"I've Spent My Whole Life Competing With People Like You"

Friends,

This tweet reached into the recesses of my insecurity and pulled out a memory:

tweet by @visakanv

It was mid to late 2010s. Me and another senior trader were asked to join a call with investors in the fund. This was not common. They only trot us out at the rare behest of allocators.

A small aside: I’ve always been a bit cynical about motivations to anonymize line workers. When you are a high-employee-turnover business you prefer stakeholders to believe it’s the system not the individuals that matter. Root for the colors and the coach not the players. And considering allegiance to sports teams regardless of who goes where in free agency suggests the owners do in fact hold the nuts even when the employees are spectacular. (If you look at the decks for various investment funds ranging from trading to VC, it’s interesting to see how many team members are featured or if an org chart is displayed. Something to ponder.)

Anyway, as I grabbed the other trader to head over to the conference room he notices I’m holding notes. He looks at me for a moment and without malice utters a precise statement that carried the tone of a Larry David “Ok”:

I’ve spent my whole life competing with people like you.

Not gonna lie — it hit me right in the gonads of my ego.

You need the full context.

I’ve known this trader for 20 years. He was one of the people that trained me when I joined SIG. On my first day on the job, in trading class, he was introduced to the cohort as “the smartest person you’ve ever met that hasn’t finished college”.

For identity reasons, I won’t be specific, but he’s an expert in several games and one of them notably world-class. As a teen he was hustling in dark card rooms populated by grizzled, savvy old men. There was a time during the Clinton years (maybe Reagan) when he was living in a commune, hitchhiking to Vegas with a suitcase of cash to play in side games during WSOP weekends.

He got into the trading business in the years when SIG would hire such misfits from the underground. “If you like playing games, let’s introduce you to options”. Incidentally, the fund I worked at, Parallax, was founded by a top-ranked backgammon player in the 80s. On the Amex floor, I met many of this breed. I stood next to a guy that was one of the best bridge players in the world and I remember one of the CSCO options market makers was a grandmaster captain of a chess team that represented the US (as a naturalized Russian).

The point is there was a lot of very specific types of mental horsepower — eidetic memories and competitive reasoning that thrived in the environment I had been recruited into. All of which was useful to look up at an options board of calls and puts to “see the matrix”.

Intellectually, I was completely overmatched.

Up until this point in my life I was a box checker. And a lazy one at that. Smart enough to find school easy but that’s a low bar. It’s designed for the masses. But doing well at school does require conscientiousness. Even if the work is easy, you still need to turn it in. We’ve all seen brilliant people that can’t be bothered. My mother had nurtured a sense of duty in me. I was paranoid of failing. Such a paranoia is double-edged because it will limit what you’ll try (I’ve spent much of my adult life de-programming this) but in this case it focused me on a simple truth — if I had any chance in this competitive ecology I needed to work.

I made up for my IQ-deficiency through effort.¹ I can think back to my first year out of college — the first thing I splurged on was season tickets to the NY Giants (they went to the Super Bowl behind Kerry Collins and the “thunder & lightening” combo of Tiki Barber and Ron Dayne only to get embarrassed by the Ravens’ Tent Dilfer, Jamal Lewis, and yes the greatest defense of all time.). I was renting an apartment in Park Slope that year so I’d take the subway to Port Authority to take a bus to the Meadowlands. The excursion swallowed my entire Sunday. But I distinctly remember reading Natenburg on those rides while everyone around me was getting hammered on paper bag 40s. I kept saying to myself “if I can learn this stuff, one day I’ll be able to have fun”. I would have crushed the marshmallow test.

When the trader said “I’ve spent my whole life competing with people like you”, it pained me because, being the card player he was, he read me perfectly. He knew I meticulously prepared and was serious about something that was second-nature to him. Again the tweet:

Now if I didn’t know him better, I would have thought the needling was intended to put me on tilt. But I think it was his own way of processing what this career was.

You see, he overcame a lot too.

It takes the misfit genius energy to be disciplined enough to last. And this guy was a survivor. Too many flame out.

The reason comes from this section I covered in The Unplugged Controller:

The optimal amount of bullshit

[Morgan Housel and Tim Ferriss chatting]

You had Stephen Pressfield on your show, and he was talking about a time when he lived in a mental institution. He was not a patient himself, but he lived there and he starts talking to all these people. And he made this comment that a lot of the common denominators of these people who lived in a mental institution was they were not crazy, they just could not handle or put up with the bullshit of life. They just couldn’t deal with it. And that was kind of why they ended up in the mental institution. And he said all these people were the smartest, most creative people who he had ever met, but they couldn’t put up, they had no tolerance for the bullshit of the real world. And that to me, just brought this idea that there’s actually an optimal amount of bullshit to deal with in life. If your tolerance for bullshit is zero, you’re not going to make it at all in life…

I listened to that [interview] and it was like, “Oh, see, these people could not function in the real world because they had no tolerance for bullshit.” The second step from that is, there is an optimal amount of bullshit to put up within life. And that was where this article, “The Optimal Amount of Hassle,” came from.

