I’m a big fan of self-deprecating humor, but this isn’t one of those moments. Rather it’s a learning moment. While the above question is a lagging indicator for personal growth, it nevertheless deserves to be measured. After all, as the great Peter Drucker would say, you cannot manage what you cannot measure.
The timeframe of evaluation
Why a month? Why not a week? Or not a year?
In the business world, there’s a concept called the rule of 72. Effectively, 72 divided by the growth rate is the time it takes to double. For instance, if you’re growing 30% month-over-month, 72 divided by 30 is 2.4. So, if you’re growing revenue at 30% every month, you’re going to double your revenue in roughly two and a half months.
It is equally as analogous for personal growth.
time it takes to shock yourself = 72 / rate of learning
Let’s say you’re a first-time founder, and you only knew 10 things about how to start a business. But every day, you learn one more thing – via podcasts, articles, blogs, classes, you name it. Give or take a 10% growth rate. You will double your knowledge in about a week. Hopefully enough to shock the you from a week prior. Or take another example, many self-help books ask you to commit to getting 1% better every day. Assuming you consistently do that, you would have doubled your experience in about 2.5 months.
That goes to say, the faster you want to grow, the shorter the timeframe should be for you to look back and reflect on your “stupidity.” For me, it is in my nature to be hungry for knowledge, and I really love learning about things I thought I knew and what I didn’t know. For now, as learning is a top priority for me, a month sounds like a reasonable timeframe to shock myself. I also use the term “stupidity” lightly and with notes of self-deprecating love.
The shock factor
But how do you measure personal growth? Something rather intangible. It isn’t a number like revenue or user acquisition. Some people might have a set of resolutions or goals that is tangible and quantitative – say read two books a month or exercise an hour four days a week. Great goals, but they are often based on the assumption that movement is progress. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but neither are they synonymous. The former – movement – lacks retrospection.
There were, are, and will be days, weeks, and months, we may just be busy. Our schedule is packed. We’re a duck paddling furiously underwater. And we’re gasping for air. And while our body and mind are exhausted, our body and mind have not expanded. I know I’m not alone when I think to myself, “Wow, I did a lot, but I still feel like I’m not moving anywhere.”
Our brains are unfortunately also poor predictors of the future. We use past progress as indicators of future progress. But while history often rhymes, it does not repeat. Our predictions end up being guesstimates at best.
So I look into the past. I measure my own personal growth emotionally – by shock, very similar to how Tim Urban measures progress of the human race (which I included at the end of a previous essay). I don’t know what the future will hold and neither will I make many predictions of what the future will hold for me. If I knew, I’d have made a fortune on the stock market already, in startups, or on crypto already. What I can commit to is my relentless pursuit of taking risks, making mistakes, and trying things that scare the bejesus out of me. Since only by making new mistakes will I grow as a person. What I am equipped with now can be mapped out by the scar tissue I’ve accumulated.
Coming full circle, what’ll make me realize and appreciate my mistakes and failures more is knowing that as a greenhorn I was laughably stupid.
But if, in retrospect, David from a month ago sounds like quite the sensible person, my growth will have gone from exponential to linear. Or worse, flatlined.
For founders
And now that I’m thinking aloud – or rather, writing aloud (which may deserve its indictment into the #unfiltered series), this might be a great line of questions to ask founders as well.
As a founder, what was the last dumb thing you did? When was that?
And before that, what was the second most recent dumb thing you did?
And the third most recent?
There’s the commonly repeated saying in the venture world. Investors invest in lines, not dots. Two’s a line. Three’s a curve. I want to see how fast you’ve been growing and learning.
Why such a question?
If we’re in it for the long run, I wanna assess how candid and self-aware you are. Pitch meetings often depict a portrait of perfection. But founders, like all humans, aren’t perfect. For that matter, neither are investors.
Venture capital is impatient capital. We demand aggressive timelines, and honestly, quite toxic to most people in the world. Given that, if you’re going to learn how to hustle after investors invest, you’re going to have a tough time convincing investors. But if the hustle is already in your DNA, that bias to action lends much better to the venture model.
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
Subscribe to more of my shenaniganery. Warning: Not all of it will be worth the subscription. But hey, it’s free. But even if you don’t, you can always come back at your own pace.
