Late Bloomer

Moontower Munchies #68

Jun 19, 2024

Programming note

Travel time. This year will be much shorter than the previous 3 summers. I’ll be back home in early July. Annual tradition — summer fun in NJ, but this year we are also celebrating my mother’s 70th with 13 of us caravanning around Portugal.

Tomorrow, I will publish a large follow-up to Breakpoints for paying subs where we explore and measure skew with some intuitive option structures. More fun charts.

But after that you won’t hear from me until July.

I got feedback from a bunch of readers that “they are falling behind” because I’m publishing a lot more this year. I doubt Moontower is beach reading but hey not a bad window to consolidate some accumulated learning.

[Life hack — book a flight so you have nothing to do but read. I save like 40 posts to devour on cross-country flights.]

Friends,

I’m a late bloomer. Not physically, I was born with a mustache. I mean in terms of maturity.

A child takes time for granted. And this is beautiful. They are present. Since my personal belief is the less time you spend thinking about the past or the future the happier you’ll be, the child’s indifference to tomorrow is wondrous. Joy demands those moments where you feel nothing else exists.

But as you get older you realize that planning, taking care of your body, delaying gratification and any number of overheads that come with adulting are facts of life. Eventually you cannot resist that reality without becoming one many varietals of leech.

Maturity allows you to reframe the duties you’d rather shirk as opportunities, gifts even, to give another joy. You can see how this works. Personal responsibility lets us pass the joy pipe around. And the fundamental unit for personal responsibility is not taking time for granted. To be reliable, you need to actually be awake when you’re supposed to be. Simple idea. Not easy to do. It’s not easy to be ready.

It’s not easy to keep everything together but still maintain the ease to drop into the moment. Alternatively, the free spirit who only lives in the moment is eventually an adult who needs you to put their oxygen mask on for them in an emergency. I have one of each kind of parent. I was born into this tension.

Preserving waves of joy in a sea of self-governance. Respecting time while occasionally denying its existence. Maturity is playful because it maintains perspective. But it stiffens when it needs to. It’s both the conscious and somatic wisdom to alternate between modes as needed.

I say I’m a late-bloomer because I think I surfed this poorly for a long time. Wasted time and because I was playing catch up wouldn’t be present when I should be. A late-bloomer is blocked by the need to unlearn a habit of thought or behavior. The enemy is a child within that says “don’t go, stay with me, secure me”. That enemy becomes a ceiling of your own creation.

When you see yourself as you are, both the good and the bad, that’s your chance to bloom. And some will suffer the luxury of never needing to.

My take on late-blooming is admittedly something of an emotional biography. The topic of late-bloomers is full of curiosities. Whether or not it’s some sense of misplaced hope or just a fanciful camaraderie with its thrust, I’m drawn to the topic.

The spirit of this letter draws many kinds — from aspiring traders to mid/late career professionals who have gotten more introspective about their paths (at the extremes some feel the pressure to evolve within melting ice cube businesses while others’ marginal utility of time is now much higher than an extra bonus).

The older group will likely get a lot of mileage from the links below.

Fifty Late Bloomers (3 min read)
Henry Oliver
Ten of the Best Books About Late Bloomers (5 min read)
Henry Oliver
The Case for Opsimaths: Maybe Late is Great (4 min read)
Henry Oliver
What About the People Who Never Found Their Passion? (6 min read)
Henry Oliver
Year-End Remembrances Part 3: The Late Bloomers (7 min read)
David Epstein
Learn Anything Easily (8 min read)
Scott H. Young

You’ll notice that 4 of these links are from Henry Oliver. That’s not an accident. He recently published Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.

Tyler Cowen called it “One of the very best books written on talent.”

Finally, if your bloom means a drastic change, I highly recommend Rick Foerster’s post below. It’s a masterful display of working through a decision. He weighs the factors that you should consider when deciding whether or not to quit.

On Quitting (when it’s unclear whether to quit) [6 min read]
Rick Foerster

That’s all for now. As a reminder, I will publish tomorrow and then see you again in July.

Stay Groovy

☮️

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