And I remembered I was on a flight many years ago and there was this guy in a pinstripe suit who let everyone know that he was a CEO of some company, and the flight was like two hours delayed, and he completely lost his mind. He was dropping F bombs to the gate agents and just completely making an ass of himself because the flight was delayed. And I remember thinking like, “How could you make it this far in life and have no tolerance for petty annoyance, like a delayed flight?”

And I just think like there’s a big skill in life in terms of just being able to deal with some level of bullshit, and a lot of people don’t have that. There’s another great quote that I love from FDR, who of course was paralyzed and in a wheelchair. And he said, “When you’re in a wheelchair and you want milk but they bring you orange juice instead, you learn to say, ‘That’s all right.’ and just drink it.” And I think that just having the ability to put up with that kind of stuff is, I think, really important and often lost in this age where we want perfection. We want everything to be perfect, and it never is.

[Kris comment: I have a good friend who is insanely smart and well-traveled (top 1% in both categories of everyone I know). His brother is not conventionally successful but I was curious what that brother is like. His brother is also very well-traveled in part to choosing a life in the armed forces. But my friend also described his brother as extremely smart. But…incapable of tolerating the b.s. The military life is simple in the ways he prefers. It has always stayed with me, that my friend quite explicitly described his brother as being unwilling to suffer bullshit. I often feel that “getting ahead” in a conventional sense is really just alpining sedimentary layers of compressed bullshit. When I use the word “integrated” metaphysically, a large portion of that is finding your personal sweet spot on the b.s. continuum.]

People wring hands over what is required to succeed. Personally, I think you are lucky if the thing you enjoy and are good at happens to pay. We’d all like to be a natural.

But the truth is best captured in this post by

Scantron

: Life is Not A Game of Chess:

Excerpts:

• I have plans and aspirations for my career. Well articulated thoughts, plans, and goals for where I want to go. It’s right but it should not be everything. If you are forever waiting for those plans to be realized, you will wake up one day and have a sobering realization that you never lived in the present moment and never enjoyed the work you were currently doing. The days, weeks, and months are blurred together because all that matters is the next job, promotion, raise, or level change. Not being the best at who you currently were or the work you currently did.

• Is the best advice to always be planning and plotting with your ambitious goals to advance in your career? Or is it to be the best you can be where you are at and be the best at what lies six feet in front of you?

  Never wish for less time. Waiting for things to be over is just wishing for less time.

  I was texting my sister about career advice and trying to understand the best way to have the belief that everything will work out if you are not constantly planning for the future.

  “Life is not a game of chess, it doesn’t reward strategy – it rewards repetition and effort.”

  Dan Lanning, the football coach for the University of Oregon, put this notion really well when delivering a talk to his team,

“Everyone has goals and aspirations, you know how you get those? You be the best where you are at. It’s not worrying about the next thing, it’s about worrying what’s right in front of you, six inches in front of your face.” [Kris: Football coach borrowing Pacino’s Inches speech. I’ll allow it.]

• Great achievements are just what a long series of unremarkable tasks looks like from far away. It is being great at where you are each and every day.

☮️

Stay groovy

1. IQ “science” is fraught topic. My quick take on it is it’s definitely a thing — just like fast-twitch muscles are a thing, but I think above a basic level it doesn’t determine anything of substance because it’s swamped by our individual variations across other dimensions. If you’re trying to be a theoretical physicist or grandmaster then yea it probably matters in the same way that you need to be born different to be an Olympic sprinter.

My market on my own IQ is 125-135, small on the bid, size on the offer. 2 standard devs above the mean but squarely mediocre for Wall Street or tech. CA administers an IQ test in 3rd grade to determine who gets into gifted and talented. My older kid scored 2 standard devs above the mean which actually reinforced my guess as to where I am since I am just triangulating myself based on my SAT’s, academic performance, and using my eyeballs. I never actually took an IQ test.

Interestingly, I read the fine print of the test evaluations from our son’s score. Turns out our town’s kids on average are 1 standard deviation above the CA mean and to get into GAT you need to be 2 standard devs above that since they only accept the top 1%.

My instinct if you are trying to game college admissions you probably don’t want to live in a good school district. I’ll just chalk it up to another form of progressive taxation.