Life Lessons (re)Learned from Parenting

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

Hello there 👋

You haven’t heard from me in a while and that is due in no small part to the fact that my life has changed in a big way recently. About six months ago, my wife and I welcomed our first son to the world.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused a certain amount of introspection on my part. As I’ve reflected on the experience of becoming a parent, I’ve found that parenting hasn’t necessarily taught me a bunch of things I didn’t know, as much as it has absolutely hammer home many concepts that I (thought I) already knew. Here are some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned (or relearned) after six months of parenting.

It’s better to do the hard thing now, rather than hoping it will go away

Problems don’t tend to go away just because we wish they would. I don’t know if there is any other lesson that parenthood makes more clear. Your kid’s diaper isn’t going to become less dirty if you leave it. If your kid is hungry, waiting and hoping won’t make them less hungry. Rolling over and wishing they will stop crying in the middle of the night rarely pans out (though this is becoming less true with the advent of Son’s increasing self-soothing prowess).

No matter how much you may want a problem to go away, it often won’t cooperate. Usually, the problem just gets worse. Full diapers cause rashes. Crying babies struggle to latch. A bit of fussiness quickly becomes a full-on galactic meltdown.

The best approach I’ve found is to just get yourself used to doing the hard thing right away. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still unpleasant, but both Son and I are almost always better off if we just get the hard thing over with instead of dragging it out hoping it will go away.
This lesson holds true for life. Procrastination has never made anything better. If something needs doing, better to suck it up and bite the bullet as opposed to hoping it will fix itself.

Growth is non-linear

Parenting is the ultimate lesson that progress is often two steps forward and one (or two or even three) steps backward. Each time you feel like you've made a breakthrough you can be sure there is some sort of regression lying in wait around the corner.

If we are honest, I think we will all admit that life tends to follow a similar pattern. A constantly repeating series of incremental gains and intermittent backslides. It may feel like a roller coaster in the moment, but the key is to keep pushing through. It is only in hindsight that you can chart out the continual trend of progress over time. Whether we are talking about exercise, reading, relationships, faith, learning a new language, or careers, things always feel hardest in the moment and look best only when you take the time to zoom out and compare yourself today to where you were in the past.

Comparison is the death of Joy (and parental sanity)

Speaking of comparison, parenthood is an area where it is so easy to drive yourself crazy comparing you/your kid to others. Everyone else seems to have everything figured out. They seem to have perfect babies that never cry,sleep on command, and eat enough to be nurtured but not so much that you feel like you have to constantly be feeding them. There is so much pressure on parents to be perfect (especially moms). We all of course want what is best for our kids, so we look up the best approach for every possible scenario. For each individual thing, whether it be food or sleep, it may be within our power to optimize for that recommended approach, but it’s impossible to do that for every single aspect of a human life. You have to pick and choose the things that you really care about and what is important to you. As with parenting, so with life (sensing a theme here?). If you try to be perfect at everything, you’ll struggle to be good at anything. You have to prioritize the things that are most important and be ok with letting other things go or -gasp- just being ok at something.

The Art of Flexible Prioritization

This brings me to my next lesson. Parenthood has forced me to learn the art of flexible prioritization. Prior to becoming a parent, I relied on lots of structure, systems, and planning in order to be productive. The only way I could maintain discipline was by waking up at the same time every day, having the exact same morning routine, reading my bible in the same little study corner, doing the same kind of exercise.

And you know what? It worked pretty darn well. This approach has been awesome for someone like me who is great at building habits and terrible at exhibiting willpower in the moment.

The issue with this approach is that it is extremely fragile to exogenous shocks. My perfect little ideal structure for my days would work great on perfect little ideal days, but the issue is that perfect little ideal days don’t come around all that often. The second that real life would actually happen, all of my structure would go out the window. Vacation? Sickness? New job? Any road bump and I’d feel like I had to start back at square one.

Having a kid is the ultimate shock to the system. Allegedly, at some point we will be able to build routines and have very specific structure but for now, our life is much more jazz than sheet music. I’ve found that the best way to handle this is to adopt a new principle-based way of orienting my life. Instead of prescribing that I am going to be doing X at X time and Y at Y time, I now have a list of things that I prioritize. I know I want to get to them, but I try to be flexible in terms of when I do and how they look.

I call the following my “ordinal priorities”. They order how I try to invest my time. Their order doesn’t necessarily reflect their relative importance, but more the optimal path to ensure I am giving my best to the areas that need it.

🤲Faith

If I don’t take care of my spiritual health and relationship with God, I can’t be the leader my family needs me to be

🏋️‍♀️Health

If I don’t take care of myself physically, mentally, and emotionally I can’t be at my best for my family

👫Husband

If I focus on enabling Caitlyn to flourish, she will ensure that our family thrives

👨‍👩‍👦Father

If I focus on being present, emotionally available, and earnestly seek to be a good parent, my son will turn out well, despite the fact that I am going to make mistakes as a parent

👷‍♂️Builder/Writer

If I focus on following my curiosity and working on my craft as a builder/writer then I will feel professionally fulfilled.

