A Higher Principle: The Builder’s Oath

Hi Friends 👋,

Today I published the culminating point of The Philosophy of Building Better and wanted to share it with you. I hope you enjoy!

Erik

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A Higher Principle: The Builder’s Oath

The Philosophy of Building Better: Chapter 9 - The Builder's Oath

Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

When a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and when before going to sleep he has awakened his rational powers, and fed them on noble thoughts and enquiries, collecting himself in meditation; after having first indulged his appetites neither too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep, and prevent them and their enjoyments and pains from interfering with the higher principle-- which he leaves in the solitude of pure abstraction, free to contemplate and aspire to the knowledge of the unknown, whether in past, present or future; when again he has allayed the passionate element, if he has a quarrel against any one-- I say, when after pacifying the two irrational principles, he rouses up the third, which is reason, before he takes his rest, then as you know, he attains truth most nearly, and is least likely to be the sport of fantastic and lawless visions.

Plato, The Republic

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Today is the culmination of a project, nearly two years in the making, but it goes back even further than that.

I have spent my professional career feeling a deep calling to “build” and grappling with what exactly that means. I spent the early years of my career as an investor before becoming a product manager. Along the way I’ve worked at startups, on my own business ideas, and I have documented most of my thoughts and challenges through writing. In some ways, all of these things scratched some of that building itch, but none has ever done so completely.

This project is the closest I’ve ever gotten in my professional life to a sense that I am doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, and in the right way. I am not sure where this project will lead going forward, but I know that I want to continue to chase that feeling.

We’ve come a long way together and I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to follow along.

In my first post, A Nobler Strain, I laid out my goals for this project, outlined the Philosophy of Building Better, and explained what Timeless Building Furthering Human Flourishing meant.

In our first chapter of the Philosophy of Building Better, we discussed how we are all building in one way or another and how that makes us all builders. We explored how our actions have consequences and how we are all “building our own house,” as the process of building impacts us just as much as the things we build. For better or for worse.

In chapter two, we discussed the true meaning of the “pursuit of happiness” and how the aim of all building projects is to further human flourishing. We explored myriad examples of the poor way things are often built nowadays and shared a glimpse of a different way of building. A way of building that moves the world towards a healthier, more whole place.

Chapter three introduced us to the age-old debate between proponents of objective truth and those who think reality is subjective. This post also first introduced us to Christopher Alexander and his Timeless Way of Building, which has been a major inspiration for this whole effort. Using Alexander’s concept of The Quality Without a Name we contended that there are objectively good and bad acts of building based on the degree they do or do not contain this quality.

In chapter four, we expanded on the objective nature of reality by grounding objective truth in the specific context of a situation. We explained how a particular setting contains a physical, personal, societal, and temporal context. We also drew parallels between the act of exploring context and the customer discovery that my job as a product manager requires of me.

Chapter five afforded us the opportunity to dig deeper into the world of temporal context. We discussed how the Lindy Effect can be a powerful heuristic for predicting something’s quality. As an example of the staying power of ideas that remain relevant thousands of years after they were first proposed, we discussed how Aristotle’s concept of The Golden Mean could be applied to modern building.

In chapter six, we began to discuss the responsibility that Better Builders have towards the people they are building for. We discussed the reality that there are no neutral design choices and explored the concept of “shadow patterns,” building patterns that are designed to get users to act in a way that is contrary to their interests. We also shared a powerful framing technique to help us build better by designing for our users as if they were true friends of ours.

Chapter seven outlined the reality that the path to building better is not always going to be easy. We acknowledged the fact that, in pursuing a better way of building, we will face pushback from followers of the status quo. We explained the reality that, at some point, we will all be faced with the pressure to ethically compromise and how the true better builders will be those who refuse to compromise on their ethics.

In chapter eight, we discussed how a builder’s job does not end the day that their project is completed. We explored the importance of not only repairing the things that we build, but of using our buildings to repair the fabric of the world around us. Ultimately, we acknowledged that, in this temporal world, all of the things we build will eventually decay. Despite this reality, we reaffirmed our commitment to doing what we could to nudge the world in a better, healthier, more whole direction.

And now we arrive at the concept that started this entire project. My wife becoming pregnant approximately two years ago led me to start thinking about the kind of parent I wanted to be. As part of preparing for this major life change, I began to reflect on the role that technology played in my life and the relationship I wanted my son to have with it. As a builder in the technology industry, I started to become more aware of some of the negative effects that our technology was having on us as a society and that those effects were especially pronounced in children. The first question I really remember contemplating was, “why is there a Hippocratic Oath for Doctors and not software engineers?” Around that time I read The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander for the first time and also started a book club focused on reading classical philosophy with some friends.

All of these threads came together in The Building Better Project.

The culmination of the Philosophy of Building Better is making a commitment to following a better way of building. A timeless way that strives to promote the flourishing of our users and build in harmony with the surrounding world. All of these ideas are useless without taking the step to apply them in our acts of building. My solution to that disparity is to propose just the "Hippocratic Oath for software engineers” (and builders of every other stripe) that I believe this world is missing. I would be honored if you considered signing The Builder’s Oath, but even more importantly, I hope you will consider making some kind of commitment to a higher standard of conduct whether you be a software engineer, writer, architect, construction worker, chef, investor, fellow product manager, or any other of the countless numbers of builders that are out there.

I acknowledge that the pursuit of my life is to build, whether it be building physical structures, technology products, relational connections between humans, or institutions meant to withstand the test of time.

As a builder, I know that I am called to further human flourishing. I commit the work of my hands and mind to fostering virtue, community, and the institutions that have been the bedrocks of human flourishing throughout history. I will always seek to consider the perspective of the user, customer, member, or owner that I am building for and to make decisions that are in the interest of their long-term flourishing.

I accept the inherent responsibility that comes with being a builder. I know that there is an objectively right way to build for each given context and I commit to doing my utmost to build in this way. I humbly admit that there will be times when I fall short of this ideal, times when the things I build fail or cause unintentional harm to others. As a better builder, I will take accountability for my mistakes, and correct my failings as fully as possible.

I know that the process of building is fundamentally contextual and I promise to take into account the physical, personal, societal, and temporal context of any building project as I plan and design. I swear to always seek to build in a way that is concordant with the natural patterns, rhythms, and order of this world.

I vow to learn from the great builders of the past and acknowledge that I am forever a student of the building process. In solidarity with those great builders upon whose shoulders I stand, I will pass on my accumulated wisdom about how to build for the furtherment of human flourishing to any who genuinely seek such knowledge.

As a builder, I commit to holding myself to a higher standard of conduct. I will consider the potential harms of what I am building and will never build something that is designed to take advantage of people’s worst impulses. I refuse to prey upon my users’ self-doubt, anxiety, or addictions. Instead, I will build in a way that supports humanity’s best impulses.

I understand that, as a builder, demands of deadlines, leaders, profit, and more will be placed upon me. I know that at times I may be pressured to compromise my ethics for the sake of another’s short-term goals, but I commit to standing my ethical ground. I believe that the only way to build a better world is through individuals taking responsibility for what they build and that by holding myself to a higher standard of conduct, I empower others to do the same.

I acknowledge that my effort as a builder does not end after the completion of a project. I accept that I have a responsibility to repair the things that I build and safeguard them against the burdens of time. Despite my best efforts, I understand the reality that in a temporal world, the things I build will eventually fade away. In the face of that inevitability, I chose to do what I can to nudge the world in a better, healthier, more whole direction.

When I build I will seek to inspire and empower the real human beings using my product to be the best that they can be.

When I build, I will avoid creating shadow patterns that deceive users into acting in a way that is contrary to their long-term interest.

When I build, I will work to bolster mankind’s proclivity for kindness, empathy, and courage.

When I build, I will build with the user’s long-term flourishing in mind.

On this day, I swear to follow in the steps of the great builders who have come before me and commit myself to pursuing a better way of building. A way of building that draws on timeless wisdom to further human flourishing.

I commit to building better because in doing so, not only will the things I build become better, but through that process I, my community, and the world will become better as well.

In some ways, this post is the culmination of two years of effort. In other ways, it feels like just the beginning. There is one more chapter to cover as part of our Philosophy of Building Better covering how to apply these concepts more practically, but that won’t be the end of The Building Better Project. Outlining my philosophy is the foundation upon which I plan to add more writing and building projects. More to come soon. Thanks for following along so far.

Let’s Build Better,

Erik

Monsters in the Closet

I recently did something I didn’t want to.

Last month my wife and I flew back to Colorado for a weekend so that I could attend my 10-year high school reunion. This was something I went back and forth on for a while and I only decided to attend last minute. It was an experience that I am still processing and I thought it might be helpful to share.

High School

High school was a hard time in my life. I never really felt like I fit in. I was self-conscious, anxious, and self-absorbed. I struggled with my weight and even more with my opinion of myself. I was a social jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. I had many friends and could generally get along with just about anyone. But my childhood best friend was a few years older than I was and when he left for college I felt like everyone else had their tightest friends and I was relegated to the periphery of a few different friend groups. I spent an altogether unhealthy amount of time pursuing girls who weren’t interested in me and I failed to invest in the things that made me feel good about myself. I coasted off my intellect and backpedaled from challenging courses that made me stretch. This whole experience culminated in a handful of episodes that made it anything but an accident that I looked far afield for college. As high school ended, I was ready to slam the book on that chapter of my life and move on without looking back.

College

And move on I did! College was an altogether different experience for me. It was scary and new, but it allowed me to carve out a different persona. One that was still riddled with some of the same anxieties and self-conscious feelings, but to who they were a simple burden versus a crushing weight. My parents stuck around during orientation and I remember we went out for dinner on the day they left. I vividly remember weeping in the car not because I was sad to see them leave or because I would miss them, but because, even after only a handful of days with people who were still largely strangers, I felt like I had found a place where I fit in for the first time in life. And that initial feeling ended up being born out. At William & Mary, I found a home for myself in a way that I never had before. I had the dumb luck of getting the world’s best freshman hall which has stayed extremely close a decade later and still makes sure to get together for reunions once or twice a year. I grew in confidence and matured into an adult. I stopped chasing people who were wrong for me and became the kind of man who was ready for a level of relationship with the woman who has now become my wife. There were stops and starts and it wasn’t always a smooth path, but I found my Tribe in my friends, my classmates, my fraternity, and most of all, my wife. I still look back on my senior year of college as the best year of my life.

Despite the overwhelmingly positive experience, I still carried the scars that had formed in high school. I continued to have social anxiety in situations that were new or where I didn’t have a “comfort blanket” of a close friend (this made rushing a fraternity an unbelievably painful experience until one of my closes friends essentially dragged me towards his fraternity knowing it would be the right fit for me even if I didn’t know it myself.) The hurt I felt feeling like I was always on the outside looking in during high school manifested in status-seeking behavior and a need for attention and recognition. My identity became more and more intertwined with my intellect. It grew more and more important to me to be seen as smart by others. As my need to appear intelligent and logical grew, my empathy towards others diminished. It was more important for me to win arguments or point out the logical inconsistencies with others’ stances than it was to build relationships or try to understand where people were coming from.

Grad School

For the sake of brevity, I will skip ahead to grad school. It’s not that I didn’t grow in the intervening 4 years between undergrad and grad school. I did in a lot of ways. Personally, professionally, and spiritually. But I didn’t make much progress on my high school baggage. I was mostly well-adjusted and mostly happy. And that was good enough for a long time.

Things changed when I got to grad school. For anyone that has explored getting an MBA or some other graduate degree, the value of said degree is often discussed in terms of a golden stamp on your resume or setting a high floor for your compensation, or the incredible network you will build. All of those things are true, but I think the piece of the MBA value equation that had the biggest delta between its impact on me and how much it is talked about is the space that grad school provides you. It is really hard to grapple with life’s big questions when you are working full-time and simply trying to do what you need outside of work to maintain your sanity and some semblance of a social life. Like the decanting of a fine wine, grad school gives you time to breathe. To sit there with your thoughts and goals and aspirations and ask yourself the big questions. What do you want to do? What kind of person do you want to be? Where do you want to live? What are your values?

This mental breathing room and the amount of personal growth I experienced as a by-product of it was one of the biggest surprises of the MBA experience. Two experiences in particular were crucial for my personal growth.
The first was a program called P3: Passion, Purpose, and Principles. During P3, small groups would meet and read through Springboard. Springboard was written by Professor Shell, one of my favorite Wharton professors and a leading expert on success. The book is an incredible guide along the journey of figuring out what is important to you and how you can craft a life that aligns with those values. First as a participant and then as a leader, P3 helped me to clarify my innermost beliefs about the kind of person that I wanted to be. This process coalesced around 4 core values (or non-negotiables as the world’s greatest football coach would say).

My Non-Negotiables

1. Be Grateful

   • Life is a gift and without gratitude, it is far too easy to forget that I have so many things in my life I once prayed for. I have an incredible wife that inspires me to be a better man every day. I have a family who loves me. I am financially secure and healthy. I have a father in heaven who loves me so much that he sent his son to die for my sins. My life is truly blessed and as such, I choose to be a blessing to those around me.

2. Live Simply

   • “Everything we need to be happy is easy to obtain”. I choose to live within my means and avoid upgrading my lifestyle. I choose to opt-out of pie-eating contests where the only prize is more pie. I find joy in the little everyday things and never lose a sense of childlike wonder. I am happiest in life spending time outside with people that I love. Other things that make me happy are reading a book, making a cocktail, and listening to my record player. None of those things are expensive or hard to achieve and I can do them whenever I want. I choose to practice mindfulness and meditation to remember that I have all that I need to be happy, I just need to remember to be aware of it.

3. Journey Before Destination

   • Half of life is showing up. I choose to put the journey of my life before any destination. The journey of my life is an ongoing pursuit to be a slightly better person/husband/father/leader every single day. I know I will never be perfect but I choose to work hard and with discipline toward the pursuits I believe in and to be there for the people I care about. I choose to be an ethical and faith-focused leader for both my family and in my work. I choose to chop wood and carry water, knowing that every day I am building my own house. I choose to eat healthily and regularly exercise knowing that maintaining my health is the only way I can excel in other aspects of my life such as being a good husband and father.

4. Be Empathetic

   • My default is to be self-centered. I know that being empathetic toward others doesn’t come naturally to me, but I actively choose to be empathetic and forgiving of others. I invert the fundamental attribution error. I forgive others’ shortcomings and attribute them to environmental factors while taking responsibility for my own failures. When I succeed I give other people the credit. When I fail I take responsibility. I know that I have lived a privileged life and as such, I hold myself to a higher standard. To whom much is given, much is expected.

Those words may or may not resonate with you. But every single one of them resonates to the core of my being. Those values represent, not who I am today, but the person I hope one day to be.

The other experience at grad school that I got immense value out of is my sessions with a school-funded executive coach. This ended up feeling much more like therapy than professional coaching, but whatever it was, made a massive impact on me. With my coach I was able to sift through some of the scar tissue I still carried from high school. I dredged up and examined the aspects of my persona that had their roots in the hurt that I experienced in those days. In particular, I came face to face with two aspects of my personality that I had previously refused to acknowledge. The first we jokingly referred to as “Whiz Kid” and the second as “O.L.I.” (Outside Looking In). Whiz kid was the part of me that always needed to be seen as right. It was the face I would show when I was in the classroom or having a philosophical debate with friends. It was the part of me that would rather be seen as smart than kind. Who would rather win an argument than uncover what was actually true.

Whiz kid represents some of the parts of myself that I am least proud of, but I can’t feel too much antipathy towards him as his purpose was to protect his little brother, Oli. Oli was the hurt part of me that felt like I didn’t belong. The part that felt like I wasn’t adequate and didn’t deserve to be included. It was an inner part of my psyche that my 28-year-old self had largely forgotten was even there. I had become so used to living with it and had come up with so many coping mechanisms that in my day-to-day life, I didn’t feel the bite of those wounds any longer. But just because I had learned to cover up the wounds didn’t mean that they had ever truly healed. It took me coming face to face with Oli and one critical realization about him to finally begin the healing process. Oli was created out of a place of hurt, yes, but in that place, he had become a seed for many of the parts of myself that I was most proud of. Oli knew what it felt like to not be included and because of that, he didn’t want anyone else to share in those feelings of exclusion. Oli was the small ember of my inner kindness, empathy, and inclusiveness. Feelings that I didn’t (and still don’t) show the world nearly as much as I should, but feelings that when expressed, caused me to feel more wholly myself than anything else. For over 10 years, I hated Oli and tried to forget about him. It took me doing the not-so-pleasant work of coming face to face with him to realize that there was nothing to hate in this anxious, hurt, kid that I used to be. I now feel nothing but warmth towards that part of myself. Yes, I was hurt, but in that crucible, the best parts of myself had many of their beginnings.