With the crazy market we’re in today, VCs are frontloading their diligence. They’re having smarter conversations earlier. Before 2021, most investors would have intro conversations with founders before taking a deeper dive into the market to see if the opportunity is big enough. Nowadays, investors do most, if not all, their homework before they start conversations with founders. And when they’ve gotten a good understanding of the market and a more robust thesis, then:
They go out finding and talking to the founders who are solving the problems and gaps in the market they know exist.
They incubate their own companies that solve these same issues.
Subsequently, they are more exploratory than ever before. In frontloading their diligence, VCs have become more informed, if not better, predictors of not only where the market is today, but where the market is going to be tomorrow. They have a better grasp on the non-obvious. Or at the very minimum, have a much better understanding on the obvious, so that the boundaries of the non-obvious are pushed further. In turn, they can truly invest in the outliers. Outliers that are more than three standard deviations from the mean.
Startup ideas are often pushing the boundaries of our understanding of the world we live in. The team at Floodgate use an incredible breakdown to frame the amount of data that needs to be present to qualify the validity of a team and idea. “[W]e like to say some secrets are plausible, some are possible, and some are preposterous, all different types of insights. It matters what type it is because the type of team you need, the type of people you need to hire, the fundraising strategy, the risk profile, the amount of inflections that have to come together. All of those things vary, depending on the type of secret about future that you’re pursuing,” said Mike Maples Jr. recently on the Invest Like the Best podcast.
Science fiction is, by definition, preposterous. But so are the true outliers. And as any great investor knows, that’s where the greatest alphas are generated.
Preposterous ideas are backed by logic and insight
To quote PG from an essay he wrote earlier this year, “Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they’re proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don’t. And if they have deep domain expertise, that’s probably the source of it.
“Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately likely to be interesting.”
But no matter how implausible your startup idea sounds, there still has to fundamentally be an audience. And while it may not be obvious today, the goal is that it will be obvious one day. Frankly, if it’s forever non-obvious and forever in the non-consensus, you just can’t make any money there. If Airbnb stuck only with the convention industry or Uber only with the black cab, or Shopify only with snowboards, they would never have the ability to be as big as they are today.
Shopify’s Alex Danco has this great line in his essay World Building. “If you can create a world that’s more clear and compelling than the complex, ambiguous real world, then people will be attracted to that story.”
As investors, we have to start from first principle thinking. Investors, in frontloading their diligence, find the answers to “why now” and “why this”. All they’re looking for after is the “why you.” The further down the line towards preposterous science fiction you are, the more you need to sell investors on “why you”.
Idea Plausibility
Key Question
Context
Plausible
Why this?
Most people can see why this idea should exist. Because of the consensus, you’re competing in a saturated market of similar, if not the same ideas. Therefore, to stand out, you must show traction.
Possible
Why now?
It makes sense that this idea should exist, but it’s unclear whether there’s a market for this. To stand out, you have to convince investors on the market, and subsequently the market timing.
Preposterous
Why you?
Hands down, this is just crazy. You’re clearly in the non-consensus. Now the only way you can redeem yourself is if you have incredible insight and foresight. What’s the future you see and why does that make sense given the information we have today? If an investor doesn’t walk out of that meeting having been mind-blown on your lesson from the future, you’ve got no chance.
And when answering the “why you”, it’s not just on your background and years of experience, but your expertise. As Sequoia’s Roelof Bothaputs it, “So what was the insight? What is the problem that you’re addressing? And why is your solution compelling and unique in addressing that problem? Even if it’s compelling, if it’s not unique there’re going to be lots of competitors. And then you’re probably going to struggle to build a distinctive business. So it’s that unique and compelling value proposition that I look for.” So before anything else, the best investors, like Roelof, “think of value creation before value capture.”
In order to find that earned secret – that compelling and unique secret sauce – in the first place, you have to love what you’re working. And not just passionate, but obsessive. The problem you’re trying to solve keeps you up at night. You have to be more of a “missionary” than a “mercenary” as Roelof would put it. If you’re truly a missionary, even the most preposterous idea will sound plausible if you can break down why it truly matters.
The Regulatory Dilemma
The most important and arguably the hardest part about writing science fiction – and this is equally true for funders as it is for founders – is that we have to self-regulate. Regulation will always be a lagging indicator of technological development. Regulators won’t move until there’s enough momentum.