I know I am only at my best after I've exercised so every single day I prioritize getting some form of exercise in. On an ideal day when things are going well, that looks like lifting weights for 45m-1hr, but ideal days don't happen every day. Some mornings are tough and I have an early meeting or we are in a rush to get to church. With my prior structure, this would've meant I wouldn't work out at all that day. Now I try not to sweat it  and make sure to get a quick 30-minute run or yoga session later in the day.

There’s a certain way I like to do things, but not every day is an ideal day, and being flexible, allows me to invest in my priorities, and to fulfill the needs I have for myself and my family without over-indexing on exactly how it looks in the ideal set of circumstances, because I know many days won’t be ideal

We are on the same team

My wife and I spoke a lot about parenting while she was pregnant. We talked about the kinds of parents we wanted to be. The kinds of parents we had and the behaviors we wanted to emulate. The sort of things we wanted to change from our upbringing. One of the things we talked about was how we would handle inevitable conflict especially when we might both be tired and feeling overwhelmed. During this conversation, my wife said something that has become a mantra for us.

”We are on the same team”

Any time one of us gets frustrated with the other this saying helps us to de-escalate and remember that we are rowing in the same direction. It helps us remember that we are ultimately teammates. That we are both tired and anxious and stressed, but we are working towards the same goal of trying our best to be good people, parents, and partners.

Killing Time-Killers

Having a kid really drives home the value of time. Instantly, a meaningful portion of the time you had for yourself just disappears. Don’t worry would-be parents, it is not as if free time is a thing of the past, just that the time you do have for yourself is much more limited. I’ve found it crucial to intentionally make an effort to kill the time killers in my life. I have realized that those little things I would do because I wanted to “just chill” or because I “had nothing better to do” can so easily become the only things I do in my precious free time if I let them.

The wonderful silver lining of having less free time is that the time you do have becomes so much more precious. If I am going to have any chance of investing into the priorities I outlined above, I have to be laser-focused on making time for them. The stakes are simply too high to spend every night vegging out in front of the TV or mindlessly scrolling social media.

For me, the biggest culprits were YouTube and Twitter. These were the sites I would open up when I wanted to “zone out” or “do nothing”. Now I haven't cut these sites out cold turkey. If someone shares a Twitter thread with me or if I want to look up a how-to video on something, I can still access them, but I've blocked them on my phone and computer so the effort required is much higher. High enough that they aren't what I immediately turn to whenever I have a free second.

The Joys of Living in the Moment

The lesson most imprinted on me after six months of parenting is the joy of living in the moment. It’s always been easier for me to focus on where I’m going than where I currently am. One example was how I spent the majority of my professional career aiming at going to Wharton for my MBA. It was a goal I had for so long, and I worked and worked towards it for years. The day I got in and got to tell my parents I’d been accepted was a moment that I am going to cherish forever. It was a culmination of so much hard work and effort, but guess how long I enjoyed it.

A day? Maybe two?

Instead of taking time to relish my achievement, I immediately started to think about my classes, how I would optimize for internships, and what my post-graduation career path would be. I had reached the mountaintop I had so long aimed for, but rather than taking time to enjoy the view, I headed straight for the next mountain to climb.

To some degree, I think this is just part of the human condition. We are wired to think about what’s next, and I think this is especially true for ambitious people. It’s so easy to think of goals as a checklist and once you check one off, you’re thinking about what comes next. The danger of always focusing on what comes next is that so much of the joy of life is being present in the little moments. When I look back on my most cherished memories, they’re often not what you’d expect to make the highlight reel. They are time spent being present with people. Enjoying relationships, conversations, and the outdoors. Little everyday moments are often the memories that have the most lasting impact on us.

When you have a kid it’s amazing how your world just shrinks. All of a sudden the mindshare you used to give to your career ambitions, your five-year goals, and your next vacation just disappears. Your time horizon shrinks down to the next day, the next hour, the next minute. Suddenly, (and in some cases by sheer necessity) you’re forced to live in the moment and just focus on what you need to be doing right now. After our son was a couple of weeks old, we started being able to think ahead a little bit. Starting to plan for the next day and maybe even next week. Even though we can now plan a bit further ahead, it has still been such a joy and relief to shrink the aperture down to focus more on the here and now. This sense of presence has been so refreshing and it’s something that I want to take with me even as we get into more of a routine with our family and are able to think more long-term.