10-Year Reunion

Which brings me back to my 10-year high school reunion. This post has been a long, winding, cathartic, and probably altogether overly personal journey but I promise I will tie it all together. As mentioned, I went back on whether I should go or not. I felt like grad school had finally afforded me an acceptance of my high school years and how they were a critical episode of my journey, even if they had been an unpleasant one. Should I really go back and face people who I had so recently let go of grudges against? Should I risk re-opening old wounds that had only recently begun to heal?

A part of me tried to put off the decision long enough that it would be made for me, but in the end, I decided that, at the very least, going to my reunion was something I wanted to have done if not something I was especially excited about actually doing.

So my wife and I fly out to Colorado so I could face some of my inner demons.

The day of the reunion I was nervous. There was an undeniable pressure to try to portray a certain picture of myself. There was a part of me that wished I was further along in my weight loss journey and that my beard had grown to cover even more of the baby face that I still sometimes felt self-conscious about after seeing a high school classmate years after graduating who exclaimed that I looked “the exact same as I did in high school”. But leaning on the one person who I trusted most in the whole world, I decided to simply try to go as I was. With all my strengths and all of my weaknesses. All the growth I had experienced and all the ways I still felt like I fell short.

And it was incredible.

It truly was a shockingly positive experience. After a wonderful dinner with friends I had barely spoken to in a decade, we went to the reunion itself and even my most optimistic of expectations were surpassed.

I felt like I knew everyone there and everyone there was genuinely excited to see me. And in perhaps the biggest surprise of all, I was genuinely excited to see them.

Over the course of a couple of hours, I spoke with more people from my high school than I could possibly recount. Some old friends who I hadn’t talked to since graduation. Some folks I didn’t remember being especially close with who still went out of their way to track me down and catch up. I even spoke with multiple people who I was nervous about seeing.

And in not one of those conversations did I feel anything other than genuine warmth. Everyone was kind and seemed genuinely interested in me and my life. They were thrilled to meet my wonderful wife and truly seemed happy for the life we were building together.

There wasn’t any ill will or awkwardness.

Just a level of familiarity and comfort of seeing people who knew me before I became who I am today and who were excited to hear about the path that I took to get here.

I had thought the personal growth I had experienced in grad school had finally allowed me to write the last chapter on my high school experience. But attending my 10-year reunion is what allowed me to finally close the book.

That night, I realized that all the perceived injury I had experienced, whether real or imagined, came from kids who were just as anxious, immature, lost, and self-absorbed as I was. It may sound obvious in hindsight, but all the hurt in my story came, not from some sort of malicious intent, but from teenagers who were struggling just as much as me to navigate the transition from child to adult.

I was struck by how normal everyone seemed. A bunch of teenagers who didn’t have anything figured out had become a bunch of adults who, while further along, were still largely trying to find their way. Just like I was.

Perhaps even more surprising than the warmth I felt from others, was the warmth I felt pouring out of myself. I talked with people whose insults I had held onto for years. People who had failed to include me or spurned my advances. And I felt nothing but happiness toward them. I maybe never uttered these exact words, but that night I was finally able to forgive and let go of all the hurt I had felt as a teenager.

Monsters in the Closet

It was funny listening to my wife’s perspective on the evening as we drove back to my parent's house.

“If you hadn’t spent the last 8 years complaining about high school, I would’ve thought you were the Prom King! For as much as you seemed to have thought you were left out and not included, you sure seemed to have a lot of friends who were happy to see you and catch up.”

With the clarity it took me a decade to find, she’s probably right. I had a lot more friends than I had been telling myself and I hope to do a better job of staying in touch with them over the next 10 years than I did over the last.

I am so happy with my life and high school was a part of what shaped me into the person I am today. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a single thing.

The best way I think I have been able to articulate the experience is through metaphor. For over a decade it felt like there had been a monster in my closet. I largely ignored it, but it still caused me to feel uneasy anytime I thought about it. At my 10-year reunion, I finally turned the lights on only to discover that the scary monster was nothing more than an old sweater. A sweater that brings feelings of comfort and a smile on my face as I remember a younger, more naive me who took the monsters in the closet far too seriously.

I am so glad I went to my 10-year reunion.

It was the final chapter in a journey of letting go. Of finally accepting that I am enough. I feel like I can finally put the book of my high school experience on a shelf. And when I take it down and reflect on my teenage years in the future it won’t be with spite or frustration, but with a smile.

I hope you go to your reunions. Maybe they won’t have the kind of earth-shattering importance for you as they did for me, but I’d still recommend it. You never know what kind of monsters you may have in the closet that simply need to be brought out into the light.

Thank you to all my friends from high school. There were many more of you than I had previously given credit for. Best of luck and I hope our paths cross again. I wish you nothing but happiness and joy and success and satisfaction along whatever trail life takes you down.

Gratefully yours,

Erik

How Far I'll Go

This is not the post I expected to write.

It has the right title, but the content is very different.

The summer before I started my MBA at Wharton I thought about what a successful experience would look like. Two years ago I wrote a blog post talking about starting grad school. As I did so, I imagined what I would write two years later when it came time to graduate.

I knew I would write about Moana. I just didn’t realize it would be this post.

Wait so Erik for the past two years you have been planning on writing a blog post comparing yourself to a fictional island princess?

Yep. Be honest, you would’ve been surprised if I hadn’t.

I freaking love Moana. Great movie. Even better soundtrack.

As I pictured what a successful MBA experience would look like, I couldn’t help but think of the song How Far I’ll Go.

Much like Moana has spent her whole life called by the horizon of an endless sea, I have felt compelled to pursue entrepreneurship. That’s been my line where the sea meets the sky.

I entered Wharton expecting that a successful experience would be something like starting my own company to pursue post-graduation. At the very least, I thought I would be joining a high-flying startup ready to experience the world of hypergrowth. This post then would’ve been about how entrepreneurship has been calling to me my whole life and I couldn’t help but climb into my little sailboat and make for the horizon with the Disney princess-esque confidence that my destiny lay somewhere beyond the reef.

But this is not that post.

Please don’t be distressed, my faithful reader. Though this is not the post that I was expecting, it is not a sad post. Quite the opposite in fact. My MBA experience turned out very different than how I expected it would.

And I couldn’t be happier.

But before I get to what is next, I want to discuss the path that got me here.

The Path Revisited

I’ve written before about my belief that the mystical “path” that everyone tells us we need to be on is a lie. I have taken a professional path less traveled. Whenever the opportunity presented itself I opted to veer away from the well-worn path. This strategy got me where I am today, and I don't regret it, but I do sometimes wonder if it was the right one.

Part of me wonders if it was motivated by a lack of patience on my part. I can have a tendency to spend too much time thinking about what is next instead of living in the present. In some ways, this can be a good thing. It motivates me and helps me think long-term. In other ways it hampers me. It keeps me from being content with what I have and it causes me to become frustrated if I don't feel like I am growing and progressing.

This one, a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing. Hmph! Adventure. Ha! Excitement. Ha! A Jedi craves not these things.

From the outside looking in my path may seem nice and clear. You get good at making it seem that way when applying to MBA programs.

If you ask me my story I will tell you how everything I have done is according to a north star. How each step in my journey set me up perfectly for the next one and how each has marched me towards my goal of being a builder of great things.

There is truth in that story. A lot of truth in fact. But isn’t the whole truth.

The whole truth is that my path has looked far straighter and more purposeful in hindsight. (As I am guessing most people's do). I haven't always had a grand plan. Whenever I thought I did, those grand plans have inevitably been discarded as I have grown and matured and realized they were facsimiles of what I thought I wanted.

When I first graduated from undergrad I thought I would spend my career as a venture capitalist. I thought I would be the person to say “yes” to entrepreneurs trying to change the world. I thought that’s how I would leave my mark. Then I became disillusioned with a world that, to quote a good friend, had an altogether too high “ratio of noise to substance.” I became frustrated by seemingly ever-present grifters and entrepreneurs more interested in being the modern rock stars our society labels “founders” than in actually building a business.

Eventually, I realized I didn’t want to be a VC. I wanted to do something more substantial. I wanted to work on the other side of the table. I thought I would take everything I had learned as an investor and catapult myself to success as an entrepreneur. The fact that I didn’t have any real expertise or a problem I wanted to solve was inconsequential. I would go to grad school and slingshot myself onto the stage at conferences wearing my company’s logo t-shirt beneath a sports jacket so I could wax lyrical about how my company was changing the world.

Well, I tried that. Didn’t work.

In my first year at school, I worked on my own startup idea. The idea had some promise, but it was in a space that was quickly growing too hot, serving customers I didn’t really understand, and leveraging absolutely zero unique insights or connections that made me the right person to start that company.

So I scrapped that and spent my MBA summer interning at a promising startup in a space I was passionate about from my time as an investor. I enjoyed the work, the team, and the fast-paced startup environment, but something still didn’t feel quite right.

I realized with my background as an investor and my MBA education startups would love to hire me. But only for general business/operational roles. Roles that required someone who was smart and good at problem-solving. Roles that would further cement my status as a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none. I realized I didn’t want to continue being a mile wide and an inch deep. I wanted to develop skills, expertise, and know-how that I could leverage no matter what I did in the future.

In some ways, I think I have been too harsh on "the path". I see other people who paid their dues and built a foundational skillset in a particular area or industry and I can't help but be envious. In contrast, sometimes I feel like an anchorless ship drifting upon the currents of my own aspirations.

After two years at Wharton, I see the path a little bit differently now. Instead of a pre-ordained beeline directly to your life’s great work I believe it is instead a much more iterative process. A series of experiments.

Have a hypothesis. Test it. Learn from the outcome. Re-orient and plan your next experiment.

I thought I wanted to start my own company. I tried that and realized I needed to have more of a unique insight/skillset to anything I might one day start.

I thought I wanted to work at a startup. I tried that and realized that I didn’t want to be a generalist or part of the crew on someone else’s ship.

In some ways, the next step in my career seems like a far cry from what I expected to be doing post-graduation. But if you zoom in a bit, the journey from there to here has been a series of iterative stepping stones as I learned more about myself and what I wanted from my career.

The Next Experiment

Earlier I said that my path only really looks clear in hindsight. The truth is that the only real undercurrent my path has ever had has been my desire to build something important. I didn’t know what that would be or how I would build it. I just knew I wanted to build something and that I wanted that something to matter (defining what matters is a conversation for a different time).

This desire to build was what motivated me to be an investor. It’s what motivated me to try being a founder and then an operator.

It’s taken me a long time to realize that if I want to be fulfilled professionally I need to build something.

And so for my next experiment, I am going to a place where I can actually learn how.

This week I’m starting as a Product Manager at Capital One and I couldn’t be more excited.

I am excited to learn how to build products. How to work with engineers and to guide software development. How to delve deeply into the needs of customers and prioritize solutions that solve their biggest problems.

For all of my career, I have wanted to “build” without really knowing what that entailed.

And I am excited that I am finally taking the time to learn.

When I started at Wharton, I didn’t really expect to be taking this kind of role or joining this kind (or size) of company post-graduation. But I am confident in the path I have followed to get here and that this next step is the right one for me and my family. Here’s why.

It’s A Wonderful Life

One of my all-time favorite movies is It’s a Wonderful Life. Besides being a Christmas classic, it also is an evergreen story of a man who finds meaning, not in what he thought he wanted, but in the relationships he stumbled into following a path he was pressured into. I’ve written about how my biggest surprise from my Wharton experience has been my lesson that what I do matters less than the person I become along the way.

I am trying to be more like George Bailey. I am trying to build a wonderful life. A life that is less focused on what seems cool or what I think I want and more on becoming the best man, husband, father, and friend I can be. And I believe this job is the next step in that journey.

When I started at Wharton, I expected my next steps to be defined by the Moana song “How Far I’ll Go.”

At the end of the experience, I now realize that what I am looking for in the next stage of my career in life is better explained by a different Moana song, Where You Are.

Moana, stay on the ground now

Our people will need a chief and there you are

There comes a day

When you’re gonna look around

And realize happiness is where you are

In an ironic twist, my MBA journey actually represents the opposite of Moana’s. She was held back by feelings of family pressure and longed for the adventure of the sea. I started Wharton longing for the status and adventure of entrepreneurship and unexpectedly found myself in a place where my priorities had shifted towards family, relationships, and seeking contentment.

I believe in the principles with which I decided to join Capital One. I believe that it is a role that will allow me to focus less on where I am going and more on the person I am becoming along the way.

Three quick anecdotes (that may or may not become full-blown blog posts at some point) that I think hammer home the transformation I have experienced over the past two years:

Opting out of Pie Eating Contests

One of the most transformational experiences I had at Wharton was participating and then being a leader in a program called P3. P3 stands for Purpose, Passions, and Principals. It is a small group program where we read through the book Springboard by the legendary Wharton Professor Richard Shell who created Penn’s famous “Success Course”.

The program entails spending six weeks discussing big questions such as “what do I want from life”, “what are my core values”, and “why am I pursing the goals I am”.

I think it would be a useful book to read for anyone at any stage in life, but it is especially appropriate during a time of transition such as grad school.

The book includes a variety of memorable anecdotes, but my favorite is about an entrepreneur who goes to his trusted lawyer asking for recommendations on who to hire as an in-house counsel. The lawyer, who is a partner at his firm, offers to take the job himself despite the offering being for much less money than the lawyer is currently making. Surprised the entrepreneur asks why the lawyer wants to leave his high-powered role and the lawyer responds that “It is just a question of more pie.”

He goes on to explain:

“Working the way I have all my life is like a pie-eating contest. I worked in high school to get into a great college. Then I worked in college to get into a great law school. Then I worked at the law school to get a job at a top-flight law firm. Then I worked at the law firm to make partner. I’ve finally figured out that it is all just a big pie-eating contest. You win, and the price is always… MORE PIE. Who wants that?”

For most of my career, I have been chasing more pie and boy, is it easy to continue to do that at a place like Wharton. When everyone is interviewing for the upper echelon of banking and consulting firms you begin to wonder if maybe you should be too.

I am going to Capital One because of what I intend to learn there. But I am also going to Capital One because it is a place that treats its employees like people. A place that prioritizes balance and where I can live in the area my wife and I have always talked about building our family. Capital One represents an opportunity for me to opt out of pie-eating contests. I still want to work hard and ambitiously, but my focus isn’t simply the accumulation of more pie, but on personal fulfillment and growth.

Gryffindor to Hufflepuff

This one is quick but revealing. You know those sorting hat quizzes that tell you what house you would get sorted into in Harry Potter? Going into school I always was a Gryffindor. I wanted to be the hero in every story. I wanted to be the person in the limelight for having saved the day. Recently on some post-graduation travel, my friends and I were taking the sorting hat quiz and discussing our results for fun. For the first time in my life, I was sorted into Hufflepuff. At first, I was indignant.

I am not a Hufflepuff, I am a Gryffindor!

But even as I heard myself thinking that I realized that it was an incredibly poignant example of the growth I had experienced over the past two years.

When I entered Wharton I wanted to be a courageous leader. The daring knight who saved the day.

As I leave Wharton I am much more focused on being a better person. Being a kind, loyal, ethical, and hardworking man.

Maybe you’ll find this anecdote a bit silly, but for anyone who is familiar with Harry Potter, I think it does a great job of capturing my changed priorities.

A picture of the lake next to my family’s cabin in Norway.

The Mondays and Tuesdays

Post-graduation I got to spend some time traveling around Europe. A big highlight was getting to go to Norway to spend some time with my relatives on my dad’s side of the family. While spending some time at the Berg family cabin in the mountains, we went for a hike and I ended up spending the bulk of the time talking with my Aunt Hilde. She wanted to hear about my Wharton experience and we discussed many of the topics I have written about in this post. I told her that my priorities had shifted and that I was more focused on my family and on finding contentment versus always looking toward the horizon.

That’s when she told me about her husband Leif. Leif passed away from cancer when I was younger, but his presence still looms large in my family. On top of being my Aunt’s husband, he was also my dad’s childhood best friend and so his loss hit my family hard. He was an exceedingly kind man with a larger-than-life sense of humor that brightened any room he entered. My aunt told me about how when he was diagnosed with cancer, she asked him what he wanted to do with the time that he had left. Did he want to travel? Were there items that he wanted to check off his bucket list?