But, as we learned in high school physics, with every action, you need an equal and opposite reaction. The hard about momentum, and I imagine this’ll only be more true in a decentralized world, is that it’s second order derivative is positive. In other words, it’ll only get faster and faster. On the other hand, regulation follows the afterimage of innovation. It sees where the puck was or, at best, is at, but not, until much later, where the puck is going. And truth be told, innovation will eventually plateau, as it follows a rather step-wise function, as I’ve written before. And when it does, regulation will catch up.
So, in the high school physics example of Newtonian physics, the reaction, in this case, regulation, needs to be equal and opposite force comparative to where the puck will be. But as you’ve guessed, that will stop innovation. And I don’t think the vast majority of the world would want that. Progress fuels the human race.
In fantastical worlds, we are often used to how awesome things can be. Making the impossible possible. But as Brandon explains, “the truth is that it’s virtually impossible to come up with a magical effect that nobody else has thought of. Originality, I’ve seen, doesn’t come so often with the power itself as with the limitation.”
As the infamous line goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.” If you end up having access to every single person on this planet’s data, what makes you a company worth betting on isn’t your power, but how you use that power. How you self-regulate in using that power. Take, Open AI’s GPT-3. Instead of sharing the entire AI with the world, they limited that power to prevent malicious actors through an API.
What does self-regulation mean? Simply, aligning incentives so that all stakeholders win. When you have two people, you have a 2×2 matrix to account for four possible outcomes. There’s a situation where both people win, two situations where one wins, one loses, and another where both lose. Needless to say, we want to be maximizing for win-win situations.
As Balaji Srinivasansaid on the Tim Ferriss Show recently, “When you have three people, it’s a 2x2x2, because there’s eight outcomes, win/lose times win/lose times win/lose. It’s a Cartesian product.. […] When you have N people, it’s two by two by two to the Nth power. It’s like this hypercube it as it gets very complicated.” Subsequently, the greater the organization, the more stakeholders there, and the harder it is to account for the “win” to the Nth power outcome. Nevertheless, it’s important for founder and funders at the frontier of technological and economic development to consider such outcomes. And at what point is there a divergence of incentives.
There’s usually a strict alignment in the value creation days. But as the business grows and evolves to worry more about value capture, there needs to be a recalibration of growth and an ownership of responsibility as the architects who willed a seemingly preposterous idea into existence.
In closing
We live in a day in age that is crazier than ever before. To use Tim Urban’s analogy, if you brought someone from 1750 to today and had them just observe the world we live in, that person will not only be mind-blown, but literally, die of shock. To get the same effect of having someone die of shock in 1750, you can’t just bring someone from 1500, but you’d have to go further back till 12,000 BC. The world is changing exponentially. And new technologies further that. Who knows? In 50 years, we in 2021, might die of shock from what the world will have become.
And rightly because of such velocity, innovators – founders and investors – will have to lead the charge not only technically and economically, but also morally.
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Not too long ago, I quoted Phil Libin, founder of All Turtles and mmhmm (which has been my favorite virtual camera in and most likely post-pandemic), who said: “I think the most important job of a CEO is to isolate the rest of the company from fluctuations of the hype cycle because the hype cycle will destroy a company. It’ll shake it apart. In tech the hype cycles tend to be pretty intense.”
Hype is the difference in expectation and reality. Or more specifically, the disproportionate surplus of expectation. A month ago, Sarah Tavel at Benchmarkwrote: “Hype — the moment, either organic or manufactured, when the perception of a startup’s significance expands ahead of the startup’s lived reality — is an inevitability. And yet, it’s hard not to view hype with a mix of both awe and fear. Hype applied at the right moment can make a startup, while the wrong moment can doom it.”
Right now, we are in a hype market. And hype has taken the venture market by storm.
We’ve all been seeing this massive and increasing velocity and magnitude of capital deployment over the last few months. Startups are getting valued more and more. In the past, the pre-money valuations I was seeing ranged from 2-on-8 to 3-on-9. Or in not so esoteric VC jargon, $2M rounds on $8M pre-money valuations ($10M post-money) to $3M rounds on $9M pre-money valuations ($12M post-money). These days, I’ve been seeing 5-on-20 or 6-on-30. Some of which are still pre-traction, or even pre-product.