Prior to having a kid my biggest anxiety was that if I took my foot off the gas, I’d never be able to put it back on. What I realize now, is that just because you set some ambition on the shelf doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. It just means that right now, you’re where you’re supposed to be and that down the road, when the time is right, you can pick that goal back off the shelf.

And that’s what I am doing today. Over the past year or so, as I have experienced some of the biggest changes of my life, I’ve become more and more sure that my calling revolves around two things. Building and writing. At points over the last six months this realization has stressed me out as I inevitably failed to do it all. After many conversations with my wife, and a miniature existential crisis or two, I decided to give myself 6 months of solely focusing on Son and our new little family. Six months to not stress out about writing or building. To not think about what my career was going to look like or what impact I was going to make on this world.

I write these words on Son’s six month birthday. I am still not 100% sure what I will be writing and building, just that I am going to be more intentional with my limited free time to write and build. And hopefully, I will figure out exactly what that means somewhere along the way.

Thanks for being part of the journey and hopefully some of these lessons learned can help all of us be, not only better parents, but better people.

Until next time,
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

A Letter To My Fellow Graduates

Well, that was fast.

Wharton graduation is this weekend and, as with many things in life, it felt ages away until it suddenly was tomorrow. I’ve got a lot of things to say about the past two years, the MBA experience in general, and what is next for me. There’ll be a time and a place for those kinds of posts (especially as I want to get back into a better writing habit as I re-enter the real world.) For now, I thought I would sign off from the Wharton experience with a short letter to my fellow graduates.

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To my fellow Graduates,

There’s an inside joke in my family that I didn’t know where I wanted to go for undergrad but that I always knew where I wanted to go for grad school. My dad graduated from Wharton in 1991 and my whole life has been spent hearing stories about my parents’ time at Wharton. Growing up I saw the massive impact Wharton had on his career. He started a company with one of his classmates, his grad school buddies became my mentors, and we even would regularly go on family vacations with their respective families.

For me, Wharton was always a goal unto itself. I’ve always had a plan in life and Wharton is where that plan culminated. It was where the sidewalk ended.

Achieving a big goal like that is always a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Excitement to have reached the mountaintop and trepidation as you find yourself staring at the even larger mountain that is now in your path.

This trepidation was exacerbated by the state of the world two years ago. My classmates and I were getting acceptance letters and making big life decisions from within the confines of quarantines caused by an unprecedented global pandemic.

Our classes’ experience wasn’t a given. With the cloud of COVID looming, we didn’t really know what we were signing ourselves up for. I remember being nervous. I remember talking with my wife about whether this was an intelligent investment given all the uncertainty. I also remember believing that the sort of people who would be willing to make such a big life adjustment in the face of such uncertainty were EXACTLY the kind of people that I wanted to build relationships with. The kind of people who knew that there would be unknown challenges presented by the pandemic and who chose to take it upon themselves to make the most out of the situation anyways.

And make the most out of it we did. We learned a lot and laughed even more. We’ve traveled the world and built friendships that will last a lifetime, all while of course adhering to all the health guidelines of the University of Pennsylvania.

When I look back on where I was two years ago, the biggest surprise isn’t the things we did against the backdrop of a global pandemic. We all knew we would make this an amazing experience. The biggest surprise was that the true value of a Wharton MBA isn’t the things you do, but the people you become along the way.

I really believe that is true. Yes, there’s the golden stamp of approval on the resume, and the cushy post-graduation job, and the confidence of saying you went to one of the best schools in the world.

But so rarely in life do you get the opportunity to take a step back and to ask yourself the big questions. What do you want to do? Where do you want to do it? Who do you want to do it with? And most importantly, who do you want to be while you are doing it?

The reality is that if you’ve navigated your way to a school like Wharton you will likely achieve some baseline level of success (whatever that means to you). Does that mean we should feel entitled to our success? Absolutely not. But it does mean that questions about whether or not we will be successful aren’t especially interesting.

The far more interesting questions are how we will be successful? Doing what? And most importantly what kind of person we will be in the midst of that success?

That opportunity for self-reflection presents itself as a challenge for us going forward. To not think of our MBA experience as a self-enclosed moment in time. A perfect little snowglobe of memories and intellectual stimulation. The challenge instead is to think of it as a stepping stone.

Over the past two years, I’ve realized Wharton isn’t where the sidewalk ends. It’s not a destination unto itself, but simply a part of the journey.

I’ve also realized that if you spend your life chasing accolades and jobs and money, every mountaintop attained will simply leave you staring up at the next rung on the ladder.

I hope that you have experienced tremendous growth over the past two years.

Even more than that I hope that your growth won’t end when you collect your diploma.

Wharton has taught us that experiences are what we make of them.

But even more than that, Wharton has taught us that we are what we make of ourselves.

And that the journey of becoming the best version of ourselves is far more important than anything we may achieve along the way.

Good luck to you class of 2022.

Thanks for the memories.