I’ll never forget what she told me his response was.

“I just want the Mondays and Tuesdays.”

Here was a man with limited time left. And all he wanted was as much of his normal everyday life as possible. He wanted to work for as long as he could and spend time with his family and friends as he always had.

There are rare moments in life when someone tells you something and you immediately know that it is going to stick with you for the rest of your days.

My Uncle’s idea of “the Mondays and Tuesdays” was one such moment for me.

I don’t know where my path is going to take me. I don’t know if I am going to stay at Capital One for three years or thirty. I don’t know if we are here to stay in Virginia, as we expect, or if something unforeseen will draw our family elsewhere.

But whatever happens, I know that if I can find a way to fall in love with my Mondays and Tuesdays, I’ll have a pretty good shot at leading a worthwhile life. Admittedly, this is probably something that is easier said than done, but I think my newfound strategy of prioritizing relationships and the journey of becoming a better version of myself every day is as good of a path to a good life as any.

Thank You

Thanks for following along over the past couple years. I wrote with less frequency and regularity than I would have liked, but my priority was fitting this blog into my grad school experience and not the other way around. I am sure I will have more thoughts and insights on this transition in the weeks and months to come. I’m not sure how this blog will change as I re-enter the working world. I’d love to keep writing and I hope you continue to follow along.

Journey before destination.

Erik

Builder or Investor?

The summer before my junior year was one of the most impactful couple of months in my life. I had two internships that summer, one at a PE shop in Chicago and one at a medical device startup in New Hampshire. Chicago was the first time I ever really lived on my own. As a social extrovert, this was hard but, ultimately, really good for me. My summer in Chicago was a step function increase in my personal growth. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I met the woman who would go on to become my wife shortly after returning to school in the fall. I was finally mature enough for that kind of relationship, and my time in Chicago had a lot to do with that. 

If Chicago was an accelerant for personal growth, New Hampshire was a catalyst for significant professional development. 

I was working at a medical device company while also living with the CEO and his family. It was an intensive business boot camp. During the workweek, I did a rotation throughout the company working on a new project each week. Combined with daily 1v1s with departmental heads, the internship served as a fantastic introduction to the various dimensions of a technology business. 

Outside of work, the CEO had me do his P90X workouts with him every day before work at 5 am. This may sound early, but it was a luxury compared to the 4 am wake-up calls I had on the weekends for fishing. 

I learned a lot through this experience. I learned the importance of being able to speak just as easily with a dockhand as with a CEO. I learned what a world-class culture feels like and the impact of working at a mission-driven company. I learned that if you want to be truly successful, it is more important to be among the world’s best at something than what that something is. 

I think I learned as much out on the boat talking with the CEO as I did in the office. One conversation in particular sticks out. He told me, “at some point, every successful person has to decide whether they want to be a builder or an investor.” 

The concept of builder vs. investor has informed much of my career thus far. 

After school, I had the opportunity to work at an elite, global investment shop like The Carlyle Group. I got so much from that experience, but I knew pretty early that I wanted to try to find a way back into the startup world as my next step. I knew that I wanted to be part of building companies that make an impact through solving important problems, but I didn’t know the first thing about actually working at a startup. 

I thought through my potential options as follows: 

1. I could go try to work at a startup. 

2. I could go try to work at a big tech company. 

3. I could try to get into venture capital. 

My only tangible skills were financial management and analysis, so if I did pursue being an operator, it would have to be in some sort of financial analyst role. As positive as large swathes of my Carlyle experience had been, it had also made me realize that I didn’t want to be a cog in the wheel at another big company. Spending the previous two years working on billion-dollar oil & gas transactions also made me want to work with more nascent companies. 

So I actually saw my options as follows: 

1. Try to find a startup to join. It would have to be in a financial analyst role, which generally only more mature companies recruit. I would be buying a single lottery ticket, but it would really pay off if the company became super successful. 

2. Try to become a VC. I hoped to leverage my investor’s skill set to land a role at a seed-stage investing shop working with early-stage companies. Instead of a single lottery ticket, I rationalized that I would have visibility on a whole host of different startups. I would develop a broad view of what success looked like, which could inform whatever was next. 

I decided to pursue the VC path. My logic was that I could be a real growth partner to startups. I may not be doing the building myself, but I would be an integral part of that process as an investor. I thought I could be a builder through being an investor. 

And I was wrong. 

Now I don’t regret my choice. It worked out well for me. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a VC. I learned a lot, built a ton of great relationships, and ultimately ended up here at Wharton, which had been my goal for as long as I could remember.

I didn’t make a wrong choice, but I can see that my logic was fundamentally flawed with hindsight. 

The reality is that VCs aren’t builders. They may think they are, and maybe as partners on boards, VCs are adjacent to the building process, but they aren’t builders. Not really. Especially not junior-level VCs. 

I had this deep desire to build something meaningful. To be part of creating something new that I could hang my hat on, point to, and say, “I did that.” And as much as I wished it could, I realize now that VC was never going to scratch that itch. 

I think a lot of junior and would-be VCs fall into this builder trap. They want to be a company builder, but they don’t have any sort of technical or operational background, so they pursue being a VC. The career provides access to startups has a sheen of sexiness (to its ultimate fault, I would argue).

After a couple of years, all the associates who wanted to be builders end up pretty disillusioned because they aren’t making the impact they had hoped they would.

What generally happens next is these aspiring builders leverage the network they have cultivated and their knowledge of startups to land an operating role at a company. Going from VC to operator isn't a bad route at all (at least I hope not because it is the one I am pursuing!). You will leave VC with a robust network in the space, a high-level view of what it takes to build a successful tech company, and the ability to evaluate what strong companies look like. 

I don't think this path is as good as jumping straight into an operating role at a future unicorn, but it probably has a lower variance. Worst comes to worst, you can always go and get your MBA and use that as a springboard onto the operating side of the table 😊.

You can't really make a wrong choice when deciding between being an operator and an investor, but I do think you can make a suboptimal one based on your ultimate aspiration. 

The number one piece of advice I have for folks interested in pursuing venture capital is to take the time to think about why they want to become a VC. Do they want to be a builder or an investor? 

With the benefit of hindsight, my recommendation is only to pursue being a venture capitalist early on in your career if you want to be an investor. 

If you want to be a builder long term and pursue VC as a path into that world, you'll get broad exposure, but you'll likely be frustrated with how little impact you make on companies (the extent to which VCs make a tangible impact on companies in general is a debate for another post). 

Instead, join a high-growth company. Optimize more for growth and sitting next to brilliant people. Optimize less for the particulars of your role. You can always get into VC down the road. Operating experience will only make you a better, more empathetic, and more credible investor.  

If you want to be an investor and want VC to be your asset class of choice, then great! You won’t make as much money as being a PE bro, but the companies you work with are about 1000x cooler, and you may even be able to invest in some companies that change the world. 

As with most things in life, there isn't one ideal path. The path you choose matters less than what you do while on it. 

But before deciding to jump into the VC rabbit hole, think about what you really want. 

Do you want to be a builder or an investor?

The answer will inform a lot. 

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If you have thoughts on this post leave a comment below or reach out to me on twitter @abergseyeview where my DMs will forever be open.

If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe here to receive all of my posts delivered directly to your inbox every Monday morning.

If this is the first time you are reading something I wrote and you want to learn more about me, this is a good place to start. It includes some background on me as well as a collection of my top posts.

Your Life's Great Work

There have been times over the last couple of months where I have been struggling.

I have written before about how getting my MBA at Wharton is a realization of a life-long dream. But sometimes there is a double-edged sword to achieving a dream.

I have been orientating myself towards getting my MBA for so long, now that I am here, I have been at a bit of a loss for what I want to do next. This question has caused me an undue amount of stress and anxiety over the past few months, but I am happy to say that I feel like I have worked through it and come out on the other side. I want to share how I grappled with some of these existential questions and where I landed.

The Green Grass of Measurability

There are a lot of things that make the MBA experience unique. One of them is how condensed it feels. Two years is a relatively short amount of time to pack in the learning, relationships, growth, and career moves that you expect to make. If we are being honest this probably creates challenges for all of us at one point or another. A common area where this rears its head is with jobs. Many of my fellow students started recruiting for their summer internship almost as soon as they arrived in the fall. Others are only now starting to work on figuring out their summer plans. This mismatch creates a recipe for comparison and anxiety. Maybe you are practicing cases while your friends are out celebrating. Or maybe you are anxiously twiddling your thumbs as all your friends start to receive offers and you are just getting started on your search.

I definitely fall into this second camp. Now, I knew this was going to be the case. I knew going in that I wouldn’t be part of a straightforward recruiting process. My chief goal at graduate school was and is to launch my own business. And even as I do explore less-entrepreneurial paths, there is absolutely zero part of me that is interested in the sort of jobs that hire using that kind of process-heavy structure. Even still, it is hard to not be envious of the clear feedback loops those processes entail. I have found myself envious of my peers’ ability to measure where they are at and how they are doing within their job search even if the jobs themselves are of no interest to me. The grass really is always greener.

The Great Work Trap

When it comes to big decisions about careers or life or marriage or anything else, the path forward is often littered with mental traps. One of the most common traps that I have written about before is the belief in a “path” that no longer exists (or maybe never really did). Another one I discovered for myself is the Great Work Trap.

My first semester at school I was mostly focused on making friends, getting my family settled in a new city, and remembering how to be a student again. As I started to find my sea legs a bit towards the tail-end of the semester, my attention started to turn to what I would be doing over my summer internship and post-graduation. For those who don’t know, your summer internship during your MBA is generally seen as a very important stepping stone towards whatever you want to do post-graduation. There is a lot of pressure to find the right opportunity over the summer especially for jobs with more structured recruiting processes like banking or consulting.

As I started to spend time thinking about what I wanted to do, I found myself getting stuck. First, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. Having previously worked as a VC, there were parts of the industry that I absolutely loved, but other parts that I didn’t love so much. I also am very interested in getting operating experience either at an early stage startup or through starting my own venture. Do I try to go back into venture and find a firm that is a better long-term fit? Do I try to get a taste for the operating side of things? Do I try to start my own thing at school with the guard rails, free-time, and lowered opportunity costs that it affords?

In some ways, I still don’t have the answers, but after spending way too much time thinking about it and talking with people who are a lot wiser than me, I have learned to let go of some of the questions.

I think I have looked towards getting my MBA as this inflection point in my life and career for so long that I have simply been putting too much pressure on myself. I had been trying to figure out what my Life’s Great Work would be so that I could launch into it like a slingshot after I graduated.

I’ve come around to realizing that life very rarely works that way.

I think the journeys towards the great works of our life tend to only appear in hindsight.

Very few people point to the distance, decide what their career will look like, and then unnervingly succeed in pursuing that vision. I now believe that when done right, careers are much more iterative processes. You run a bunch of experiments. You double down on the things that are a good fit and you cut out the things that aren't. I like to think of Boyd Varty’s concept of tracking. You explore and you find a clue of where you want to be. That clue leads you to the next one. Sometimes you lose the trail and have to circle back around. But if you are patient, you will eventually track your way to where you want to be.

We also put unnecessary pressure on ourselves because we lack perspective. Careers are long. Much longer than we give them credit for. Too many of us, myself very much included, place undue importance on figuring them out as quickly as possible. In undergrad, everyone acted like their first job out of college was the end-all-be-all that would define the course of their life. How many of your friends were still working at their first job even just a few years after graduation? 1? Maybe 2? And yet here we are again just a few years later acting like our life will be a success or failure solely based on the summer internship we get over the summer.

What I am looking for in my work

So now that the pressure is off a bit where have I landed? First, instead of trying to figure out exactly what I want to do, I set out to figure out the aspects of a job that were important to me. Probably the piece of content I have recommended to more people than any other is a great Wait, But Why post on picking a career. It is the first resource I recommend to friends or colleagues who are struggling to figure out what they want to do next and as such a few weeks ago I decided to work through it myself. If you feel like you are just going through the motions and want to try to find some direction in your life, give yourself two hours, a pen, some paper, and dive in.

The post includes a series of mental exercises to think through the “yearnings” that are important to you and slowly sort through what your priorities are. Here is my professional yearnings hierarchy for any job or career prospects.

My Professional Yearnings Hierarchy

The Non-Negotiable Bowl - Lines in the sand that I will never compromise on

1. To be valued

2. To be respected

3. To work with incredible people

The Top Shelf - Absolute priorities that I will be looking for no matter what I do

1. To learn something new every single day

2. To be intellectually challenged

3. To have the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with people

The Middle Shelf - Things that are important to me but that I can compromise on so long as my Non-Negotiable Bowl and Top Shelf yearnings are satisfied

1. To be given autonomy

2. To have skin in the game

Bottom shelf - Things that would be nice to have

1. To be given a variety of work to do

2. To be appreciated

The Trash Can - Things that I may sometimes find myself tempted to want, but that I need to actively fight against letting have any bearing whatsoever on my life decisions

1. To be admired

2. To work at a prestigious firm

3. To work in a career where I can acquire status and fame

You are building your own house

Once I had thought through what I was looking for I had to decide what I actually wanted to do next. Instead of committing to a path, I have decided to focus on becoming the type of person who builds. The advice is the same as I give to anyone who wants to be in a relationship. Focus a little less on finding someone to date and focus a little more on becoming the kind of person someone else would want to date.

I don’t know what my life’s great work is. I don’t know what my career is going to look like.

But what I do know is that I want to be a company builder. That can look like a lot of different things and I can get valuable skills from all sorts of different endeavors. Instead of focusing on finding the exact right career, now I want to focus on going somewhere where I can have my work yearnings met and can build the skills to become the type of leader, builder, and entrepreneur I know I want to be. Whether I put those skills to use next year or many years down the road.

One of the most impactful books I have ever read is the book Chop Wood, Carry Water. One of the stories in the book is about a master architect who has made a career building some of the most beautiful houses in the world. After a long and storied career, he decides to retire but his boss asks him to build one last house. He begrudgingly agrees but he doesn’t put his usual love and care into the project. Once the house is built, he goes back to his boss to finally resign for good and his boss gives him the keys to the house he had just built as a thank you for a career of excellence. All this time the architect had been building his own house and he had no idea. If he had known he would’ve put much more effort into it than he did.

It’s easy to forget that we are building our own house. It’s so easy to get caught up in where we are doing or our next move or what we will do after school.

What’s hard is to remember is that much more important than what we are doing is who we are becoming in the process.

It’s taken me a lot of self-reflection and frustration to remember that.

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If you have thoughts on this post leave a comment below or reach out to me on twitter @abergseyeview where my DMs will forever be open.

If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe here to receive all of my posts delivered directly to your inbox every Monday morning.

If this is the first time you are reading something I wrote and you want to learn more about me, this is a good place to start. It includes some background on me as well as a collection of my top posts.

My Ethical Manifesto

Recently, I have been making an intentional effort to consciously shape my identity. I have a notion page that outlines a list of choices I make about what I want my identity to be that I read out loud to myself every week. Some of these choices, like “I choose to be a bridge-builder and I seek to find commonalities instead of differences,” are born out of self-awareness. Others, like “I choose to be encouraging and empathetic towards others” are more aspirational aspects of my self-identity that I am actively working on building towards. One of the items on my self-identity list is “I choose to act ethically in all things I do. I don’t take shortcuts and I don’t compromise on my morals.” This semester I took a business ethics course that gave me an excellent opportunity to think deeply about the ethical beliefs and values that I want to guide my personal and professional conduct. Our final project was to write a paper describing the characteristics of a responsible leader. Our professor encouraged us to think of this as more of a personal manifesto than a simple assignment and I thought it would be worth sharing and keeping updated. Think of this as a guide of the kind of leader I aspire to be and the characteristics I will be looking for anyone I choose to work for.

My definition of an ethical and responsible leader has coalesced around six main pillars.