Founders love it. They’re getting capital on a discount. They’re getting greater sums of money for the same dilution. Investors who invested early love it. Their paper returns are going through the roof. When looking at IRR or TVPI (total value to paid-in capital – net measurement on realized and unrealized value), higher valuations in their portfolio companies are giving investors jet fuel to raise future funds. And greater exit values on acquisition or IPO mean great paydays for early investors. Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fundsays “this incentivizes investors to throw cash at hyped up companies, instead of less buzzy startups that may be better run.”
Sarah further elaborated, “In the reality distortion field of hype, consumers lean in and invest in a platform with their time and engagement ahead of when they otherwise might have. They pursue status-seeking-work, not because they necessarily get the reward for it relative to other uses of their time, but because they expect to be rewarded for it in the future, either because of the typical rich-get-richer effect of networks, or just in the status of being an early adopter in something that ends up being big.” The same is true for investors investing in hyped startups. It’s status-seeking work.
Frankly, if you’re a founder, this is a good time to be fundraising.
Why?
Capital is increasingly digital.
There is more than one vehicle of early stage capital.
There are only two types of capital: Tactical capital and distribution capital.
1. Capital is increasingly digital.
Of the many things COVID did, the pandemic accelerated the timeline of the venture market. Pre-pandemic, when founders started fundraising, they’d book a week-long trip to the Bay Area to talk to investors sitting on Sand Hill Road. Most meetings that week would be intro meetings and coffee chats with a diverse cast of investors. Founders would then fly back to their home base and wait to hear back. And if they did, they would fly in once again. This process would inevitably repeat over and over, as the funnel grew tighter and tighter. And hopefully, at the end of a six-to-twelve month fundraise, they’d have one, maybe a few term sheets to choose from.
Over the past 18 months, every single investor took founder meetings over Zoom. And it caused many investors to realize that they can get deals done without ever having to meet founders in-person. Of course, the pandemic forced an overcorrection in investor habits. And now that we’re coming out of isolation, the future looks like: every intro meeting will now be over Zoom, but as founders get into the DD (due diligence) phases or in-depth conversations, then they’ll fly out to meet who they will marry.
It saves founders so much time, so they can focus on actually building and delivering their product to their customers. And,
VCs can meet many more founders than they previously thought possible.
This has enabled investors to invest across multiple geographies and build communities that breathe outside of their central hub or THE central hub – formerly the SF Bay Area. Rather, we’re seeing the growth of startup communities around the nation and around the world.
2. There is more than one vehicle for early stage capital.
While meetings have gone virtual, the past year has led to a proliferation of financing options in the market as well. Capital as jet fuel for your company is everywhere. Founders now have unprecedented optionality to fundraise on their terms. And that’s great!
Solo capitalists
Individual GPs who raise larger funds than angels and super angels, so that they can lead and price rounds. The best part is they make faster decisions that funds with multiple partners, which may require partner buy-in for investments.
Rolling funds
With their 506c general solicitation designation, emerging fund managers raise venture funds faster than ever and can start deploying capital sooner than traditional 506b funds.
Micro- and nano-VCs
Smaller venture funds with sub-ten million in fund size deploying strategic checks and often leverage deep GP expertise. No ownership targets, and can fill rounds fast after getting a lead investor.
Equity crowdfunding
Platforms, like Republic and SeedInvest, provide community-fueled capital to startups. Let your biggest fans and customers invest in the platform they want to see more of in the future. With recent regulations, you can also raise up to $5 million via non-accredited and accredited investors on these platforms.
Accelerators/incubators
Short three-month long programs, like Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars, that write small, fast checks (~$100K) to help you reach milestones. Little diligence and one to two interviews after the application. Often paired with an amazing investor and/or advisor network, workshops, powerful communities, and some, even opportunity funds to invest in your next round.
Syndicates/SPVs
Created for the purpose of making one investment into a company a syndicate lead loves, syndicates are another ad hoc way of raising capital from accredited investor fans, leveraging the brand of syndicate leads and deploying through SPVs. Or special purpose vehicles. I know… people in venture are really creative with their naming conventions. In turn, this increases discoverability and market awareness for your product.