Thanks for saying yes to a challenge in the face of so many unknowns.

And thanks for being a part of the most transformative two years of my life.

---

Ok, that was a bit cheesy. But just because it is cheesy doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Motivational graduation speeches are one of my favorite genres so I couldn’t help but try a hand at what I would say if given the chance. If you too are a fan of the genre, here are 1, 2, and 3 of my favorite all-time commencement speeches.

Until next time.

Journey before destination.

The Tactics of Ethical Influence

At Wharton, there are a few "famous classes" that every alum recommends you try to take. This semester I had the opportunity to take one such class. Influence, taught by Professor Cade Massey was about the theory, strategies, and tactics of exerting influence on others both personally and professionally. Now, this was a class I entered into with a not-small degree of skepticism. I have worked in highly-political environments before and hated it. I viewed political behavior as the sort of brown-nosing and maneuvering that people did when they didn't have the skill to succeed on their own merit. I have always tried my best to be genuine and direct about my thoughts, feelings, and positions on things. So what was I to gain from a class all about politics and power?

Turns out, a lot.

Three things changed my mind about the concept of influence. In our first class, the professor hammered home the idea that influence is not a substitute for merit, but an accelerant. A point of leverage when you already are in a position of strength. The ability to outmaneuver an opponent when backed into a corner. An option to win against adversaries who are larger, more powerful, and backed by better resources than you are. Throughout the course, this concept that neither merit nor influence will likely be sufficient for you to accomplish your goals on your own was hammered home. We also explored how influence was itself a skill that needed to be honed and so really was an aspect of your merit itself. It opened up my eyes to the fact that utilizing influence wasn't something that people did when they didn't have anything else to rely upon, but an important part of anyone's professional development.

Second, we talked about the "Just World" hypothesis. The idea that too often people operate as if the world was perfectly just and that there were cosmic scales that automatically balanced out every act with an equal reward. Do good, good happens to you. Take the expedient route, it'll come back to bite you. The danger with the Just World hypothesis is that it hinders people's agency. If you believe that what goes around always comes back around, there is little reason for you to take it upon yourself to improve circumstances. Now I personally think that in the long-term, there is an aspect of balancing that occurs. If you spend your life burning bridges, eventually you are going to lose our credibility, reputation, and any goodwill from others. But one need only turn on the news for 5 minutes to see that bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Now, this isn't to say that the world is completely unjust, just that it is a bit rough around the edges. Good and bad things happen to both good and bad people. Hard work and good intentions usually pay off, but not always. Merit matters, but it isn't the only thing that matters. In the "rough world" that we live in, influence matters. We may not like it, but to argue otherwise is naive. And I feel confident saying that as someone who has made the argument myself all too often.

Now I know what you are thinking. "Oh great, a bunch of Ivy League MBAs learning how to manipulate people. What could go wrong?" The same thought crossed my mind and that is why I was so glad that ethical considerations were a crucial cornerstone of this course. At the end of the day, influence tools are just that, tools. And as tools, they can be used for good or ill. The matter of real importance comes from deciding when and how to use these tools. Whether to use them for expedience's sake or with honor. Whether to use them to treat people as means to your own ends or to use them with the conscious belief that others are ends unto themselves. Wielding influence is not only an avenue to accomplish your goals but also a defensive mechanism. A shield from bad actors who would spoil your cause for their own selfish gain. If you are like how I used to be and simply refused to participate in "politics" out of principle, you may open yourself, your friends, and your causes to manipulation by others who aren't as principled. It may not be ideal, but in the world we have, being aware and capable of wielding influence is especially important if you are a good person with noble ends. If these tools really are effective, we need the people using them to be thoughtful, ethical, and conscientious of their impact, not just those who will do whatever it takes to see their goals realized. In my first semester at Wharton, I wrote an ethical manifesto about how I wanted to be an ethical leader. Of the 6 pillars I highlighted, two are especially salient to the guidance of when and how to use influence tactics: Treat everyone with Honor and Don't take shortcuts. On the last day of our class we discussed the importance of integrity as it related to influence. Of making decisions by principles instead of simple cost-benefit calculations. Of the fact that not only can we exercise influence with integrity, but that sometimes, in order to act with integrity, situations will require us to exert influence and to do so effectively. The foundational importance of ethics and integrity in conversations of politics and power was a pleasant surprise to me and a throughline I wish that more of my classes grappled with. Often even more important than the question of whether or not we can do something is the question of whether we ought to.

What exactly are these influence tactics that I am referencing? Each class we would hit on one or two tactics and a figure whose behavior served as an example of them. I can't do them all justice in a simple blog post, but I will outline the tactics at a high level here. Our professors’ research broke the tactics into three buckets, hard power, soft power, and smart power.