1. Lead from a place of vulnerability

2. Provide others with an ideal to strive towards

3. Treat everyone with honor

4. Courageously challenge the status quo

5. Invert the Fundamental Attribution Error

6. Don’t take shortcuts.

Lead from a place of vulnerability

I believe that one of the most important things that a leader can do to promote a culture of ethical and responsible business practice is to lead from a place of vulnerability. From Enron, to WorldCom, to Theranos, we have seen the danger that comes from leaders who promote a culture where they are above reproach. The challenge for leaders must be to create an environment where immoral behavior is not given the opportunity to flourish. Otherwise decent people do bad things when their environment puts pressure on them be it from peers, authority, incentives, roles, or the system within which they find themselves. Those who are used to professional success are especially prone to suffering from the ‘Bathsheba Syndrome’ of thinking that they are entitled to special treatment and that the rules don’t apply to them.[1] Maintaining an air of humility and vulnerability is one of the most surefire ways to create an environment where there are no shadows for unethical behavior to fester. When a leader acknowledges that they are not always right and welcomes critical feedback they create an environment where issues are brought to light instead of hushed up in darkness. On the other hand, if a leader surrounds themselves with “yes men” and creates a culture where they cannot be questioned, the chances that they act unethically themselves, even if unintentionally, are significantly multiplied. As is the chance that their underlings will cover up unethical behavior out of fear of the leader’s reaction. By leading from a place of vulnerability, by looking at challenges or failures as an opportunity to learn and grow, leaders create a culture that encourages responsible behavior and discourages immoral actions.

Provide others with an ideal to strive towards

              A responsible leader should provide an ideal to strive towards for both themselves and their employees. In Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer series, they have a word for the empire’s commander-in-chief: “Promachos” which means “The One Who Goes Before Us to Fight.”[2] I believe that the modern responsible leader should be one who leads by example. Someone who sets the bar high for themselves and provides their team with an aspirational ideal to strive towards. A Promachos. When given the chance, people tend to rise to the occasion. This is exemplified by the fact that people are more likely to act ethically when they are reminded of their morals or asked to take an honor pledge.[3] When a leader holds themselves and those around them to a higher standard and points their team towards an aspirational purpose, people will be drawn towards living up to those ideals. French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is quoted as having said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”[4] People are much more motivated by purpose or mission than they are from the rigid and dogmatic rules that seem like the strategy de jour of the modern workplace. A common pitfall of leaders is getting too involved in telling people what to do instead of telling people where to go. While working as the CEO of Expedia in 2003, Dara Khosrowshahi captured this ideal perfectly when he said a young engineer confronted him and told him that “you’re telling us what to do, but not telling us where to go. If you tell us where to go we’ll do it because we believe in you, tell us where to go and then we’ll do it.”[5] Great leaders create the vision for the company and then trust their people to do what it takes to accomplish that vision. This promotes people having the space to think for themselves and avoids situations where employees stop scrutinizing work through a moral lens or avoid thinking critically about whether their current course of action is the right one.

Treat everyone with honor  

              It is critical for leaders to treat others with honor. With fairness, respect, and empathy. The importance of this is grounded in my personal Christian belief system where all people are created in God’s image. As such, our value is intrinsically based, not on what we do, but on who we are and that means that everyone, whether they be an executive or a janitor, deserves to be treated with empathy, respect, and dignity. This requires us to treat people with honor regardless of what ethnic, social, sexual, or religious group they may belong to. Treating people honorably also means being fair to them. It means treating people like the adults they are and communicating with them in a direct way.  To dole out praise or criticism when warranted. To tell people the truth, not what they want to hear. Ambiguity in the workplace is opportunity for unethical behavior to flourish and a responsible leader must do their upmost to be clear and direct. Netflix is a company that exemplifies this brand of respectful, but direct communication perfectly. Netflix is focused on building a high-performing team and they think of themselves more like a sports team than a family. They honor their employees by treating them like adults and trusting them to make responsible decisions for themselves as exemplified by their 5-word policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses: “Act in Netflix’s Best Interest.”[6]

Courageously challenge the status quo

              One of the more important things a responsible leader must do is promote a culture where people feel empowered to question the status quo. Speaking truth to power is never easy, but it is vitally important. A leader is responsible for doing what they can to empower their employees as much as possible and I believe that the best way to do this is to set a tone of questioning how things have always been done. Leaders must push themselves and their employees to always ask “why” and to reexamine previously held maxims in light of changing circumstances. In his inaugural address to students at the University of St. Andrews, philosopher John Stuart Mill stated that “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”[7] If leaders do not promote a culture of questioning established orthodoxy and convention, the chance that their employees will stand up in the face of immoral actions is minimal. One way that leaders can do this is to consciously subvert the pressures that may lead employees to act unethically. An example of how this can be done on a personal level comes from my parents. A common refrain of theirs is to “always live within your means.” Part of this advice is given from the perspective of being fiscally responsible, but the second order meaning is to always have “screw you money”. Having a financial cushion gives you the ability to never compromise on your ethics if you are asked to do something immoral for work. If your boss is pressuring you to do something you know to be wrong, you are much more likely to be able to stand up to them if you have reduced the financial pressure of making ends meet by spending within your means. If you are left with no other option, you can always walk away. It is important to safeguard the optionality to leave, but the best option is to build an organization where people are willing to stand up for what they believe to be right. In the workplace, I think leaders can promote a culture that challenges the status quo by focusing the organization on pursuing “knowledge” over being “right”. A leader who sets the tone by challenging themselves and others to always critically examine why things are done the way they are and question whether they can improve will be a leader who empowers their employees to courageously stand up and be counted when they know that something is wrong.   

Invert the Fundamental Attribution Error

             The Fundamental Attribution Error is our tendency to explain away our faults or missteps while holding others to account for even the most minor of infractions. I believe that a responsible leader should seek to invert the fundamental attribution error by holding themselves accountable based on their actions while giving others the benefit of the doubt and allowing for the possibility of extenuating circumstances. In his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College, American author David Foster Wallace outlines the practical application of this maxim in a speech titled: “This is Water.”[8] He discusses how easy it is to fall into the “default setting” of assuming the whole world is out to get you and believing that you alone are a victim of everyone else’s laziness and ineptitude. The challenge he prescribes is to awaken yourself to an awareness of the world around you. To not get mad at the car that cuts you off in traffic because you allow for the potential that they may be rushing their wife to the hospital. Just as a goldfish may live their entire life without questioning what water is, so too can people live their lives without taking agency for themselves and acknowledging that they are part of a larger human existence than the myopathy of their personal perspective would lead them to believe. I believe it is crucial for a responsible leader to cultivate this openness to giving others the benefit of the doubt. Even if sometimes they will be disappointed, I personally believe that it is better to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront has a great philosophy for operating called “putting the gun in the other person’s hand.”[9] The idea is when entering a business deal or negotiation to give the person on the other side of the table the opportunity to set the terms. Either they do so fairly and you know that you would like to work with them again in the future or they act in an unscrupulous manner and any short-term pain from the deal is well worth the knowledge that you won’t expose yourself to them again. Inverting the Fundamental Attribution Error allows you to empathetically see the world through other people’s eyes and give them the benefit of the doubt. This may lead to pain in the short-term, but it is the responsible thing to do in the long-term as you will, over time, self-select out of relationships with people who take advantage of your or act immorally.

Don’t take shortcuts  

              It seems to me that much of corporate ethical misconduct stems, not from a place of malicious intent, but from simply making the decision to take shortcuts which compounds upon themselves and leads to situations where people feel forced into unethical behavior. One compromise leads to another and eventually a morally upstanding person can find themselves in unanticipated moral ambiguity before too long. Clay Christensen’s belief that “it’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time” rings true.[10] The slightest compromise of your morals or ethics opens the door to future misconduct. This can be a path towards destructive habits and behaviors for both individuals as well as organizations. An insidious form of this propensity to take the easy way out is seen not just in misconduct itself, but in organizations who are willfully ignorant and turn a blind eye to unethical behavior going on under their watch. Not only does taking the easy way out often lead to morally unstable ground, but it delegitimizes good efforts. In class we talked about how if a kid cheats during a soap box derby, he will never know if he could’ve won without cheating. It is obvious how cheating harms others, but I would argue that much more of the damage falls on ourselves. One of my favorite mantras to think of is the idea that “we are building our own house” from the book Chop Wood, Carry Water.[11] The story told is about a famous architect who is asked to build one final home on the eve of his retirement. Begrudgingly, he goes about the project without his usual precision and enthusiasm. Once the home is completed his boss hands him the keys as a thank you for his years of service. Unbeknownst to the architect, he had been building his own house the whole time and if he had known so, he would’ve put much more time, thought, and effort into it. Taking shortcuts in life degrades the house that we are building for ourselves. A responsible leader needs to consider the impact that their words and actions have on others, but just as importantly they must be cognizant of the impact it has on themselves. A career is a marathon and surviving it with your dignity and ethical self-identity intact is the real winners’ medal. When I think of a responsible leader, I think of someone who steadfastly refuses to give in to the temptation to take shortcuts. I think of one of my all-time favorite literary characters, Dalinar Kholin, and his self-realization that “the most important step a man can take. It’s not the first one, is it? It’s the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.”[12]

I hope this was interesting and that the transmission from paper to blog post wasn’t too forced. If you haven’t taken the time to lay out the ethical paradigms you aspire to hold yourself to, I can’t recommend the process enough. It is enlightens your own actions and helps you identify environments that align with your ethical compass vs those that may put you in a situation to compromise it.

As with everything I write, this is a snapshot of my perspectives at this point. I am sure that as I continue on in my career and find myself in positions where leadership is more of a focus, that these principles will grow and evolve. I still think there is immense value in charting them out and questioning what you think to be ethical.

Journey before destination and until next time.

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If you have thoughts on this post leave a comment below or reach out to me on twitter @abergseyeview where my DMs will forever be open.

If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe here to receive all of my posts delivered directly to your inbox every Monday morning (or the occasional Tuesday).

If this is the first time you are reading something I wrote and you want to learn more about me, this is a good place to start. It includes some background on me as well as a collection of my top posts.

Sources:

[1] Wyatt Olson, “Do Fired Navy Cos suffer from ‘Bathsheba Syndrome’?”, Stripes, March 14, 2002, https://www.stripes.com/news/navy/do-fired-navy-cos-suffer-from-bathsheba-syndrome-1.171525  

[2] Brent Weeks, The Burning White, (Little, Brown Book Group, 2019), pg. 27.

[3] Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—especially Ourselves (New York: Harper, 2012), Chapter 2.

[4] Randy Howe, 1001 Smartest Things Teachers Ever Said, (Lyons Press: An Imprint of Globe Pequot Press, Guilford, Connecticut.), Page 51.

[5] Zameena Meija, “Here’s the moment Uber’s new CEO pick gained confidence in himself”, CNBC, August 28, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/28/when-ubers-ceo-pick-dara-khosrowshahi-gained-confidence-in-himself.html

[6] “Netflix Culture”, Netflix, https://jobs.netflix.com/culture

[7] John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Addresse, Delivered to the University of St. Andrews. Feb. 1st, 1867, (Longmans, 1867), pg. 36.

[8] David Foster Wallace, This is Water, Farnam Street, https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

[9] “Building Something People want to Buy, with Andy Rachleff,” Invest Like the Best, Episode 42, https://investorfieldguide.com/andy/

[10] Frances Bridges, “Lessons from Clay Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’”

[11] Joshua Medcalf, Chop Wood, Carry Water, (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), pg. 6.

[12] Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer, (Tom Doherty Associates, 2017), pg. 1132.

Quality

Sometimes you come across a concept that just sticks with you.

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a couple of years ago now, but there are a couple of concepts from the book that I find myself thinking of often. None more so than the idea of Quality.

For those who haven’t read it, the book is part fiction, part philosophy textbook, part autobiography, and part holy tome. It is an exploration of one man’s metaphysical journey to uncover the meaning behind the word “Quality” and the toll it took on him.

I’m not sure the book ever truly comes to a definitive answer, but if I had to sum it up I would say that something is of high quality if there is a sense that it is doing what it’s supposed to do. That it’s doing it well. That it’s fulfilling its purpose. That it is acting in accordance with its identity.

Quality is a certain rightness. It’s hard to put your finger on, but it is clear whether it is there or not.

The idea of Quality shows up everywhere once you are looking for it. In the startup world, we call it “product market fit.”

Product market fit is when there is a resonance between what you are building and a problem that needs solving in the world. When customers want your product so badly they are basically ripping it out of your hands. I love Michael Seibel’s description of product market fit in this week’s Invest Like the Best episode. He describes the utter craziness you experience when your company finds product market fit. There is no time to sit around waxing philosophically on whether or not you have found this mythical equilibrium between a product and a market need, you are simply running around like crazy trying to keep all your servers from getting shut down by a complete deluge of users.

I think we see the idea of Quality in our personal lives too.

I remember a crisp fall day in college when my fraternity was asking a sorority to go with us to homecoming (a tradition that I have nothing but fondness for due, in no small part, to the role it played in introducing my wife and I). There was another fraternity that was asking this same sorority, so things were pretty competitive and the stakes laughably high. I spent that day running all over campus wheeling and dealing. Cajoling and entreating. I was trying to get my brothers organized at the same time I was coming up with new ideas for events we could hold. I didn't have a chance to sit around and think, I was too busy problem solving and executing. Now the context around this example is a little silly, but I remember at one point having this shock of clarity where I thought "This is awesome. I am good at this. I like this." Creative problem solving, communication, taking action, working on a team. I was doing something that perfectly fit my strengths. And it felt amazing.

Unfortunately in life, I think we so often experience the idea of Quality through its absence. There may be a wrongness in our lives that we struggle to explain. We may feel tired, disjointed, frantic, and anxious. We may feel like we are doing something wrong but we don't quite know what. We feel somehow less than what we know we could be.

I know I've experienced this dissonance. This dearth of Quality. If Quality is finding that magical apex of purpose where we are doing exactly what we should be, then anything else is a fundamental breach of our identity. There are gradients to this of course, but I believe that over time, the results of sustained actions that run counter to our core self are inevitably disastrous.

If you are in a career or relationship that is discordant with your notion of your own identity and purpose, it will eat away at you. For a day, a month, or maybe even years, it can be tolerable. We can pull the wool over everyone's eyes, including our own. But eventually, it will degrade you in a way that leaves a mark.

Maybe you are just so drained you miss a step in other places of your life. Maybe you are irritable or quick to judge when you know you are naturally easy-going. Worst of all, maybe you start to shift your core identity away from what you know to be true in order to somehow make the days and years more tolerable.

I look around me and see this among my peers and friends. As I get started at business school I see it in my new classmates. I have felt it myself in my career and life. A fundamental mismatch between what I am doing and what I should be doing. I think that it is natural to experience this in life. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it is part of the human experience.

The unease you feel when acting counter to who you know yourself to be is actually a good thing. It is the latent potential energy that pulls you towards finding that apex of Quality where you are acting in a way that is core to your conception of self. Don't avoid it or pretend it isn't there. Lean into it. Ask yourself why you are feeling this way. What needs to change? Who are you? If you saw your ideal conception of yourself in this situation how would you expect them to act? How are you acting differently? Why are you acting differently?

Quality in sport, business, and life is magical. It is poetry in motion. It is a master at work on their craft. It is an internal rhythm and music that is in sync with the world around it. Like a tool in the toolbox that does exactly what it was designed to do and does it to perfection, living in accordance with your identity is the path to joy. Joy. Not happiness. Happiness is a stimulus-response from external actions. Joy is the music that your soul makes when you find the resonance point where your actions and words align perfectly with your identity, strengths, and purpose.

When you’ve found it, appreciate it and try to hold on to it. It may take years to build towards this resonance but, like a note played jarringly out of key, it can be lost in an instant by acting counter to who you are.

If you aren't there yet. That's ok! I'm not either. We've got time. People forget that life is long and full of possibilities. But pay attention. Pay attention to how your actions and the words you say make you feel. Pay attention to whether a relationship makes you feel better about yourself or worse. Pay attention to whether coworkers act in accordance with your value system or not. Social pressure is a helluva drug and if you surround yourself by people who act in a way that is discordant to you, it will be extremely hard not to eventually adjust yourself to appease them.

Stay strong. Stay curious. Think about yourself, and who you are, and what you were put on this earth to do. You may not have all the answers, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be asking the questions.

Whatever you do don’t settle. There is no quicker way to ruin your life than to accept a discordant path as "just the way it is". How many drones are there in our society who spend time with people who make them feel less then they are? Who work at jobs they hate? Corporate soldiers committing atrocities against others and themselves because they are just following orders. Wayword tools in the tool kit. Without purpose, form, or function.

If you are reading this and think, “man Erik woke up on the existential side of the bed this morning,” there is probably some truth in that. All this discussion of purpose and identity can sound a little whimsical at times.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in here. I hope I am getting to the heart of things. Maybe I am just dancing around it. Either way, I think it could be helpful for you to think about as I know it has been for me.