SPACs and privates are going public again
Companies going public mean early employees have turned into overnight millionaires. In other words, accredited investors who are looking to grow their net worth further by investing in different asset classes. Because of the hype, investing in venture-scale businesses tend to be extremely lucrative. These investors also happen to have deep vertical expertise, high-value networks, as well as hiring networks to help startups grow faster. More investors, more early stage capital.
Growth and private equity are going upstream
Big players who usually sat downstream are moving earlier and earlier, raising or investing in venture funds and acceleration programs to capture venture returns. And as a function of such, LPs have increased percent distributions into the venture asset classes, just under different names.
Pipe
Pipe‘s existed before the pandemic, but founders have turned their eye towards different financing options, like Pipe. They turn your recurring revenue into upfront capital. Say a customer has an annual contract locked in with you, but is billed monthly. With Pipe, you can get all that promised revenue now to finance your startup’s growth, instead of having only bits and pieces of cash as your customers pay you monthly. Non-dilutive capital and low risk.
3. There are only two types of capital: Tactical capital and distribution capital.
There’s an increasingly barbell distribution in the market. Scott Kupor once toldMark Suster that: “The industry’s gonna bifurcate. You’re going to end up with the mega VCs. Let’s call them the Goldman Sachs of venture capital. Or the Blackrock of venture capital. And on the other end, you’re going to end up with niche. Little, small people who own some neighborhood whether it’s video, or payments, or physical security, cybersecurity, physical products, whatever. And people in the middle are going to get caught.”
Those “little, small” players have deep product and go-to-market expertise and networks. Their checks may be small. But for an early stage company still trying to figure out product-market fit, the resources, advice, and connections are invaluable to a startup’s growth. They’re often in the weeds with you. They check your blind side. And they genuinely empathize with the problems and frustrations you experience, having gone through them not too long ago themselves. Admittedly, many happen to be former or active operators and/or entrepreneurs.
On the flip side, you have the a16z’s and Sequoias on their 15th or 20th fund. Tried and true. Brilliant track record with funds consistently north of 25% IRR. Internal rate of return, or how fast their cash is appreciating annually. LPs love them because they know these funds are going to make them money. And as any investor knows, double down on your winners. More money for the same multiples means bigger returns.
The same is true for historical players, like Tiger, Coatue, and Insight, who wire you cash to scale. They assume far less risk. Which admittedly means a smaller multiple. And to compensate for a lower multiple, they invest large injections of capital. By the time you hit scale, you already know what strategies work. All you need is just more money in your winning strategies.
You find product-market fit with tactical capital. You find scale with distribution capital.
Product-market fit is the process of finding hype. When you stop pushing and start finding the pull in the market. Scale is the process of manufacturing hype.
The bear case
But there are downsides to hype. Last month, Nikhil, founding partner at Footwork, put it better than I ever could.
If I could add an 8th point to Nikhil’s analysis, it’d be that investors in today’s market are incentivized to “pump and dump” their investments. Early stage investors spike up the valuations, which leads to downstream investors like Tiger Global, Coatue, Insight, and Softbank doubling down on valuation bets. Once there’s a secondary market for private shares, early stage investors then liquidate their equity to growth investors who are seeking ownership targets, or just to get a slice of the pie. This creates an ecosystem of misaligned incentives, where early stage investors are no longer in it for the long run with founders. Great fund strategy that’ll make LPs happy campers, but it leaves founders with uncommitted, temporary partners.
Sundeep Peechu of Felicis Ventures has an amazing thread on how getting the right founder-investor fit right is a huge value add. And getting founder-investor fit takes time, and sometimes a trial by fire as well. After all, it’s a long-term marriage, rather than a one-night stand. Those who don’t spend enough time “dating” before “marriage” may find a rocky road ahead when things go south.
By my count, ~30% of Felicis companies that have done well had trouble raising Series As in some fashion.
As an example, Matterport which went public last week had little appetite at the A. Non-recurring revenue, hardware business and selling to real estate was a triple whammy.
On a 9th point, underrepresented and underestimated founders are often swept under the rug. In a hype market, VCs are forced to make faster decisions, partly due to FOMO. With faster decisions, investors do less diligence before investing. Which to the earlier point of misaligned incentives, has amplified the already-existing notion of buyer’s remorse.