Influence Tactics

Hard Power

Hard power is what it sounds like and what many of us first think of when we think of influence. Hard power is using your position or authority to get someone to do what you want. It is easy to have negative feelings about hard power, but a real challenge is thinking about how to use these tactics in a relationship-preserving way instead of burning bridges with them. The two tactics in the hard power bucket are Ethos and Might.

Ethos - Someone's credibility and a key element to persuasion. The trick with Ethos is displaying your credentials within an appropriate context so it doesn't come across as obnoxious.

Might - Coercive Power. Might is the ability to address difficult issues and to tolerate conflict or unpleasantness. Might may be the most challenging strategy to use the appropriate amount of and most people tend to over-rely on it or to completely neglect it.

Soft Power

Soft power is the more subtle side of influence. It is all about getting others to want to do what you want them to do versus forcing them to do it. It is about building bridges and relationships and using those connections to accomplish your goals. The six tactics in the soft power bucket are Coalitions, Pathos, Networks, Team Building, Exchange, and Allocentrism.

Coalitions - The ability to garner support from other actors and to align incentives towards a common goal. Coalitions are crucially important because they are the most effective way for someone with low power to overcome a more powerful opponent.

Pathos - Creating emotional resonance with an audience and the second key element to persuasion. Pathos is often created through the telling of stories and allows the user to relate to the topic or issue at hand.

Networks - Building bridges between yourself and others. Effective networks are diverse and contain both formal and informal relationships. People who have the most valuable networks sit at the leverage points between different network nodes and can act as an intermediary between otherwise separate groups.

Team-Building - Team-building takes the idea of coalitions one step further. It is often not enough to bring desperate actors together in pursuit of a common goal, the real trick is in keeping all the diverging interests from tearing the group apart. Effective team-building means creating a sense of cohesion and loyalty between members of the team and ensuring that everyone's unique strengths are able to be leveraged.

Exchange - Human beings are naturally inclined towards reciprocity. A powerful way to win allies is to do things for them knowing that most people will naturally seek to even the scales. Those who are most effective using the tactic of exchange go beyond simple transactions and develop habits of helping others without short-term expectations of anything in return.

Allocentrism - The opposite of egocentrism. Allocentrism means being cognizant of and orienting yourself towards others' perspectives versus your own. Allocentrism is key for exhibiting empathy or looking at a situation from someone else's perspective.

Smart Power

Smart Power is the bucket that may be the newest to you. It deals with meta-level tools that are more about the appropriate recognition of when to use what tools versus the tools themselves. Research has shown that smart power tools have the biggest impact on whether you are effective or not with Agency being the most effective tactic to cultivate out of all the tactics discussed. The four tactics in the smart power bucket are Situational Awareness, Agency, Intent, and Logos

Situational Awareness - The ability to understand one’s environment and how it is changing. Those skilled in situational awareness understand the interests of different actors and can reliably make predictions about how situations are going to play out.

Agency - The understanding that nothing in the environment is fixed and that you can exert influence to change circumstances. Agency is found to be the most impactful of all influence tactics which makes sense because if you don't think you will be able to influence a situation, you are unlikely to even try.

Intentionality - Intentionality is a complete focus on achieving goals. It is the ability to sacrifice the battle to win the war and to compromise tertiary interests in pursuit of a larger design.

Logos - The logic of one's arguments and the final key element to persuasion. Logos can take the form of facts and figures or a simple logical flow.

Developing My Influence

A major aspect of the class was evaluating our own influence abilities and seeing where there were opportunities for improvement. As someone who had eschewed "playing politics" I expected that I would have some areas to work on.

Little did I know how un-influential I really was.

We were rated on our ability to use influence tactics by both fellow classmates as well as by former colleagues. And my ratings stunk. I had one rating, Network building, that scored in the 80th percentile of my class, and everything else was much lower. In some cases, much, much, much lower.

This definitely was a bit of a blow to my confidence, but I have decided to look at the positive side of things. I have been relatively successful so far in my career apparently without the ability to influence people at all! Imagine what I can do if I develop even just one or two of these skills!

Joking aside, these assessments were definitely a wake-up call, and as I think about how to practice some of the things I learned in influence I want to make sure that I have concrete strategies and tactics that I can employ moving forward.

My Influence Action Plan

One of my favorite parts of Influence was how the professor emphasized the importance of making these theoretical ideas highly practical and building tangible habits to improve these skills. As someone who has so much room for improvement across so many of these tactics, part of the challenge for me is simply narrowing down what I should be working on. After reflecting on the various influence tools I learned in the class, two stick out as key areas I need to improve on, Agency and Situational Awareness.

I think the first step of improving both of these areas was simply taking this class. It has opened my eyes to the fact that influence matters. That these tools can be powerful and that they really can shape situations when applied directly.