Our society holds up ideals that, for most of us, are of poor Quality. It worships freedom instead of purpose. Pleasure instead of joy. Memories instead of meaning. It tells us that work is only a means to an end and that relationships are worthwhile as long as they serve us.

I am not wise. I don't know how the world works better than anyone else. I am trying to figure it all out and these writings are a record of my thoughts and how they evolve. But one thing I have learned is that freedom is only a means to an end. True freedom is having the ability to choose what to commit yourself too and then doing so wholeheartedly.

If you are feeling ill at ease with where you are in life, join the club. Most of us do. Finding capital-Q “Quality” in our lives is the rarified air of a select few who choose not to settle for anything less than exemplary. Who refuse to bear the burden of a life lived in discord to oneself. Who stare into the face of the lies we are told, standing unassailably and whisper, "not for me."

It isn’t an easy path, but the right path rarely is.

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If you have thoughts on this post leave a comment below or reach out to me on twitter @abergseyeview where my DMs will forever be open.

If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe here to receive all of my posts delivered directly to your inbox every Monday morning (or the occasional Tuesday).

If this is the first time you are reading something I wrote and you want to learn more about me, this is a good place to start. It includes some background on me as well as a collection of my top posts.

Lessons Learned from 2+ Years of Weekly Writing

I wrote my first post on this blog in November 2017. Since then I have (more or less) been writing weekly. I started the blog as part of my job search process trying to find a job in venture capital. It has evolved into something so much more than that. Part professional development. Part mental health therapy. All me.

When I started this blog I wrote solely about the world of venture capital and technology startups. Over time, and especially after I got my job at a venture capital firm, the blog became more personal in nature. I liked this transition. I now write about whatever I want to write about. Turns out that venture capital still continues to be a meaningful part of that. But I also sprinkle in my personal development, views on pop culture, and lyrical waxings for flavor.

In this post, I will share some of the lessons I have learned along this journey so far.

Begin.

I will start with the most important part of writing. Starting it. The most common response I get from people who have read my blog is “I’ve always wanted to write!” Well, what is stopping you? I’m not trying to be insensitive. I know how hard it is. In some ways, it gets easier with practice and in some ways, it doesn’t. A blank page and a deadline are always intimidating. But there is something truly thrilling about it as well. The hardest part of writing something new every week is just writing that first sentence. Once you get going, it generally flows pretty easily. (In fact, if it isn’t flowing once you have started, that is usually a pretty good sign that you picked the wrong topic to write about.) My biggest piece of advice I can give is simply to start. I recently read the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and it is the book I recommend to anyone trying to write more. The anecdote she shares on the back of the book superbly sums up writing.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said "‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

If any of you are procrastinators like me I imagine this hit similarly close to home. It’s easy for writing to feel overwhelming. Whether it is a blog post, a novel, or even a tweet, it is always difficult to create something out of nothing. The best way to get over that hump is simply to start putting one foot in front of the other. To take it bird by bird. It doesn’t even have to be about what you ultimately want to write about. If you are struggling to come up with something to write, get out a blank piece of paper and jot down a running stream of your thoughts. You will be amazed by how much easier it is to start writing once your thoughts have started flowing.

The Power of Writing

Writing has gotten me into rooms and conversations that I had no business being a part of. I by no means have a massive following on this blog, but even I have seen huge asymmetric benefits come from it. Writing is the best kind of bet you can take. The downside is capped. For me the downside is time. I sacrifice an hour or two a week to write. It’s not nothing, but it also isn’t that big of a deal. I probably spend more time watching Hearthstone videos on youtube each week so if I need to cut something out that will be the first thing to go. A small sacrifice in the face of the potential upside. You never know who is going to read your work and reach out. You never know if what you’re saying will strike a chord with someone. I have had many personal and professional opportunities crop up solely because of my writing. And the best part is that writing compounds over time. The longer that I consistently write, the more it differentiates me. Things like writing are the best kind of flywheel. The more you do it, the more benefit you see from it, which makes you want to do it even more.

The Pocket Knife of the Mind

Recently I have gotten into pocket knives— ahem I mean multi-tools. My parents got me a fancy new backpack for my birthday and since then I have been into the idea of the “Everyday Carry” (or “EDC” if you are especially hip and yes, this really is a real thing). As part of that newfound interest, I have acquired a couple of new multi-tools. The thing that I have found with multi-tools is that if you don’t regularly use them, you don’t see any use for them. That changes as soon as you have one. Suddenly you see all kinds of uses for it everywhere. Writing is the same way. Once you get into the habit of coming up with stories, you start to see them everywhere. I write a post each week, but I generally come up with 2-3 ideas for new posts each week. When I am in the habit of keeping an eye out for those nuggets of an idea, I see them when they pop up. I am not special. You have these ideas too. You just aren’t used to seeing them that way since you aren’t used to the pocket knife of writing.

Develop a system

So all these little golden ideas I just mentioned. Everyone has them. But almost no one captures them. The world’s best idea won’t do you a lot of good if you don’t remember it when it comes time to start writing the next day.

It doesn’t really matter how you do it. You can use a notebook or an app or you can simply send yourself text messages. I have a page set up in Notion to capture all of my blog post ideas quickly from my phone. Whatever works for you, so long as you are able to quickly and efficiently capture and store those ideas so you can come back to them later and turn them into your magnificent writings.

Inconsistently Consistent

As with much of life, when it comes to putting out content, consistency is key. When I started writing I would do a post every 2-3 weeks. I didn’t have a real schedule and it was only ever when I could carve out some significant time for it. Over time, I focused on writing shorter posts more consistently. The one thing every audience appreciates, no matter how big or how small, is consistency. Set expectations with yourself and your audience and then stick to them. You don’t have to be militant about it. It’s your content, if you want to take a week off, you can. But know that the more consistent you can be the more it will positively impact your readership and the quality of your writing. When you stick to a consistent schedule, you get in a groove. You have an easier time getting started and you come up with more ideas of what to write about. My best advice is to pick whatever schedule that you can stick to consistently. It’s better to write something once a month than to write inconsistently every 1-3 weeks. Your readers will thank you for it and it WILL make your writing stronger.

Chop Wood and Carry Water

Writing is about the process. The quicker you can learn to fall in love with the process of writing, the quicker you will become a better writer. I am a big believer in being process-oriented in as much as you can in life. Writing is no exception. If you focus too much on the outcome you will either a) fall short of your goal or b) attain it at unnecessary costs. Focus on the process. Do I write for professional development and opportunities? Sure, but that isn’t my focus. I write for me. I practice writing so I can improve and hone that skill. I find writing therapeutic. Putting my thoughts into cogent sentences really helps me think through them. Sometimes I find myself surprised by the results. That is my focus. This blog would be worth writing even if no one ever read it. That’s how I am able to stick with it. I love that people read my blog. It means so much when someone reaches out to tell me that they enjoyed something I created.

But that’s only ever going to be the cherry on top. Because I have learned to fall in love with the inherent benefits of the writing process, not just the outcomes of that process. I have learned to chop wood and carry water when it comes to writing. And you can too.

Perfect is the enemy of good

At Carlyle, one of our founders had a saying: “By the time you have completed the most perfect due diligence you possibly can, you will have lost the deal.” Perfection is an impossible standard to strive towards and it is one of the biggest pitfalls that nascent writers have. There is this pressure thinking that if you are going to put a blog post or tweet out into the world it needs to be perfect. You should craft it with care, but perfection should never be the aim. If you won’t settle for anything less than perfect, you will never click that ‘Publish’ button. Do your best, read everything over for typos and then send that sucker on its merry way.

Let me let you in on a little secret I have learned about creating content on the internet. Say something uninteresting and no one cares. The algorithms won’t pick it up. It will be like it never even happened. Hate to break it to you, but no one is combing through your old posts to see how you messed up. If you, at some point, do reach the level of quasi-celebrity where someone is doing that, I imagine you have bigger fish to fry. No one will read your subpar writing, but write something good and it becomes a whole different story. Suddenly people are liking and sharing. The algorithms that buried your mediocrity are now pouring fuel on the fire of your achievement. Writing publicly is a totally asymmetric bet. Write poorly and no one knows. Write well and it will blow up. No, I am not saying to just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. But whatever you do, don’t try to be perfect.

Find What Works for You

As I mentioned, I originally started this blog as a way to land a job in venture capital. As such, my initial writing focused on researching and analyzing specific companies and markets. I wanted to show that I could do the work of being a VC before I actually was one. Once I actually got a job in the industry, my blog started to change. It became more personal. I started writing about the things I was interested in. My posts became shorter and more consistent. I was doing less research and more thinking. That’s what the blog is now. I write about the things I care about. Yes, venture capital and entrepreneurship. But also boardgames. And Arsenal. And whatever TV show I may be watching or book I may be reading. That’s the beauty of having a personal blog. You can be just that, personal. The internet is so big that writing about what I care about is interesting enough for others to tune in every week. And it is WAY more enjoyable for me to just write about whatever I want to write about. Remember, learn to fall in love with the process.

If you are thinking about writing, go for it. It’s a small sacrifice of time for big potential upsides down the road. Come up with a process and then fall in love with it. Don’t try to be perfect, just try to be genuinely you. The internet is big enough that you will find your tribe. If something you write flops, don’t sweat it because no one will read it. But the second you write something good it will seem like everyone will. Consistency over volume.

If even a small part of you feels like you may want to write, then just start and see where it takes you.

And if you get stuck, just remember to take things bird by bird.

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Don't Stop Imagining. The Day That You Do Is The Day That You Die

I’ve always loved books. Growing up I would speed through (or neglect) school work so that I could read whatever book I was engrossed in. When I was a kid, you could find me curled up in the corner of our couch in our living room reading for hours on end. I wasn’t anti-social. In fact, I am very much a social extravert, but I’ve struggled with social anxiety throughout my life— the irony is not lost on me— and books were always a safe haven that I could escape into. I especially loved fantasy and science fiction books.

I believe that a proper appreciation for fiction is sorely lacking in today’s modern society. Fiction is viewed as “fun” reading and not useful or practical in any way.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

First of all, what is wrong with doing something for enjoyment? Are we really so focused on productivity that we can’t do something for the sake of doing it? But more than that, I think fiction is absolutely valuable to the development and maintenance of a healthy person.

Fiction is an abstraction that allows us to discuss and grapple with things that are very, very real. Which is easier to understand: The heroism of a knight slaying a dragon or the heroism of a mother working two jobs to support her children? Both are heroic, but the abstraction of fiction allows us to interact with ideas in a more concrete and objective way than when we face them in real life. Joseph Campbell discusses mythology as the mirror by which our ego is able to view and judge itself. Fiction allows us to take a step outside of ourselves to see things as they are. It asks questions of us and demands answers in a way that so often be ignored in “real” life.

Famed fantasy author Ursula Le Guin has an excellent topic on the subject called Why are American’s Afraid of Dragons?. Le Guin discusses her belief that imagination and healthy escapism are fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. It is what allows us to think of a better future and to strive towards it. These thoughts can be channeled towards positive, aspirational ends or they can be suppressed. As with most core aspects of our identity, suppression of imagination deforms our thoughts into vehicles of jealousy and base cravings.

My favorite quote from the essay (and one of my favorite quotes ever):

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

I firmly believe that imagination is a muscle and just like any other, it requires exercise to be maintained. Fantasy and science fiction novels are a great way to keep your imagination in tip-top shape. Imagination is crucially important whatever you do. It’s how you see things other people don’t and set yourself apart from peers. It is also only going to become more and more important. As automation affects more jobs imagination and creativity are the qualities that will be most prized.

I hope that I have convinced you of the importance of fantasy. It’s not too late to start working out your most important mental muscle.

I have put together a list of my all-time favorite fantasy and sci-fi books for any that would like to get started.

The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

My all-time favorite series by my all-time favorite author. Brandon is the master of world-building and Stormlight is his masterpiece. Set on the broken and war-torn world of Roshar. The world of Stormlight is by far the most unique of any fantasy book I have ever read. There are twists and turns and the most epic cinematic action scenes you will read anywhere. As with most great high-fantasy novels, the Way of Kings takes some time to get going, but it is well worth the wait for the most incredible climax I’ve ever read. The best part of Sanderson is how prolific he is. The second and third installments, Words of Radiance and Oathbringer, are equally excellent and the 4th book in the series is on its way and expected to be released in late 2020.

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

The Wheel of Time is incredible. It’s by far my favorite complete fantasy series. There is a reason the Wheel of Time sits at the head of the modern fantasy pantheon. It starts with familiar fantasy tropes but evolves into so much more. The only thing more impressive than this series’ scope is the fact that Brandon Sanderson finished it in such a compelling way after the tragic death of the original author. The character work is especially strong. Every time you pick the book up it feels like you are hanging out with your close friends. The depth of this series really cannot be overstated. The time is right to at least read the first book (The Eye of the World) with Amazon working on the production of a live television adaption.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Far into the future, the human race has populated the solar system and adopted a stratified social structure based on the precepts of Ancient Rome. The Reds are the lowest of all the different castes working as laborers and slaves until one man decides that he has had enough. This book reads like an absolute action thriller. The book’s mix of futuristic and ancient is the absolutely perfect setting for its electrifying plot. My all-time favorite sci-fi book and my trojan horse to get people into reading.

Everything else by Brandon Sanderson

Did I mention how prolific Sanderson was? The rate at which he pumps out excellent books is unreal. I have never read a book by him that I haven’t loved. They come in all shapes, sizes and settings. Some are lighter fair. Some a hefty. Westerns, sci-fi, classic fantasy, and exciting heists. Sanderson writes it all. Most of his books even take place within the same universe and are littered with easter eggs between each of them. There is one character that even makes an appearance in every book. Every book by Brandon Sanderson is worth checking out, but here are some of my favorites:

• Mistborn - The coolest magic system of all his books

• Warbreaker - His best stand-alone novel

• The Emperor’s Soul - The Hugo Award-winning novela

The Gentlemen Bastards by Scott Lynch

The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of my favorite books every. It probably has the most likable and endearing main character of any book. This book is just fun. Set in a fictional city much like historic Venice, the book follows a guild of thieves on their heists, cons, and adventures. The book is laugh-out-loud funny and the action doesn’t disappoint either. I haven’t finished the series and the second book is pretty great, but the series’ initial book is an absolute standout.

The Expanse by James S. A. Corey

A fantastic Sci-Fi series for anyone who loves space westerns. The Expanse follows the exploits of the crew of the Rocinante during a time when the human race first learns that it is not alone in the universe. The Expanse is interesting for the territory it occupies. Far enough in the future that mankind has conquered the galaxy, but near enough that the world feels strikingly familiar to our own. My go-to sci-fi series and one I am excited to dive back into soon.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson

The heftiest book on this list. Malazan makes other high-fantasy books look like YA novels. It is what you get when a series is written by an anthropologist. This book series does not hold your hand at all. You get the distinct feeling that you are being provided a glimpse into a world that has existed long-before you happened upon it and will continue on long after you have gone your separate ways. Despite its uncompromising nature, I can promise you that you won’t regret picking it up. I have only read the first two books, but each was absolutely top-notch (Deadhouse Gates was especially epic).

The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Calling The Dark Tower a fantasy series is only suitable because there is no other category it could possibly fit into. Part minimalist western, part fantasy with noble knights, part metaphysical science-fiction, part classic Stephen King horror. This is a book that defies classification but is excellent nonetheless. This is a series where you need to read at least the first three books before you are going to have much of an idea of what is going on. Stick with it. It’s worth it.

The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

In fantasy, there are two archetypal subgenres. Noblebright is the optimistic stories where the heroes win out over evil and make friends along the way. Grimdark novels are the brutal worlds where every relationship ends in a backstab and where life is nasty, brutish, and short. The First Law is Grimdark. If you like Game of Thrones but figure it could use some more brutal action, you will love The First Law. I’ve never read a book with as savage and violent fight scenes. Saving Private Ryan with swords. It’s awesome.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

One of the more cerebral sci-fi books I have ever read. If you like to stretch your intellectual horsepower while reading this is the book for you. Unsolved physics problems, alien video games, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution combine to make a very good, very unique book.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

The book series that needs no introduction. Remember how good the first few seasons of Game of Thrones were? That’s because they had the books for source material. The world you know and love but better than ever on the written page. Buyer beware. I’ve talked about how prolific of a writer Brandon Sanderson is. George R. R. Martin is the opposite. A Feast for Crows came out in 2005. A Dance with Dragons came out in 2011. The Winds of Winter is supposedly forthcoming but, at this point, who knows? The books are great, but if you are going to pick them up, don’t plan on finishing them anytime soon.

