessarily need to hire only 0.01% people. A company is just a collection of people. As you can imagine, this is incredibly difficult as the top 0.01% of people have many opportunities and are likely getting paid lots of money by bigger companies. The power law of talent is a force that works against you.
But I do think there is a silver lining here. Here is how Jim Simons described his leadership strategy:
“Hire the very best people you possibly can and I have good taste in people. And then, let them carry the ball.”
Jim was a renowned mathematician himself. He knew what “great” looked like. He had exceptional taste. He was able to find the smartest people in the world, not even in finance, onboard them into his organization, and created the most formidable investment fund possibly in history. It is notable that Jim may have come across amazing people that are good in their own right, but they didn’t fit into Renaissance. You can’t just put good people together, they need to be aligned.
The Silver Lining
The silver lining is this. I probably wouldn’t have been able to distinguish what made the best mathematicians the best. It’s not my forte. In his field of genius, Jim was able to identify hidden talent. The great arbitrage opportunity in the world today is finding the best people and onboarding them into a high-performing and aligned culture. In order to do that, you need to be the best person yourself.
There are a lot of really good people trapped in environments where people don’t understand them. If you put them in the right place, they will blossom. The key is helping find those people and letting them know there is a better way.
For all my stupidity, one thing that I do feel I’m gifted in is something I inherited from my mother. The ability to understand people in a deep way. We both share the ability to detect faint signals in people. A microexpression tells me a lot about you and I’ve learned I have pretty good taste.
In the same way that I used to think different environments weren’t very different and shouldn’t matter, I used to think that people weren’t very different and that didn’t matter. Now, I realize that in both cases, the differences are subtle, but they are incredibly important. In the same way that the differences between a company that compounds at 1% vs 2% increases exponentially over time, the decisions that the best people make also compound over time. The differences that define us are subtle, and most people can’t see them, but they matter a great deal.
The Ideal Person
At least in the culture that I find most aligned, I do think there is an ideal person. It is a unique enough combination that when I look through lists of hundreds of people I know, I can maybe find one person. These traits are rare in isolation, but the combination of them makes them incredibly rare.
They are the person you would choose to work with in isolation. At a high level, the best people are hard-working, curious, smart, humble, and trustworthy. The X factor of my high school graduating class seems to be an ever-constant internal drive to grow.
There is a higher-order dimension to the best people that I am still understanding. The best people don’t fit into boxes. They are in a superposition between extreme traits. They are both highly open to ideas and stubborn in their beliefs. They are extremely hard working, but wander aimlessly in times of creativity. They are humble and agreeable, yet are extremely irreverent. They are both insiders and outsiders.
In order to be creative, you must straddle the line between different belief systems, mesh inspiration from different cortices of your brain, and create your own truth, while being highly open to new possibilities. You are grounded but optimistic simultaneously. You fit in everywhere, yet nowhere at all. It likely isn’t the case that you are constantly just holding two opposing forces in your head at the same time, but rather that someone has an extremely granular and nuanced understanding of the world where they can use different frameworks at different times.
Characteristics
At the atomic level, I am increasingly honing in on the perfect person. It’s hard to build a great “culture” in the abstract. It makes it easier to pick one person at a time and work together in a minimum viable structure between the two.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that many of the things I look for are a direct parallel with how Joel Mokyr defines the ideal culture of growth. I say this generally, but it is true that each position you hire for will need to optimize for different traits. A great CFO should be diligent and perhaps a little pessimistic to act as a counter-force if the CEO is optimistic. No one wants a creative accountant.
Cultures can be described as cults, where everyone is aligned, but if you have 30 of the same people, that feels problematic. My guess is the best combination is people who are aligned on beliefs, mission, and values, but maybe have different preferences and skills.
Characteristics of a Culture of Growth
The characteristics of a culture that grows are the abstraction of what I look for in a person. In the United States today, some of our largest problems is that we do not have people who hold these traits. If the culture was infused with deep responsibility and individual ambition towards solving unsolved problems, we will progress faster and be a stronger nation. All of our problems are cultural ones.
There’s no silver bullet to fix a nation’s culture. People need to individual choose to overcome themselves and their structures.
Conclusion
Chaos and structure wrestle across the domains of life.
You don’t only create this structure after the fact, consciously, or from a textbook. You create it organically. It will be slow, expensive, and bumpy, like building your own house from scratch. But over time you will be developing a structure that is in tune with you and will pay dividends through the rest of your life.
The hardest thing to do in an over structured world is to build your own belief system. But that makes it all the more important to think for yourself.