To improve my Agency I plan to:

• Challenge myself to never assume that an environment is fixed. I know that the game board is constantly shifting and I need to act accordingly.

• Always question whether there is a "third-way". There are often alternatives that haven't been considered or opportunities to break with "the way things have always been done" if you are willing to take them.

• Take the initiative. I want to be someone who raises their hand and takes the initiative on things. Even when it doesn't work out I need to know that in the long-term, building that habit will be worthwhile.

• In an attempt to keep the importance of Agency top of mind, I added these qualities to an identity affirmation I regularly review that describes the kind of person I am working on becoming.

To improve my Situational Awareness I plan to:

• Practice regular mindfulness and meditation in order to be more aware of my own thoughts and to give myself the cognitive space to be aware of how others are reacting around me

• Set aside 10 minutes before meetings to think through what environment I am about to walk into and what my objectives should be

• Reflect on what has changed in my environment each week as a way to practice noticing any shifting ground

• To help me stay on top of improving my Situational Awareness I added all of these items to my weekly self-check-in

To keep the lessons learned from Influence top of mind I plan to:

• Send myself a quarterly recurring email containing this blog post as well as my ethical manifesto for me to review whenever it is in my inbox

• Add a to-do list item to my quarterly self-review check in to re-evaluate where I am with improving my influence capabilities and to set up new habits according to the tactics I want to work on next

• Add a to-do list item to my weekly check-in to ask myself if there are any little notes or thank you notes I should be sending to people in an effort to maintain my network

Influence was one of the most interesting, informative, and impactful classes I have ever taken. It challenged me and made me feel convicted about my attitudes and actions in ways that I had never even questioned in myself previously. If the hallmark of an excellent course is one that will stick with you long after your last assignment has been turned in, then I think Influence has the makings of a very excellent course indeed. Hopefully, you found this brief overview of what I learned interesting and informative!

Until next time. Journey before destination.

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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.

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.

The Church of Reason

I was asked this week what I thought the future of MBAs will look like given the proliferation of online learning in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Would getting an MBA still be worth it? What will teaching look like in an increasingly virtual world? What is the impact of being in-person vs. virtual?

These questions were timely as we had our first opportunity to attend classes in-person this past week. I can’t answer all of these questions right now as my experiences are only my own and my MBA story is still in its early innings, but I did want to talk a bit about the experience of being in-person compared to being virtual.

The Church of Reason

To set the stage, I want to turn towards one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read, the part autobiography, part exploration of philosophy and metaphysics, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.

In the book, Pirsig describes modern universities as “Churches of Reason.” He discusses the question of whether a roadside sports bar located in an old church is still a church? Is it simply the building that matters or something more?

Pirsig would tell you the roadside sports bar is no longer a church. Not really.

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 to 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. Pirsig believes that 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.

Similar to religious churches, Pirsig argues that 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.

Pirsig would argue that, 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, the buildings become nothing more than a mausoleum to their former holy endeavor.

But what if we turn it around? What if the Spirit of the University is alive and well, despite not being able to meet within the confines of a classroom?

Zoom University

The past year has been an interesting exploration of that exact question. Can the Spirit of the University continue to live on virtually?

I believe that on a macro-level, the answer is a resounding yes. Over the past year, we have seen people adapt and evolve in an unprecedented way. We have seen the important roles that education plays in our society and I expect that long after COVID-19 has faded, its impact on education will continue to be felt acutely.

But I think the answer may be different on a mico-level. One of the things you realize when you start a graduate school program is that everyone is here for different reasons. There are some people who are just checking a box as they climb the corporate ladder at a bank or consulting firm. There are some people who want a two-year vacation where they can travel and party. There are others who are just focused on getting a job and others still who are deeply committed to learning in the classroom.

And I don’t want to try to prescribe which is more important. Everyone has their own reasons and they can all be legitimate depending on where you are at in your career/life.

For me, the value of the MBA revolves around three pillars: building lifelong relationships, learning as much as I absolutely can, and growing personally.

Whatever the reason someone is here, I do think it impacts the question of whether the Spirit of the University lives on. The reality is, that for a decent amount of my peers, the academic side of the MBA experience is a necessary evil required to access the other aspects of the experience.

Without saying whether this is right or wrong, I think I can say that it does make me a little bit sad. The opportunity to attend a school like Wharton is such an incredible privilege and it does make me sad when people ignore a part that, I believe, can drive so much fulfillment and accomplishment. I should note that this perspective is definitely colored by my intense love of both learning and the academic environment. I did not take full advantage of the academic environment in undergrad and it was one of my few regrets from those four years. I promised myself that, should I ever have the opportunity to be a student again, I wouldn’t take it for granted.

And I think it is impossible to look at the academic side of the experience without taking the virtual medium into account. It is clear to me that the Spirit of the University can live on virtually, but I think what the virtual medium does is that it makes it much easier to not really engage with the academic experience.