The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss

Oh, the Kingkiller Chronicles. I almost didn’t put this one up here. The first time I read this series I absolutely loved it. The first book was especially fantastic. The second time through (yes I am one of those weird people who likes reading books multiple times) I realized that the only person who was more into himself than the main character was the other. Mileage may vary here. I am including it because many people absolutely adore it and I was one of them until not so long ago. This is another book whose ending seems further and further away by the day. The first two books were released within 4 years of each other but that was 9 years ago…

There. That should keep you busy for awhile. Keep reading. Hold onto that sense of wonder we all have within us. Don’t fear dragons.

And most of all—

Don’t stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.

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The Wookiee Has No Pants: On Thinking Big in a World of Small

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by Daniel Burnham, the architect responsible for rebuilding Chicago after the great Chicago fire.

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency."

Do we still think like that? Do we make big plans or are we too busy making small plans that won’t be realized?

On December 21, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission launched itself towards the moon. Only 135 days after it was decided it would go to the moon. Mission Project Constellation was initiated by NASA in 2003 to bring men back to the moon. 7 years later it had launched a total of zero crews before being canceled.

The New York subway was opened on October 27, 1904, less than 5 years after the contract was first awarded. In April 2000, the MTA decided to build the second avenue subway. The first phase, consisting of only 3 stations opened 17 years later.

These are just a couple of examples where the dichotomy is stark between what we used to be able to accomplish and the pace of accomplishment today.

Maybe our accomplishments are less tangible and therefore harder to point to.

Or maybe we simply don’t dream big enough anymore.

You want to know who did dream big? George Lucas.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away

I took a week off from blogging for Thanksgiving. I had this post half-finished and had been pondering over it all week. After watching The Mandalorian last night (Baby Yoda is my spirit animal), I was poking around Disney+ and decided to put on Empire of Dreams, a documentary about the making of the original Star Wars trilogy. I was glued to the TV for the next couple of hours watching all the drama behind the drama unfold before my eyes. All the untold stories behind the stories we all know and love and I was struck by just how unlikely the success of my all-time favorite movies really was.

Like, let me tell you, Star Wars was by no means a sure thing when filming began in 1975. Despite his recent success with American Graffiti, Lucas had been turned down from multiple studios to finance the film and the outlook was bleak until he got 20th Century Fox to take a flier on him. Even once he had the backing he needed the movies were beset with problems. The film was shot on difficult sets, the visual effects team had to create technology that had never been dreamt of before, and even the actors raised serious questions about the quality of the film.

And yet I write this almost 50 years later as Star Wars looms as the most important cultural work of the last century.

How was this accomplished?

Because the only thing bigger than Lucas’ dreams was his willingness to fight for them.

Here are a few lessons we can all take from what it took to make Star Wars the success it is today.

Start with something universal

The secret to Star Wars’ success is that at its core, it was familiar. George Lucas was heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell and his study of the underlying commonalities between the myths of different people groups throughout history. In fact, Campbell once called Lucas his “greatest ever student”. (side note: if you want an excellent way to kill some time, there are a lot worse ways than watching Joseph Campbell videos on youtube)

Star Wars’ success is as much due to its play on common themes that resonate within us all as it is due to its visual effects. The young hero embarking on a journey to save the world. The wise wizard providing guidance. The damsel in distress. The witty scoundrel. The inhuman villain.

All these recognizable tropes allow us to immediately connect with the story in a way that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Star Wars isn’t a story with nations or people groups. It’s a story about all of us. And that is a big reason why it was so successful.

Give people an ideal to strive towards

They say timing is everything. It’s true in life and business and it sure as hell is true with Star Wars. Star Wars was released at the absolute perfect time to maximize its impact. The Vietnam war had ended and American cynicism was at an all-time high (a time not too different from today). The popular movies of the day reflected this with their portrayals of morally grey anti-heroes and doomsday disasters. The nation was poised for the clouds to break and Star Wars was a ray of sunshine.

Star Wars presented a portrayal of heroism and justice that people were so desperate for. I have written before about how fiction can more easily convey powerful messages than non-fiction and Star Wars is a prime example of that. It’s optimistic tone and higher ideals were universally relatable while remaining poignantly salient. Its message of good triumphing over evil against all odds inspired millions. Without that inspirational spark, Star Wars would not have had nearly the same cultural lasting power.

The lesson here is the power of being aspirational. Provide people the opportunity to rise to the occasion and they will exceed your wildest expectations. Expect the worst and you will surely find it.

Ignore the critics

An especially hilarious anecdote from the documentary was a piece of feedback Lucas received early in the production of the original movie. One of the biggest points of contention studio executives had with the movie was the Chewbacca wasn’t wearing any pants. That’s right. The greatest cultural phenomenon of the last century was almost stymied based on a debate about whether an 8 foot tall monkey bear should be wearing pants or not.

I think this anecdote does a wonderful job of portraying a phenomenon that anyone trying to create something important will have to deal with. The vast majority of people are not capable of this level of creativity. Through either a lack of talent or a lack of desire, they are unable to grasp the most important aspects of a project and therefore nit pick on inconsequential items around the edges. It is much easier to sound smart coming up with ways that something will fail. The true genius however lies in being able to see just how something could be able to succeed beyond your wildest imagination. This is a skillset that I very consciously try to foster as a venture capital investor, but it applies to all of us.

Ignore the critics. They will always try to tear you down because they can’t do what you can.

Optimize for upside

Another fascinating key to Star Wars’ success was that Lucas optimized for long-term upside. He forwent up-front compensation in order to have ownership over a greater portion of the merchandising and licensing rights than would be normal for a movie at the time. To the studio’s credit, Star Wars really was the movie that opened people’s eyes to the power of merchandise, but this was still a masterstroke on Lucas’ part. He generated such an incredible fortune on merchandise, he was able to fund the following films himself, without the need to go through the usual studio financing process. (I bet you didn’t know Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are “indy” films!) This allowed him to retain absolute creative control of the movies. Had Lucas needed to appease studio executives the way most directors do, it is hard to imagine the movies would have been anywhere near as good.

The lesson here is always optimize for the upside. Play your cards so that you take advantage of the big payout. Focus your energies on winning the war instead of winning each individual battle.

Most people don’t think this way. They are risk averse and will maximise for the short-term. If you can think differently, you will find that you have a sustainable source of edge in whatever you do.

The fact an accomplishment is important by definition means that it is not commonplace. To accomplish what is not commonplace means that you must think and act in a way that is not commonplace. George Lucas did this. He dreamt big and the payoff was massive.

Both for him and for the rest of us.

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What is your North Star?

My dad is from Norway.

The traditions and norms he grew up with are different than those of our country. He has spent more time living in the USA than in Norway, so, for the most part, it is hard to tell the difference, but there are some times where it is a bit more obvious.

One of those times was when it came to me receiving my driver’s license.

In Norway, you become an adult at 18. You can drink, smoke, drive and join the army. I appreciate the logic. If you are old enough to go and fight in a war, you should be able to drive yourself home from the airport and have a drink and a smoke when you get home.

With this policy as a framework, it’s easy to see why the USA’s policies on adulthood might seem strange. It is much more gradual and staggered than in Norway. You can drive at 16, join the army at 18, smoke at 18, and you have to wait until you are 21 to drink.

All of this was weird to my dad, but he was especially skeptical of the whole driving-at-16 thing.

Because of this skepticism, the bar for me getting my license was not just doing enough driving to pass the test proving to the government I could drive safely.

I had to prove it to my father.

We spent many, many, many hours driving together before I finally reached this bar. I must have doubled or tripled the required amount of driving time in order to finally satisfy his European skepticism.

My dad would always find excuses for us to go on long drives (even for the most pointless things). We must have driven up to our cabin in the mountains and back three or four times that summer because he left his sunglasses or a pair of socks he liked.

At the time, I thought all this additional driving was somewhat annoying. All my friends barely needed to drive at all (a fact which now scares the living daylight out of me), and here I was crisscrossing the great state of Colorado in my spare time.

I now look at these drives incredibly fondly.

My favorite part was the great conversations we would have as I drove up curving mountain passes while my dad lounged with his feed up on the dash.

Ok Erik, where are you going with this?

Getting there.

On one such trip, my dad and I were talking about work. What his career had been like. The highs and the lows. My dad came to the United States as a college student and spent some time in consulting before starting his own private equity firm where he has worked ever since.

I was at the stage where I was starting to contemplate what I wanted to do with my life and it was the first time I can really remember talking about his career in some detail.

He told me that the proudest moment of his career was when he purchased a company with 600 employees and sold it a short time later with 1,000 employees. This was a good financial outcome for him, but that’s not why it was his best moment.

He said that he got the most pride, not from the sales multiple, but from the feeling that he had built something. That he had provided 400 people with jobs that they could be proud of. Jobs in which they could find dignity and fulfillment, and most importantly, jobs that they could support their family with.

This conversation stands out as one of the most seminal moments of my entire life.

In some ways, you can divide my life into two chapters. Before this car ride, and after.

Before, I was aimless. I didn’t have a specific path or idea of what I wanted to do. I coasted through life and school without really working towards anything.

Ever since that day, I have had a North Star.

Like my father was before me, I want to be a company builder.

I believe that the highest good that you can do for someone is to give them a job where they can find pride, dignity, and fulfillment, all while being able to provide a good life for themselves and their family.

This has been my guiding North Star and has informed every decision I have made so far in my career.

It is why I wanted to become an investor. So that I could become a partner in the company growth process and provide the capital that companies need to support this growth.

It is why I joined The Carlyle Group out of college. To learn from the best in the world how companies are built and run.

It is why I transitioned from private equity into venture capital. To be able to get involved with companies from the earliest stages where I could be a true partner in the building process as opposed to working with companies once they have matured. In venture capital, I could hop into the trenches and work shoulder to shoulder with entrepreneurs trying to change the world. Where I could invest in tech companies that provide some of the highest quality jobs that you can find.

Venture capital is the absolute highest point of leverage I have found in the pursuit of my North Star.

I aspire to be a builder of great companies. Companies that are providing products or services that the world needs. Companies that delight their customers by building something meaningful.

Building companies is my North Star.

It’s what matters most to me.

It has defined every decision I have made in my career so far and I know that it will continue to serve as a guiding light in the future.

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The Path is a Lie

I am not a patient person.

Never have been and never will be. I think waiting is overrated. In my (occasionally) humble opinion, people who tell you to wait your turn are really just telling you to quiet down and mind your place.

We are living in an age where anyone can create anything, and yet from parents, friends, mentors, and school counselors we still hear the same age-old refrains:

“Wait your turn.”

“Get two years under your belt and then you can do something else.”

“Pay your dues.”

“This is the path for that industry. “

That’s the one that gets me the most.

The Path.

What is the path? The path is the lie that we are told. That to do X we have to do A and B first. And C. And D through W.

The path is a lie. And a lazy one at that.

There is no path to creating music. There is no path to creating art. You are the master of your own life’s work. If you want something, make it so.

The path only exists in hindsight when we look backward and all of the disparate dots line up perfectly.

When looking to the future, there is no path.

Why do we get this advice? Because it is what worked thirty years ago for the people who we look up to. It’s what worked when knowledge was scarce and companies were as loyal to their employees as their employees were to them. It’s what allowed them to slowly but surely climb the corporate ladder.

But the world has changed. We have all of the knowledge and tools in the world at our fingertips. Never in the history of mankind have individuals been empowered to create and pursue what they want in life.

And yet most of us don’t take advantage of this incredible gift. The irony is that we have more power and freedom than ever before and yet we waste it. We go to school with big dreams about changing the world and then go into exactly the industries and companies that we were hoping to change.

And at some point, we get thrown headfirst into the real world.

In the real world, there is no path. At least not unless you make an artificial one for yourself.

You want to create something? Go build it.

You want to experience something? Go make it happen.

Want to live somewhere new? Buy a plane ticket.

Want to get out of a relationship? Leave.

We live inside prisons of our own creation.

We are so afraid of what will happen if we color outside the lines. We are like dogs whose electric collars have been removed but who remain comfortable inside the world of their front lawn.

So what should we do instead?

Think big.

Don’t take no for an answer.

Stop settling for good enough.

Fake it till you make it.

Do something you find meaningful instead of just doing what you think you are supposed to.

Ask yourself tough questions and don’t be afraid of hearing the answers.

And whatever you do, don’t listen to anyone who starts telling you about the path.

What worked for them won’t work for you. And life is too short to waste your time toiling away at something that isn’t worthwhile.

In the word’s of Andry Dufresne, “Get busy living or get busy dying.”

I for one plan on living. And I am sick of feeling like I need to apologize for that choice.

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If it's not one thing, it's Structure

Do you ever feel like you are being led along a very specific path?

That the universe is telling you something or that you are being fed very specific breadcrumbs?

I think it happens to everyone. Humans have an excellent ability to see patterns in information. Even if they sometimes don’t exist. Think about shapes in clouds or constellations. We can’t help drawing lines and seeing fluffy elephants.

I feel like this has been happening to me recently. It feels like every new article I read or topic I learn about connects back to somewhere else. Whenever I learn something new, I am placing a star in the sky and eventually, I can’t help but see the pattern connecting them. One new article or podcast and suddenly 10 stars that had nothing to do with one another line up in a constellation that becomes impossible to ignore.

This phenomenon recently happened to me after reading a summary of the book The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life by Robert Fritz. In it, Fritz introduces his theories about how structure defines everything from nature to personal relationships, to organizations. The overriding idea is that all things follow the path of least resistance. In nature, this concept is easy to see as water always travels downhill along the easiest path, but the concept is every bit as true in our lives as well. According to Fritz, the structures of our lives, both implicit and explicit, define a path of least resistance for our behavior. Without changing the underlying structure, we will always revert back to that behavioral path of least resistance irregardless of the amount of energy and willpower we throw against it.

It’s why diets don’t work, means are regressed towards, and people revert to behavioral patterns. Structure defines incentives. Incentives define behavior.

Reading this summary felt like the capstone in an intellectual journey. In some ways, it began 6 months ago when I read the excellent Loonshots. In it, author Safi Bahcall explains why some organizations innovate and others don’t by analyzing the underlying structure of the organization. In other ways, it feels like this is a journey I have been on for the better part of my life.

I’ve always been obsessed with incentives and the idea of structure feels like the missing piece to the puzzle.

In the words of Charlie Munger:

Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

I’ve always thought through this mental framework where actions are explained by incentives and where people, in general, operate rationally based on the information they have. What was missing from this paradigm was a way to explain why people so often act against their own very explicit interests. Structures do this. We may have all the incentive in the world to exercise and eat healthy, but without the proper structures in place, we will never be able to sustain long-term lifestyle change.

I can see this so clearly in my life.

A recent example is working out. I recently wrote about how I have been trying to double down on exercising more. I have been trying to get on a good workout routine for years now and could never sustain anything. Now after two structural changes, getting up and exercising is easy. I went from not being able to get up to exercise more than once or twice a week, to doing it every (work) day. Easily. First, I changed how I was working out. Instead of focusing on becoming a better runner which I sucked at and didn’t enjoy I focused on lifting which I am good at and I do enjoy. The second thing I started doing was preparing my pre-workout drink the night before and setting it next to my alarm. I turn off my alarm and take a sip of caffeine and all the sudden falling back asleep isn’t an option. Two small structural changes to the system and suddenly the path of least resistance is getting up and exercising where it used to be crawling back into bed and going back to sleep.

Another example that has had a big impact on my life is networking. I used to hate it. I thought of it as brown-nosing and avoided it at all costs. It didn’t help that I struggle with social anxiety and just flat out am uncomfortable in many of the environments where “networking” is supposed to occur. Now networking is THE favorite part of my job. Why the sudden shift? Structural change. A former colleague who excelled at networking told me that he doesn’t think of networking as “networking” but simply as trying to make new friends and learn their stories. Suddenly the lens through which I looked at networking fundamentally shifted. No longer was networking some transactional way to climb the corporate ladder, but an opportunity to foster and cultivate genuine, value-add relationships.

That’s the beauty of structure and my biggest takeaway from The Path of Least Resistance. Structure is a powerful force that guides how we think and act.

But at the end of the day, we are the ones who get to shape the sand that the water will flow through.