When VCs go back to habits of pattern recognition, they optimize for founder/startup traits they are already familiar with. And often times, their investment track record don’t include underrepresented populations. To play devil’s advocate, the good news is that there is also a simultaneous, but comparatively slow proliferation of diverse fund managers, who are more likely to take a deeper look at the problems that underestimated founders are tackling.
What kind of curve are we on?
When many others seem to think that this hype market will end soon, last week, I heard a very interesting take on the current venture market in a chat with Frank Wang, investor at Dell Technologies Capital. “VCs have been mispricing companies. We anchor ourselves on historical valuations. But these anchors could be wrong.
“We’re at the beginning of the hype and I don’t see it slowing down. VC has been so stagnant, and there hasn’t been any innovation in venture in a long time. Growth hasn’t slowed. And Tiger [Global] and Insight [Partners] is doing venture right. Hypothetically speaking, if you invest in everything, the IRR should be zero. They are returning 20% IRR because they seem to have found that VC rounds are mispriced. So, there can be an arbitrage.
“There will be a 20% market correction in the future, but we don’t know if that’s going to happen after 100% growth, or correct then grow again. The current hype is just another set of growing pains.”
Part of me is scared for the market correction. When many founders will be forced to raise flat or down rounds. The fact is we haven’t had a serious market correction since 2009. It’s going to happen. It’s not a question of “if” but rather “when” and “how much”, as Frank acutely points out.
Investors who deploy capital fast win on growing markets – on bull markets. Or investors who deploy across several years, or what the afore-mentioned Mark Suster defines as having “time diversity“, who win on correcting markets – bear markets. Think of the former as putting all your eggs in one basket. And if it’s the winning basket, you’re seen as an oracle. If not, well, you disappear into obscurity. Think of the latter as diversifying your risk appetite – a hedging strategy. More specifically, (1) being able to dollar-cost average, and (2) having exposure to multiple emerging trends and platforms. You’re not gonna lose massive amounts of capital even in a bear market, but you also will be losing out on the outsized returns on a bull market.
Only time will tell how seriously the market will correct and when. As well as who the “oracles” are.
In closing
At the end of the day, there are really smart capital allocators arguing for both sides of the hype market. Like with all progress, the windshield is often cloudier and more muddled than the rearview mirror. As Tim Urban once wrote, “You have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right.“
And as founders are going to some great term sheets from amazing investors, I love the way Ashmeet Sidana of Engineering Capitalframes it earlier this year. “A company’s success makes a VC’s reputation; a VC’s success does not make a company’s reputation. In other words to take a concrete example, Google is a great company. Google is not a great company because Sequoia invested in them. Sequoia is a great venture firm because they invested in Google.”
Whether you, the founder, can live up to the hype or not depends on your ability to find distribution before your competitors do and before your incumbents find innovation. Unfortunately, great investors might help you get there with capital, but having them on your cap table doesn’t guarantee success.
Nevertheless, the interpretation of hype is always an interesting one. There will continue to be debates if a market, product, or trend is overhyped or underhyped. The former assumes that we are on track for a near-term logarithmic curve. The latter assumes an immediate future looking like an exponential curve. The interpretation is, in many ways, a Rorschach test of our perception of the future.
Over the course of human civilization, rather than an absolutely smooth distribution, we live something closer to what Tim Urban describes as:
If the regression line is the mean, then we’d see the ebbs and flows of hype looking something like a sinusoidal function. As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
It won’t be a smooth ride. The world never is. But that’s what makes the now worth living through.
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I have this conception of a personal Hall of Fame. For every piece of content, individual, and or experience in my life that has drastically changed the way I live or the way I think about life. Upon entrance, I find myself facing three large corridors – each adorned with text in Garamond font, framed in the corpse of a giant oak tree. In the corridor to the left, it’s the “Content Hall”. Arguably, the most competitive of the three halls to get into.
I only meet so many individuals in my life. I would say somewhere on the magnitude of tens of thousands. To pick tens of individuals among 10,000 is a 0.1-0.2% chance of induction.