Even for someone as gung-ho about the academic side of things as me, there have definitely been times I gave in to the temptation to roll out of bed 5 minutes before class and passively listen while constantly refreshing my All Things Arsenal Twitter feed. (Side note: Thanks for the memöries Mesut! And Here-We-Gø-Confirmed that I will be getting a new jersey in the near future!)

As with many things in life, whether the Spirit of the University lives on for each individual is largely a choice. My belief and experience so far is that the more you invest into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

Come to class with me!

To my fellow Wharton students, I highly recommend you at least give the in-class learning opportunities this semester a try.

I get the temptation. It is extremely convenient to be able to roll out of bed and into class. Needing to walk back and forth between school and center city since there aren’t really places to hang out in between classes sucks. Wearing a mask is a pain and needing to drink through a straw seems a bit silly. And the Walnut Street bridge gets cold this time of year. LIKE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY COLD.

But I would encourage and challenge you to at least give it a try. I believe one of the great dangers we all face in life is the choice between doing what is easy and what is right. Between comfort and doing what is best for ourselves and the world.

And if my experience is anything to go off of, going back into the classroom is well, well worth it if you feel comfortable doing so given your own health/risk/life parameters.

Getting to be in class and on campus last week was simply amazing. It was a little window into normalcy and a reminder of some of the things we have probably forgotten we are missing out on. I loved simply being on the move on a beautiful (if brutally cold) day. Enjoying the sun on my face instead of on the window in my office. Serendipitously running into friends on the way to campus or in the bathroom between classes. Getting to look new acquaintances in the eyes when you introduce yourself and feeling the energy of a classroom filled with interested and engaged students.

You simply can’t beat it.

I can’t recommend trying to go in person highly enough and that was when A) I went to the wrong room for my first class and had to zoom in from a floor away anyway and B) there were only a handful of people who were brave (foolish?) enough to be the guinea pigs for the first week of classes. If we are able to get a critical mass of 10-15 students in each class (even our stream together classes!) I really think it will make for a huge improvement and provide much more value to most of us over the zoom status quo.

Maybe I am making too much of being in person.

Maybe the Spirit of the University lives on no matter the medium.

Maybe I am overreacting to what was just a nice day.

Maybe COVID has simply lowered the bar for what a good day looks like.

Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Until next week. Journey before Destination.

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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.

2020 Review

What a long, strange trip it has been.

In past years I have analyzed predictions from previous years and made new ones for the year to come. I am going to stop doing that. The prediction game seems like just a bit too much of a shot in the dark and 12 months is often simply too short of a time frame for even the trends I am most confident in to come to fruition.

Instead, I just want to do a bit of a recap and a review of what happened in my life after the past year.

Big life events in somewhat chronological order.

Applying to Grad School

I don't know if this is how other grad school programs work but applying to your MBA feels like stumbling into a shockingly deep rabbit hole. As you start getting into it you find a massive world of insanely well-paid consultants and seemingly impossible best practices. Thousands of forums and blog posts on the topic. Profiles of applicants who had perfect grades and found cures to diseases and still didn’t get in. There is even a live ticker that shows the stats of people who do or don't get into various schools when it comes to decision time. It is all a bit intimidating. I'll probably write a separate post on this process one day but for now, suffice to say that it is a PROCESS. In October of 2019, I decided I was going to accelerate my plans and apply for schools' second-round deadlines in January. I ended up applying to 6 schools in what ended up being a tight, but not uncomfortable timeline. I had the great advice to take my GMAT the summer after I graduated so I had that score in my back pocket and it was one less thing I needed to deal with. I ended up getting interviews at 4 of the 6, I got waitlisted by two schools and accepted into two schools including Wharton. The onset of COVID immediately after my interviews makes the events loom especially large in my mind. Prior to visiting family for the holidays just a couple of weeks ago, our last getaway was when we took advantage of being in Boston for interviews and made it into a weekend visit. Similarly, my last time on an airplane was flying back to Columbus from Philadelphia after my Wharton interviews. My Wharton interviews, in particular, were an excellent experience. There ended up being a group of interviewees with late flights who all got drinks and burgers together after interviews had finished and funnily enough everyone in this group ended up getting into the school and have become good friends.

COVID

It's impossible to write about 2020 without writing about COVID. It caused a monumental shift in just about everyone’s life. For us personally, it had some upsides like serving as an impetus to get a dog, increased working flexibility which allowed us to spend more time with family this year than ever before, increased time with my wife, and the breathing room to focus on improving my physical health. The biggest silver lining was probably the fact that my wife was able to keep a job that she loves when we moved. It also presented some personal challenges. We weren't able to spend nearly as much time with our Columbus friends as we would've liked prior to moving. Travel plans were curtailed and we had to make a major life transition at just about the least opportune time ever (and ended up contracting COVID in early August as a result). Overall, we have been extremely fortunate to be in the privileged and blessed position that we have been where our life has been able to continue in an impacted, but not diminished way. We try hard to maintain the perspective that this pandemic is a lot harder for a lot of people.