We are the artists of our lives. Once we are aware of them (not a trivial matter) we can architect structures of our own choosing to pull us towards the actions and behavior we want to practice.

You know me. I’m a big choice guy. Part of everything in life being a choice is that sometimes (often) our choices manifest themselves in the ability to choose how to design structures in our life to get the outcomes we want. Because if your incentive structures are messed up, no amount of hard work or endurance will allow you to get the outcome you want (at least not sustainably).

Next time you are kicking yourself for doing something you know you shouldn’t or going back to bed when you know you should be hitting the gym, think about the structure in your life that is pulling you towards where you don’t want to go.

Believe me, it is easier to change the structure that is defining your behavior than to fight your way up the waterfall of going against your incentive structures.

Personal life. Business. School. Sports.

It’s all just structure.

And the great thing about structures is that they can be changed.

The sad thing about structures is that people almost never choose to do so.

So the question for you and me is, once we are aware of our structures, do we have the courage to change them?

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Churches of Entrepreneurship

One of the most thought provoking books I have ever read is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Even many months after completing it I still find myself pondering several of the ideas explored.

One of the concepts I keep coming back to is the idea of the Church of Reason and how it relates to startups.

The Church of Reason

To explore the concept of the Church of Reason first we must discuss what exactly a church is. At its face, this seems an obvious question to answer. A church is a building in which people worship, predominately in the Christian faith. But what if the building is no longer used for this specific purpose, is the church still a church?

Pirsig gives the example of a roadside sports bar located in an old church. My wife and I for our last anniversary visited a vineyard located in an old church. Whatever example you use, the question remains, are either of those buildings really still churches?

Pirsig contends, and I agree, that the answer is no. The object of a church is defined by its purpose. If a church is not being used for worship, it is just a building. We may continue refer to the building as a church because of its familiar architecture or because that is how it has been known historically, but it no longer is a church. Not really. There is a deeper meaning to something being called a church. There is a required ‘spirit’ of the physical object. As that spirit leaves, the purpose and very essence of that object leaves with it. It becomes something else entirely. A simple building. A husk.

Pirsig draws a parallel from this line of reasoning to modern universities which he dubs “Churches of Reason.” Similar to religious churches, Pirsig argues that these Churches of Reason are intrinsically defined by their use or purpose. In the case of universities that purpose, that spirit, is to pursue truth through learning. To expand the boundaries of knowledge itself.

Just as with religious churches, these Churches of Reason become simple buildings as soon as the Spirit of the University leaves. As soon as the pursuit of truth and expansion of knowledge stop becoming the purpose for the endeavor, the buildings become nothing more than a mausoleum to their former holy endeavor. Husks.

Pirsig observed this loss of the Spirit of the University in the 60’s and 70’s when he was a professor himself writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, his part auto-biography part philosophical treatise magnum opus. It saddens me to admit that this trend of the departure of the Spirit of the University not only continued, but has accelerated in the modern day.

But that is a discussion for another time. Next we will turn our attention to a different type of church.

Churches of Entrepreneurship.

The Church of Entrepreneurship

Startups are Churches of Entrepreneurship. They are the altars at which we worship the gods of technology and innovation while hoping that our sacrifices of blood, sweat, and tears change the world.

Just like other type of churches, the object is defined by its purpose. A fundamental part of any startup’s identity is the Spirit of Entrepreneurship that resides within it. The Spirit of Entrepreneurship is the driving passion to change the world through the creation of something new.

Really, the word “startup” is just a name for young companies in which the Spirit of Entrepreneurship resides. They are vehicles for the Spirit of Entrepreneurship to hopefully live and thrive. Just like with churches or universities, if you take the spirit out of the building, it is just a pile of bricks.

Startups are no different. Just because a company is young or small or technology-focused does not mean it is necessarily a startup. Without the driving passion to change the world through the creation of something new, they are just small, risky businesses. Bars within an old church. Husks.

This passion to exert one’s will on the world can come in many different shapes and sizes. There are mission driven founders. There are financially driven founders. There are rage driven founders (this was a new one for me that I heard about this week. Basically someone that is so infuriated by the status quo they say “screw it, I will change it myself”.) But while the prime motivating factor changes, the passionate drive of all strong founders is nearly identical.

This spirit of entrepreneurship can inhabit the halls of older incumbent companies as well, though it does so rarely and often in the places you would least expect. Be wary of large corporations touting their innovation groups and “startup culture.” The spirit of entrepreneurship does not reside somewhere simply because someone wishes it to. It can be born in a moment when a group of mavericks suddenly decides try to change the world against all odds. It can die just as quickly if not properly nourished.

Viewed through this lens, providing a nourishing environment that is ripe for the Spirit of Entrepreneurship to inhabit becomes of the utmost importance.

Doing so successfully is easier said than done. My favorite road map to doing so is laid out in Loonshots by Safhi Bahcall.

But even with help. It’s not easy.

And it shouldn’t be.

Things worth doing rarely are.

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Institutional Contrarianism: On Everest, Mozart, and Instinctual Originality

(Nirmal Purja/AP)

You’ve probably all seen this picture. The 2019 Mount Everest summit season has become famous for a high amount of deaths and reports of long lines of climbers waiting to complete the final summit.

Too often investors act like these climbers. Instead, they should act like Mozart. In this post, I will tell you why.

Institutional Contrarianism: When climbing the world’s highest mountain enters the mainstream

The summit of Mount Everest was first reached in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. This success came almost 70 years after it was first suggested the feat might even be possible. Unsurprisingly, the summit of Mount Everest captured the world’s collective imagination in a way that few endeavors had before, or since.

And there was no putting the genie back in the bottle.

A line of hundreds of climbers waiting on the summit is what happens when climbing the world’s highest mountain enters the mainstream. What was once the domain of a chosen few lofty dreamers has become the world of Fred from El Paso. And Mo from two neighborhoods over. Now, that is maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but a Sherpa guide has reached the summit of the mountain 24 times (the most a non-Sherpa has reached the summit is American David Hahn who has reached the summit 15 times).

Venture capital bears a striking resemblance to Everest. Everyone claims to be trying to operate on the edge of what is possible, but when everyone is swimming against the current, is anyone really?

Contrary is the biggest buzz word in venture capital today. No, the irony is not lost on me. The cult of contrarianism was seemingly started by Peter Thiel and his oft-posed question of “what is something you believe that those around you disbelieve?” In his book Zero to One, Thiel encouraged people to come up with fundamental insights about the world by looking at it through a different lens than others. I am a big fan of this way of thinking.

But it has warped into something different altogether. It has become the very evil it sought to destroy.

It has institutionalized.

At some point, everyone trying so hard to go against the crowd just becomes a herd moving in the opposite direction.

Everyone pays lip service to being a contrarian, but how much of them actually do it? From what I have observed, some. But not many. This Institutional Contrarianism becomes the very thing it claims to oppose. There are few leaders in a new space, but many followers. People are interested in latching on to the work others have done and seek exposure to hot spaces without necessarily having a strong perspective on them.

How do you break out of the trap of Institutional Contrarianism? How do you strive for true originality?

We look to great creators of the past for answers.

Create like Mozart: Tapping into the power of Instinctual Originality

A book I have learned a lot from is Impro by Keith Johnstone. This book is ostensibly about improvisation in theater but actually has much more far-ranging lessons. You may recognize it from the annals of FinTwit where it is oft-cited for its teachings on physical presence and interpersonal positioning. These lessons are great, but I have found that it has just as much, if not more, to teach us about learning and thinking.

Recently while reading I came across a section on originality that I think offers some striking insights towards solving our problem of Institutional Contrarianism.

Johnstone on originality in theater:

Anyone can run an avant-garde theatre group; you just get the actors to lie naked in heaps or outstare the audience, or move in extreme slow motion, or whatever the fashion is. But the real avant-garde aren't imitating what other people are doing, or what they did forty years ago; they're solving the problems that need solving, like how to get a popular theatre with some worthwhile content, and they may not look avant-garde at all!

Similar to the avant-garde movement, venture capital investors too often find themselves pursuing what is fashionable instead of what is truly differentiated. By definition, a space cannot at the same time be fashionable and contrarian. One need only look at any tech news site to see the dynamics of fashion trends at works. Entire sectors and technologies fluctuate between golden child one moment and untouchable the next. Blockchain. VR. AI. Greentech. All have had, or are having, their moment in the sun. All likewise have at some point been cast aside.

The crux of the issue is that you cannot generate abnormal returns in any asset class by acting the same way as everyone else. When a “contrarian” trend becomes the fashion and everyone starts flooding into the space, you can guarantee that valuations will skyrocket even as the number of quality opportunities diminishes.

As Johnstone says above, truly original ideas will often hide behind a sheen of the mundane. In hindsight, it is easy to craft a narrative around why companies like Uber and Airbnb were so transformative, but at the time they seemed anything but. Plenty of incredibly smart, successful investors passed on some of the greatest investments of the past decade (for proof just check twitter any time a tech company goes public).

So how can we tap into this true originality of thought? When asked where his ideas come from, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart replied:

Why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or in short, makes it Mozart's, and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality

Therein lies the secret. One cannot be original by trying to be original. Striving to be contrarian leads you to follow the popular fashions of the day and will inevitably lead to mediocrity. The path to true originality in life and business can only be found by accepting yourself and leaning into the things that make you unique and different. I call this Instinctual Originality.

Ok, Erik, great. Just emulate Mozart. No problem.

It is not as hard as it sounds.

First, accept who you are. All your faults and all your greatness. Be aware of them and honest with yourself about them.

Next, ignore the mainstream. Easier said than done, but possible all the same. Don’t buy the hype. Always ask why and act from principles and fundamental thinking.

Finally, create from a place of Instinctual Originality. Originality is not some external mountaintop that we can scale, it is inherently inside each of us. Let it flow from you. Don’t pursue it. Listen to the voice inside of you. There is a reason that our best ideas often come in the shower or on a run. We already know the answers.

We just need to listen.

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Lessons (and Books) from Camp

Credit: ME! Yes, that is right! This is the first time I have ever actually used one of my own pictures for the blog. This was a picture from the working farm where we had our final dinner on the last night of camp

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the first Capital Camp hosted by Brent Beshore and Patrick O’Shaughnessy in Columbia, Missouri. Over the course of three days, we listened to speakers from all corners of the investment landscape, ate delicious food, experienced some (incredibly) unique activities, and just had a fantastic time. It truly was an amazing experience and I really feel honored to have been included. We had to sign an NDA as a prerequisite to our participation, so I can’t go into too many details about the presentations themselves, but I did want to list a few of my big takeaways from the experience alongside some of the book recommendations that seemed to be a part of almost every conversation.

The Value of Going Niche

A common theme that shone through a lot of the presentations during camp was that there is a lot of value in going niche. Many of the presenters were working in under-explored niches within the investment world and this willingness to go against the grain had compelling results. Going niche allows you to be a standout within a smaller pool. If there is an interesting opportunity in the space you are playing in, competition will inevitably flow in, but by being at the forefront of the trend, you will be among a handful of go-to people in the space. There is A LOT of value in being “The _______ Guy”. If you are among someone’s first couple of calls when they are in a very specific industry or if they are looking for a never-before-created financial product, you are going to be able to capture a lot of value.

The Ugly Premium

Similar to the above, there seems to be a premium placed on work that requires one to get their hands a little dirty. A willingness to go down into the weeds and tolerate extreme complexity or uncertainty can be a true differentiator when competitors are more than happy to stick to harvesting low-hanging fruit. Being a pathfinder in difficult or unexplored terrain is rarely easy, but the results can be truly spectacular if you develop a reputation for handling ugly situations with effectiveness and grace. People are also all too willing to overlook diamonds covered in a few layers of dirt. If you do the digging, you will have them all to yourself.

The Power of Place

I believe that the decision to host Capital Camp in Columbia, Missouri was absolutely key to the event’s overwhelming success. Place is a powerful consideration for any event or gathering and its effects should not be overlooked. By having this event in Columbia, Brent and Patrick immediately differentiated it from the plethora of other investor conferences that occur every year. They were able to build a completely differentiated ethos that was pervasive throughout the entire event and which led to a much more memorable experience than if it had been hosted somewhere like New York. I also think the location served as a strong tool for self-selection. Hosting a AAA investor conference in the middle of Missouri self-selected for people with a wide variety of interests who were open to new things and not too good for small-town America. By design or by accident, I think the location of the event was an incredibly powerful Asshole-Filter.

Interesting People Lead to Interesting Results

As awesome as the presentations, food, and activities were, they paled in comparison to the joy of simply interacting with the other attendees. I am a big believer in the idea that any time that you can get interesting and intellectually curious people together in a single place, something positive will inevitably happen. I know I wasn’t the only one that felt completely out of my depth at times, but the humility and curiosity of the other attendees ensured that I never once felt out of place. I can honestly say this was the first investor event I have ever been to where people were genuinely more interested in learning about you and what you did than they were interested in telling you about themselves. I don’t believe this was an accident, and I am sure both the location and the interesting/expansive variety of Patrick’s podcast both played their part in attracting high-achieving, yet humble, people with intellectual curiosity as varied as it was deep.

The Books of Capital Camp 2019

Interesting people from all over the world attended the first Capital Camp. Every conversation was different from the last. The one constant is that I left almost all of them with a new book on my reading list. Amazon affiliate links included for each book.

Here are all of the books that were recommended to me throughout the course of the week:

• Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

  • Ok, I am cheating a little bit on this one. Loonshots was actually the recommendation that I gave everyone who shared a recommendation with me! The book describes how to foster innovative thinking inside of organizations and explores what separates nimble, innovative organizations from slow, political ones. This is by far one of the most entertaining “business” books I have ever read and one that I am sure I will refer back to for some time to come

• Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin

  • Michael Mauboussin was one of the presenters at Capital Camp and I am not exaggerating when I say that his was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking sections of the whole camp. Two of his books were highly recommended and many attendees talked about how influential his writings have been on them

• The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael Mauboussin

  • Essay highlighting some of the findings from the books

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

  • Tim Ferris has an interesting heuristic about focusing on reading stories that have been around over 100 years. Chances are if they are still being talked about, there is something of value in there. Few names have persisted as long as Rockefeller’s and his biography was recommended by an attendee who makes sure to read it every couple of years

• Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon

• The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge

• Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows

  • Systems thinking was a topic that came up in multiple presentations and conversations at Capital Camp. It is one of the topics I am most looking forward to learning more about!

• Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord

• Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

  • This book is probably the one that has been recommended to me most even from before and after camp. I have had it sitting in my kindle for some time now, but it has vaulted to the top of my list based on some of its recent recommendations

• Making Things Work by Yaneer Bar-Yam

• Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel

• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers

  • The only fiction book that was recommended to me at camp. I love reading fiction and always make sure to be simultaneously reading one fiction and one non-fiction book at any given time. Not only is fiction generally more entertaining but I truly believe that imagination is a muscle that needs to be exercised just like any other. Reading fiction books is a great way to do just that.

• Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects Everything by Hermann Simon

• HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business: Think Big, Buy Small, Own Your Own Company by Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

  • Search Funds and Permanent Capital Private Equity were two of the asset classes with the most buzz around camp. This recommendation (and the next two as well) are what I was provided when I asked where a novice should start learning about these asset classes

• The Messy Marketplace: Selling Your Business in a World of Imperfect Buyers by Brent Beshore

  • This was the first book from this list that I picked up after camp and I can happily report that I am thoroughly enjoying it (and I am not just saying that since Brent hosted!) You can tell that it is written to be a reference guide to sellers, but it has been enjoyable and insightful to me as an investor as well!

In addition to the books above, I also received recommendations for a few other mediums:

• Adventur.es Writings

  • Another shout-out to the Adventures team. Brent and Co. are the leaders in the Permanent Capital Private Equity world and they have put out a huge number of thoughtful pieces about the space on their website.

• Anything written by Matt Levine

  • I was told that reading whatever Matt Levine writes is basically the equivalent to an MBA. I subscribed to his newsletter not long after…

• The Business of Innovation: An Interview with Paul Cook

• Dealbreaker

• Econtalk Podcast episode with Jerry Muller on the Tyranny of Metrics

  • I listened to this episode earlier this week and it was a fascinating discussion about the dangers of an over-reliance on metrics without using one’s judgment. I really appreciated Muller’s thoughts on the subject and thought they sync up nicely with my previous post on venture capital due diligence

• My Dad Wrote A Porno Podcast

  • This recommendation was definitely a little bit different than the others. I was told not to listen to it while driving since laughing so hard on the road would be unsafe!

