Impedance Mismatch

Moontower #230

Jun 02, 2024

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.
The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.
There wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable landmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age 13. Several people I've talked to remember getting serious about work around this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to find idleness distasteful, he said:
“I think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering why I was wasting my summer holiday.”
Perhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.

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 hate deadlines. School stresses me out. Yet deadlines were effective because I’m the type if you need something done by Wednesday you get it on Tuesday. Self-governance is not an issue for me. But it’s crippling because I can’t relax if I’m on someone else’s schedule.

(Feels like an interesting prompt for another post: Being Good At Things You Hate — The Tragedy of Orphaned Convexity)
I really don’t care that much for leisurely activity. But I do care about getting things done leisurely.

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.
[When I was young] the world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a diluted version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later.
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun, fun like playing, it took me years to grasp that.
It was not until I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents or the desire to make money or prestige, ore sheer inertia….
…Doing what you love doesn't mean do what makes you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period. Unproductive pleasures pale eventually. After a while, you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.

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.

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

If you want to read more on aligning what you do with your own sense of vitality see Design Your Own Engine.
The sales pitch for that post: It’s probably under-read because it’s long but it’s one of those posts that multiple readers credited for compelling them to become paying subs. I’ve even had 2 people come meet me in person to talk about it.

🛡️Anticipating rebuttals

Some might argue that work is just a job and my attitude asks too much of it. That’s up to you. There are many ways to live. I can point you to many examples of people who look forward to Mondays.

There’s a quote by the advertising guy Ogilvy in his book where he sees an employee go home and unironically marvels…”Imagine the discipline it must take to leave the office right at 5pm”.

I felt exactly like that when I started at Parallax. I enjoyed those hours of being the last person in the office, able to work interrupted. But I lost the love.

The person who sees a large block of time on the calendar and thinks “I can’t wait to fill it with [insert work project]” is a fortunate individual.
The privilege argument…Of course, I’m aware that many people have little choice. Sandwiched between martyrdom and negligence. My wife and I both have parents with similar stories. I get it. But most people reading a substack let alone this substack aren’t behind that particular 8-ball. The fastest way to siphon all joy and value from communication is to go on as if all 8 billion people on Earth are in the room. Nobody wants 3 pages of pharma disclaimers at the end of a blog post
On the poor strategic decision to let my own writing be seen side-by-side with Paul Graham’s…it was a vicious miscalculation on my part. Take heart my eyes hurt more than yours.

Refer a friend

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:

https://x.com/dampedspring/status/1790489354508341539

I wrote an explainer later that day:

https://x.com/KrisAbdelmessih/status/1790537275736223837

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:

https://x.com/KrisAbdelmessih/status/1796926714326774244

I have a tedious history with this particular sentiment. See My Personal Trigger if you care.

Stay Groovy

☮️

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