The same is true for experiences. Excluding my daily habits of sleeping, eating, and others that have become second nature, there are very few extraordinary experiences among the ordinary. And in pursuing something extraordinary over a prolonged duration, that something extraordinary becomes ordinary to you. So, over time, you end up regressing into a step-wise function of finding the extraordinary in the extraordinary. To choose from a select few of these extraordinary in the extraordinary experiences at various learning curve spurts leaves an even smaller sample size.
Yet the same can’t be said for content. We consume a plethora of content on a daily basis. From obvious content drops, like YouTube, books, shows, and podcasts, to the non-obvious, such as emails, conversations, street signs, and opportunities that make you pause in the buzz of daily life. With tons of constant inputs from multi-directional sources, picking the handful that has altered your life’s course has a far lower acceptance rate than being struck by lightning.
For me, one of the greatest pieces that exists in my “Content Hall” is The Tail End by Tim Urban. There are a multitude of great anecdotes in it, but my favorite of which is, by the time we turn 18 years old, we’d already have spent at least 90% of our time with our parents.
Presidents
Say I live to 90 years old. In my lifetime, I get to see 22 US presidential terms. 22 presidents max, but many presidents hold office for two terms rather than just one term. There’ve been 46 presidents in the history of the United States so far. 21 of which served two terms. For ease of calculation, there’s about a 50% chance that any president will hold office for two terms. That’s 16 presidents, give or take, throughout my entire life. I’ve lived through Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden. That’s 5, and only 11 more to go. Of course there’s the chance of early impeachment. But let’s assume everyone serves their full term.
I’m 25 now. So, I’ve already seen almost a third of the presidents I will see in my lifetime.
Summer vacations
If I live till 90, I have another 65 summers to go. 65 summer vacations left.
If I settle down by 35, I have 10 more summer vacations left – entirely free from constraints and in my prime. I can go skydiving and play extreme sports, without having to worry about seeing the chiropractor. And I imagine, like many others out there, I have more than 10 summer vacation spots I want to hit, excluding the ones I want to have repeat visits to. I already wish I had more time.
Times I’m wrong
In preparing for this essay, for the past week, I tracked the number of times I realized I was wrong. Racking the numbers up each day for seven days. From getting the weather wrong to forgetting what I thought we had for leftovers to being one digit off on my recollection of industry metrics during a meeting, I make on average two small mistakes a day. Extrapolating that to the rest of my life, I have almost 47,500 more small mistakes left to make. I’ve never felt more human than I do now.
Of course, the above number doesn’t include all the times I’ve realized I was wrong after the fact, which I imagine accounts for a mountain of imperfections in its own right. Enough to rival the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Idea journals
Many of you reading this blog are no stranger to my idea journals. I go through a journal every four months. I have almost 200 more idea journals to go through, assuming I keep at the pace I’m going at now. 195, to be exact. Oh wow, I really need to invest in some shelf space in my future homes. Enough for over 20,000 pages and all hardcover leather-bound journals.
Breakdowns
Each time I conquer a mental breakdown I think I’d be more resilient. In many ways, I am right. In many more, I am still unprepared for what is to come. Just as the sun rises, I too will cognitively readjust to my stress levels. While I wouldn’t describe my breakdowns to be on regular intervals, on average, it seems to happen once every five years. At least a major one, discounting all the smaller frustrating moments I come across. That’s 18 total, and 13 more mental shifts I won’t be ready for no matter how much I prepare.
In closing
All the above calculations were in the scope of 90 years old. But the awesome part is if I live past 90, every day will be icing on the cake. It’ll be better bang for my buck!
The point of this mental shift isn’t to be 100% accurate (’cause I know I’ve made quite a few generalizations). But rather reframe how we choose to live our lives.
In comparison with the hundreds of thousands of years the human species has lived, we are mere century inhabitants. And in the whole history of Earth, if we were to count on a 24-hour clock where the formation of Earth began at time 00:00:00, humans have lived just over a minute. We have short lives. Maybe that’ll change some time in our lifetime, with technology, CRISPR, or some sci-fi derivation.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t live fulfilling lives. Or as Garry Tanputs it, most people are “short term optimists” and “long term pessimists” and end up picking smaller problems to tackle. Rather, we gotta be “short term pessimists” and “long term optimists.” We have short lives, but let’s live a life where our impact lasts beyond our physical lifespan.
#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.
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