3 Lessons from Weekend Reading

Because of the cold weather, I was a lazy bum this past weekend and spent a lot of time indoors surfing the internet. Somehow, everything I read this weekend fell neatly into this “worldview” that is shaping my perspective of how I approach everything.

1. I already am the person I want to be when I grow up.

That statement is a little convoluted, so let’s back up a little bit. I’m currently addicted to this Mike Posner song, Top of the World (ft. Big Sean).

I saw that Mike Posner was born in 1988, which really shouldn’t surprise me since all these K-Pop stars are like, 13 years old now. The song is very catchy, but the thought that struck me was that I am 23 now and it is very evident that no future like some of these musicians will ever be in my stars. I mean, obviously — I have no experience making music or videos. The people who are succeeding now have been doing this since they were young, young kids. Part of it is the “10,000 hours”, and the other part is the luck and timing. Point is, these young kids that are doing things now fell in love with it early and stuck to it. Whether they emerge as industry leaders depends on a large number of factors beyond their own talent, but the most important part is that when the opportunity arose, they were positioned to capitalize on it. (More on this in #3, because Howard Marks describes this almost verbatim.) So remember when you were little and adults/”real people” would ask you what you wanted to be when you were a real person? Part of me still thinks of that as some future event, but I’m starting to come around to the idea that the ambiguous “when I grow up” is now. That is at both terrifying (“Have I been wasting my time??”) and utterly thrilling (“the time is now — I can do anything”).

2. No amount of preparation or training will substitute for experience. Do, make, go. Right now. Today is Day 1.

I spent a lot of time browsing the Agenda Emerge conference talks and the Adventures in Design podcast, which is about streetwear designers/gig poster designers respectively. I’m constantly awed by the speakers’ talent and their success, but I’m most awed by how young they all are. There are people my age who I can see becoming the next designers in 4 years, but where am I in this food chain? I’m awed almost to the point that I feel paralyzed to start. (See point #1 — I love streetwear; I love graphic design/gig posters, but that wasn’t what I was doing when I was 14. How do I ever get the skills compared to these other talented designers I see who are 26-27?)

It’s scary to think that Jessica Hische, Jessica Walsh, Dana Tanamachi, Jon Contino, the guys in Heads of State, Bobby Kim of The Hundreds (who has a SICK photo blog, btw) etc. are all in their 20s-30s. I know I’m technically 23, but 26 or 27 doesn’t really feel that far off. How can I pass that seemingly insurmountable gap? But at the same time, the one lesson I keep hearing from their talks and from creative literature as a whole is that you just have to get started. There is no amount of preparation or training that will substitute for experience. Start making things (that will suck), keep making them, get good mentorship and greater critiques, grow some thicker skin, and keep making. I wish I could tattoo this Ira Glass quote INTO MY BRAIN.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

3. Rather than “you make your own luck,” there’s an old saying that provides a better way to put it: “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

I read an interesting memo this weekend that Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital released a memo about the role of luck in everything he did, with some lengthy references (and critiques!) of Outliers. If investing memos were always this profound, I could read entire volumes of them. There were so many pithy takeaways:

We arrange our lives — or, in investing, our portfolios — in expectation of what we think will happen in the future. In general, we get the desired results if future events conform to our hopes or expectations, and less-desired results if they don’t.

The bottom line is simple: it’s great to be the vanguard of a new development. Talent and hard work are essential, but there’s nothing like getting there early and being pushed ahead by the powerful trends in demographics and taste that follow.

Risk means more things can happen than will happen.

One more quote is a lesson I need to pay better attention to:

Success in investing has two aspects. The first is skill, which requires you to be technically proficient. Technical skills include the ability to find mispriced securities… and a good framework for portfolio construction. The second aspect is the game in which you choose to complete.

I definitely need to learn how to pick my games better. As I grew up, I learned to play the right games for most categories of my life — pick the games that minimize input for maximum output. It doesn’t have to be as utilitarian as it sounds; there were times (most times, actually) that human ties won out over economic or utilitarian game. (My decision to change the activities I did to social/cultural activities rather than business/policy/stuff I did in high school.) I have not historically been good at picking the right guys to like. I always became infatuated with people that were clearly not good for me or not interested or just shitty people in general. That is one area I’m getting much better at, so much so that I want to go back to my 13 year old self and slap some sense for causing my current self unnecessary anguish for ten years.

I sent this article to Lawrence, who usually has something magnanimous to say about life perspectives/philosophies/etc, but since he is also an investor, all he did was pick apart the investment advice. I still have him to thank for sending me Jay Gordon-Cone’s Authentic Accountability, Tapping into he Power of the Infinite Game, though so I won’t fault him on that.

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TL;DR: I always appreciate when everything I read ties together in some way, and in this case, my weekend reading’s narrative went like this:

• Here is some amazing work
• A series of artifacts were created to illuminate the black box on their process
• Work hard, work hard, get lucky
• Keep seeing the world in a beautiful way

Good weekend! Thanks for grounding me, cold weather. I also made a ton of stew and made a weak attempt to climb. I bought the 1 month pass more or less on a whim but I’m starting to get really into it — should I get this 10 pass to BKB??? But it’s so far in Brooklyn…….. (but I will miss all this arm strength that I’ve built!)

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