• Sam Hinkie’s Resignation Letter from the 76er’s

  • Just as Sam Hinkie closed out the show at camp, the recommendation to read his resignation letter from the Philadelphia 76er’s closes out my list. Sam’s presentation was one of the more interesting and entertaining presentations I have ever seen and this letter gives a fantastic window into how he views the world.

Thanks again to Patrick and Brent for hosting such a fascinating and fun investor event!

Can’t wait till next year!

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Confessions of an Anxious VC

Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash

My whole life I have suffered from social anxiety.

It’s something that would surprise a lot of people. I am a social extrovert. I am often the loudest (sometimes obnoxiously so) and most outgoing person in most rooms. I get my energy from interacting with others. And yet those same situations cause me anxiety.

Talk about a catch 22.

I have had social anxiety ever since I was a kid. It used to be bad. Outside of a few best friends, I wasn’t able to spend time in social settings with friends outside of work. The first time I hung out in an unstructured group setting (not a birthday party or a sports practice etc.) was my freshman year of high school.

The weird thing was that it was never the act of being social or the event itself. It was the anticipation of being in a social setting that caused the anxiety ahead of time. Once I got there, I was fine. In fact, I was more than fine. Being social is when I am at my best.

Luckily, I was able to get help. My parents had the resources to pay for me to see a psychologist when I was in middle school. Vocalizing my internal thoughts made a huge difference. Often my own self-talk sounded laughable when said out-loud. By talking about my feelings with an objective third party, I was slowly able to shift the way I talked with myself. I am so grateful I had the opportunity to get help and it breaks my heart that asking for help with mental health still seems to be so stigmatized by our society. I can honestly say that I would not be where I am today without it. Healthy, happy, and (mostly) well-adjusted.

But that doesn’t mean I still don’t get anxious sometimes. Anyone who has dealt with anxiety will understand what I am talking about. The anxiety never really goes away. You just learn to deal with it.

For me, the best strategy was “faking it till I made it”. Every time I threw myself into a social setting I was anxious about, the little voice in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough whispered a little bit more quietly. I acted like I was confident and before long I started to actually feel confident. Over time that little voice went away almost completely.

But it still crops its head up every now and again.

Especially when it comes to networking.

I don’t know what it is, but networking has always given me a spot of trouble. I guess it is just the fact that I generally don’t know anyone at all. True or not, I have this idea in my head that everyone else knows each other and it is easy to get intimidated by that.

Now, you can see why this is a problem.

As a venture capital investor, networking is a big part of my job.

Cultivating a network of relationships with entrepreneurs and other investors is one of the keys to success in this career. It’s not always easy, but I have come up with a few strategies that help me and that may help other people.

Learn someone’s story

The biggest improvement in my ability to network came after re-framing the entire activity. A former colleague of mine was always getting drinks with people after work or meeting up with people in his network for lunch. Most of these connections were people he had met briefly or only a couple of times previously. I had no idea how he did it. When I finally asked him how he was able to network so effectively his response was to tell me that he just liked “hearing people’s story.” As soon as I heard that it was like the clouds parted. I love meeting new people and learning about their story. Ever since I reframed networking as getting to hear people’s stories, instead of focusing on how to present my own, it has gotten exponentially easier and more fun!

An inch wide and a mile deep

Another big key has been focusing on quality over quantity when it came to social connections. I would get overwhelmed by feeling like I would never be able to talk to everyone at an event. So now I don’t even try. I focus on trying to make a smaller amount of deeper connections. I would rather have two 20-minute conversations than eight 5-minute conversations. Aside from just taking the pressure off, I also think this is just a much more effective way to network. If you have a superficial conversation with someone for 5-minutes, you will get lost in the noise. Talk to someone for 20-minutes about the harmonica or the frequency of lightning strikes around the globe and you can be sure that you will stand out.

Go with a friend

When in doubt, guilt-trip a buddy to going with you. Just knowing that you know at least 1 person in a crowd makes a ton of difference. Even if you split up once you get there, it is comforting to know you have a security blanket of someone you already know to talk to in case you need it. And if the event sucks, at least you have someone to laugh about it with.

Nobody cares what you say

This may sound a little depressing at first, but I actually think it is really empowering. The beauty of being in a social setting where you don’t know anyone is just that, nobody knows you. If you say something stupid or put your foot in your mouth, guess what? Chances are that you never have to see those people again if you don’t want to. Maybe you aren’t quite as prolific in putting your foot in your mouth as I am, but the logic even works for boring superficial conversations. Don’t stress about making an impact on every person you talk to. See point number 2 above. If you aren’t jiving someone and you just can’t get them to bite, don’t stress. They won’t remember.

**For the record, I think this tip has a ton of applications outside of networking, especially when it comes to creating content online. People are too afraid of what other people will think about what they say. The truth is, if you say something dumb (like I have many times), no one will care (unless you say something really, really dumb or offensive). On the flip side, make some interesting points and people will take notice. Minimum downside. Maximum upside.

Pick a color, any color

This is a fun one that I picked up from a podcast. If you are anxious about a networking event, pick a color. When you get to the event, talk to everyone there who is wearing that color. It’s that simple. I don’t know why, but for some reason having a mission when you walk into an even (talk to everyone wearing green) really helps. I enjoy this one so much I even went as far as to buy 6-sided dice on Amazon that have different colors on each side. Before any networking event, I roll the die and try to talk to everyone wearing whatever that color is. I don’t know why this one works, but it does. Give it a try.

Go against the grain

I picked this one up from Tim Ferris. When you get to an event, look where everyone is focused. It may be the food table or a celebrity whose attention everyone is trying to get. Ok now see that group focus? Head in the exact opposite direction. It is tough to stand out in a crowd. Give yourself the best possible opportunity you can by going against the grain and doing stuff other people aren’t. This means going to the more esoteric info sessions. It means doing the weirder activities. If you are doing things differently than everyone else, people will take notice. And even better, you will see the other people who are doing the same. Those are the people you want to talk with.

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Hopefully this post is as helpful for you to read as it is for me to write. Mental health is hard. Talking about it makes it less so.

As with most things, overcoming anxiety is a slow and painful process.

Each step feels like you aren’t making any progress.

It’s only when you look back that you see how far you’ve come.

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Why Brushing your Teeth is the Secret to Success in Life and Startups

Brushing your teeth is the secret to being successful in life and entrepreneurship. In this post, I am going to tell you why.

Brushing your teeth is not difficult. It is something we all do. But how many people do it the right way? It’s recommended that you brush your teeth twice a day, every day. There is proper form and improper form. I am sure some kinds of toothpaste are better than others, but admittedly, it can be difficult distinguishing which toothpastes are the best given that each and every one is recommended by 9 out of 10 dentists (I hope I never come across the 10th dentist. Must be a terribly negative person).

The key to dental health is consistency. You need to put in consistent effort day in and day out. Brushing your teeth for an hour at a time will not allow you to skip brushing your teeth for the next month.

Now, as much as I appreciate the importance of dental hygiene, this isn’t really a post about brushing your teeth. This is a post about life and business, two areas where we all too often brush for an hour once a month.

The key to success in life is consistent application of effort. This is true for everything from relationships and startups, to exercise and reading. Very rarely will you find yourself in situations where a single herculean effort is all that stands between success and failure. Much more often, slow and steady really does win the race.

When I was working at Carlyle the head of my team had a favorite phrase, “Do your day job.” It means taking care of the fundamentals of your role and making sure that you excel on the little things. Because if you don’t, it tends to be a slippery slope.

I am a big Broncos fan and our newest coach, Vic Fangio, put it well in his introductory press conference. When asked to explain his famous “death by inches” mantra he said:

“If you're running a meeting, whether it be a team meeting, offense or defense meeting, a position coach meeting and a player walks in, say 30 seconds late, 45 seconds late -- that act in it of itself really has no impact on whether you're going to win or lose that week.

"But if you let it slide, the next day there's two or three guys late or it went from 30 seconds to two minutes. It causes an avalanche of problems. That's 'death by inches.'”

The little things matter. Showing up consistently and putting in the effort is what makes the difference between success and failure.

No place is this truer than with startups.

On the startup battlefield, wars are not won in a decisive moment. Startup successes are a culmination of years of executing on the little things and consistently making progress. In tech, that steady progress tends to grow exponentially. This fact is sometimes hard to see among twitter hype threads and Techcrunch headlines, but the saying “an overnight success, 10 years in the making” really does ring true.

Execution is so, so key. A VC I really respect once told me that he would take a team that can execute in a small market over a team that can’t in a big market every single day of the week. Execution really is what sets apart A+ teams from the rest, and in venture you need those A+ teams to get the outcomes that justify the whole model.

You can bet that this hyper-focus on execution is something that VCs pay attention to.

A great example of this is due diligence. Due diligence is a necessary, but slow, and sometimes painful, process for everyone involved. A secret of venture capital that not many may know is that how an entrepreneur conducts themselves during due diligence, is just as big of a signal about whether the startup will be successful as anything else. An entrepreneur that is organized, prompt, respectful, and who has a masterful understanding of the ins and outs of their business during due diligence will likely exhibit that same attention-to-detail and execution mastery when it comes to running their business. Entrepreneurs who are difficult to deal with and get easily frustrated or are dodgy about direct questions about the business are unknowingly flying a pretty big red flag for all investors involved.

So now that we have agreed that consistent effort is the key to success, what is the best way to go about applying that effort?

In the immortal words of Joel Embidd:

“Trust the process”

The best way that you can ensure that you are properly applying just the right amount of force and using the proper technique when brushing your way through life is to build a process and stick to it. Our culture is far too outcome oriented. We operate on a last-in-first-out basis and optimize based on the outcomes we see, even when those outcomes are often nothing more than luck. If you flip a coin 4 times and get tails every time, you would not conclude that a coin will always land on tails. And yet, far too often our personal and professional actions are the equivalent of flipping a coin once, and assuming that every other time we ever flip a coin we will get the same result.

I have had a big focus on process ever since reading the book Chop Wood, Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf. I can honestly say this book has had a bigger impact on my life than any other. The subtitle says it all, “How to fall in love with the process of becoming great.” I highly recommend this book to any looking to lead a more process-oriented life.

My advice for you:

Focus on doing the little things right.

Fall in love with the process of becoming great. If you are able to truly do this, the outcomes will take care of themselves.

Maintain consistent effort instead of bursts of hyperactivity.

Take care of things like your health, your body, your relationships, your spirituality, and your mindset that only need a little bit of time each day to maintain and yet, are all too often neglected. These are things that are vitally important to your success in life, and yet not one of these things can be maintained by brushing for an hour once a month.

And speaking of.

Brush daily with consistent application of effort.

You’ll be surprised where you end up.

Venture Capital and the Red Queen

This past week I came across a fascinating concept in evolutionary biology called the Red Queen Hypothesis. The Red Queen Hypothesis proposes that organisms must maintain a perpetual state of adaptation and evolution, not only to gain a reproductive advantage against rivals from within their own species, but merely to survive in an ever-changing world filled with other constantly evolving organisms. The Red Queen Hypothesis paints evolution not as an inevitable outcome of generation after generation of survival of the fittest, but as a species-level arms race of life or death.

Evolutionary Biologist Leigh Van Valen developed the Red Queen Hypothesis as a potential explanation for why a species’ extinction rate is relatively flat over time. Under the core tenets of the theory of evolution, one would expect that as species evolve over time, the chance of them going extinct would diminish, but empirical evidence has shown this to not be the case. Van Valen named his hypothesis after the Red Queen from Lewis Carrol’s 1871 novel Through The Looking Glass (sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). At one point in the book, the antagonistic Red Queen tells Alice that:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Exhibit 1. The wily and cunning fox. Notice the hallmarks of an evolutionary predator. Pointed ears, sharp claws and a stylish three piece suit with occasion appropriate accessories.

Exhibit 2. The swift hare. Large ears have developed to be able to sense the slightest sounds. Evolutionary biologists maintain that the true reason behind the hare’s insistence on wearing gloves and proclivity to ask “whaddup, doc?” were lost a millenia ago.

This idea of running just to stay where you are is an apt metaphor for the necessity of an organism to constantly evolve just to maintain its current place in the evolutionary order. The most obvious example of this in nature also involves running. Imagine the perpetual evolutionary dance between the wily fox and the swift hare. The hare constantly evolves to become faster as the slowest hares are removed from the gene pool by the hungry fox. The inverse happens to the fox, with their slowest numbers dying out from not being able to get enough food to eat. This plays out as a balancing act of co-evolution where both foxes and hares will get faster and faster over time. If either species stops keeping pace in this evolutionary arms race, it will either die out or be forced to adapt in other ways. As long as both the fox and the hare keep at roughly the same pace, their relationship will remain locked in place.

The world of technology startups and venture capital has many of the hallmarks of the Red Queen Hypothesis. Incumbents and disruptors are often locked in a battle of the hare and the fox. As soon as either starts slowing down, their demise is relatively swift. Companies need to constantly be reinventing themselves to stay on top. This is easier said than done. If you look at the tech titans of 20 years ago, only Microsoft has been able to maintain its status as one of the leaders in the space (and even then it is no longer as dominant as it once was). It will be interesting to look back in 20 more years and see whether the Amazons and Apples of the world are able to maintain the current status they enjoy. Some might point to the incredible power that today’s incumbent companies have, but at one point it was similarly hard to imagine that seemingly invincible tech titans like AOL and Xerox would ever fall from grace.

Startups have a biological imperative to constantly be growing and innovating. If they don’t, they will die just as surely as hares would if foxes suddenly evolved to be born with jetpacks. The other day I saw a well-regarded venture capitalist compare startups who take venture funding to sharks. Sharks are only able to “breathe” by constantly swimming so that water passes through their gills and can be absorbed. Constant innovation is similarly the only thing that keeps startups flush with oxygen. You may argue about whether this is the way that things should be, but it is hard to argue with the fact that once a company gets on the venture train, it is exceedingly difficult to get off at the next station. As a founder, you should understand that an ability to evolve and adapt is table stakes. It is not enough to build one great product. You need to constantly and consistently be improving and building better and better products.

How can this be done? Are all companies doomed to fail at the slightest slip up? What can a company do to keep on innovating?

Luckily our world is in a constant state of change which means that there will always be new opportunities for companies that truly build themselves to constantly innovate. The path to constant innovation is surprisingly straightforward, but only an extremely small number of companies ever execute on it over the long term.

The first step is to create a diverse and high quality talent pipeline that will continuously refresh your company with new ideas and perspectives. A focus on diversity must start on Day 1, because if you, as a founder, don’t start focusing on diversity within your first 10 hires, it will be extremely difficult to start doing so after our first 100 hires.

The second step is to keep your eye on the horizon. Reinvest in yourself to stay on the bleeding edge of innovation. Don’t rest on your laurels and expect that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow. Always be on the look out for new opportunities recently enabled by social or technological change. If companies only tried to build upon what made them initially successful, Amazon would be the world’s best place to shop online for books (but nothing else) and Netflix would be the first place we would all go to rent our favorite DVDs through the mail.

The third step is to think for the long-term, without losing the ability to block and tackle over the short term. Apple is the master of this. They never fail to deliver on their quarterly objectives, even as they maintain a long-range focus on the next quarter century. Their obsessive focus on long-term planning has allowed them to build products that people will love to use today, even as they incorporate the building blocks of what their future products will be 10 years down the road. When Apple first built the fingerprint scanners into iPhones, they were preparing us for a day when our face would be the key to our most valuable data. If you pay attention, Apple has slowly but surely been incorporating more and more health and AR focused capabilities into their products. Don’t be surprised when new products with each of those categories at the forefront are released in the coming years.

The fourth step is to think based on first principles about the way things should be done, not the ways that they are done today. The insurance industry has been notoriously slow to embrace new technology and innovation. There are some structural advantages insurance companies have that make it a great sector to be a part of, but these same structural advantages allow them to sometimes forego evolution. In Columbus, we have seen the birth of next-generation insurance companies like Root Insurance and Beam Dental that underwrite risk based on measured activity, instead of age and demographic characteristics. Constantly ask yourself why things are being done a certain way and how should they work based on your understanding of people and available technology.

And that’s all it takes. Not so hard right? The difficulty comes in execution… and the fact that everyone else out there is going to be the fox nipping at your heels. Success is possible, but it won’t ever be easy.

Run fast.

Run hard.

Run hungry.

And you might just stand a chance.

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