Getting a Puppy

The biggest surprise of this year was our adoption of a puppy, Bulleit. Caitlyn and I had gone back and forth on getting a dog for years, never quite landing on the same space in the gameboard. Finally earlier this year, with grad school looming, we synchronized on a final decision. We would not be getting a dog.

In early March, when the world stopped spinning and everything was on fire we were kinda bummed out and decided it would be a good idea for our mental health to spend an afternoon playing with a puppy that one of my coworkers was fostering. It was going to be a fun afternoon with absolutely no long term commitment. As I am sure is of little surprise to anyone who has ever owned a dog we immediately fell in love and haven't looked back since (shoutout to Shannon for bringing this guy into our lives!). At the time, we thought that covid would be a great opportunity to get a new puppy since we would be home for a couple of weeks and could train him (hah).

I can say with absolute confidence and zero bias that Bulleit is the greatest dog to have ever lived. He is much better behaved than he has any right to be and is a constant joy to us and everyone who meets him.

Getting in Shape

I have written a bit about my focus on improving my physical health. I had a bit of a health wake-up call towards the end of 2019 and was really focused on improving my health in 2020. Overall this was a big success. I lost about 35 lbs before gaining about 10 lbs back over the holidays for an overall net loss of about 25 lbs. More important than the outcome was the journey it took me to get there. Eating healthier and being more active has led to me feeling better and being happier. Trying to be healthy has turned from something I do to part of who I am. I still have plenty of room for improvement but I am seeing physical, mental, and emotional progress and think 2021 is going to be an even more positive year than 2020 was.

Moving

Moving sucked. I hate moving so much. Next topic.

Getting COVID

Part of moving sucking was having our movers give us the gift that just kept on giving in the form of COVID. Part of the reason I want to talk about COVID and be open about it is that it is hilariously stupid that there is any sort of stigma attached to a highly infectious global pandemic. Maybe I would feel more self-conscious if we had been exposed due to wanton negligence but it's unfortunately hard to get around being in close contact with people packing and then unpacking all of your earthly possessions. COVID was not fun but also not terrible. 10/10 still would not recommend. It manifested as a bad cold for me. For Caitlyn, it was a bit more severe with flu like symptoms. The hardest part of COVID for me was the existential dread that I would never make any friends at grad school since I was isolating during the first couple of weeks of school. Luckily those fears proved to be overblown. Without making light of it, part of me is glad we got it. It doesn't feel like quite so much of an amorphous boogeyman as it did before. Having antibodies has increased our risk tolerance and allowed us to feel a bit more comfortable participating in social situations.

Philly

Philly has turned out to be a wonderfully pleasant surprise. We have really enjoyed our time in the city. There are a ton of shops, restaurants, and parks in the area we live in. All Wharton students live within a relatively small area so we have lots of friends around and it isn't rare to serendipitously run into people you know. The highlight for Bulleit (and maybe Caitlyn too) is definitely the off-leash dog park just a couple of blocks away from our apartment. For all the rumors of the demise of big cities over the past year, moving from an idealized mid-sized city to a coastal metropolis has done nothing but give me confidence that those rumors are overblown. On paper, it may be easy to focus on the downsides of big cities like the cost of living. But there is an energy and life in big cities that just doesn't seem to exist in other places. Maybe it is all in my head or caused by the grad school bubble I find myself in, but I believe that large cities will continue to be where the brightest and most ambitious people choose to live their lives. There just isn't a good substitute for the powerful network effects that cities create even in an increasingly virtual world.

Colossus

A pleasant irony of this year was that I pursued my MBA in the name of a belief in the power of serendipity and yet the most serendipitous thing to happen to me has had very little to do with school itself. Since the beginning of the school year, I have been working part time at Colossus. For those that don't know, Colossus is a startup media company that includes the popular business and investing podcasts Invest Like the Best and Founder’s Field Guide of which I have been a huge fan for years. A big reason why I wanted to get my MBA was in a hope of getting operational experience. Getting to be part of the Colossus team from early on has given me that in spades. It is a good reminder that there is no better way to learn than to do and it has been immensely rewarding being a part of building something. I've been happy with how my role has grown and I am excited for the trajectory the company is on. It's a unique position for a company that is in many ways very much a startup but has the benefit of having hundreds of thousands of highly engaged fans that tune into the shows weekly. Special shoutout to Damian for already teaching me a TON about hiring, firing, selling, building, and being more direct. Working at Colossus has also been an amazing example of the power of networking, social media, and being politely persistent (Don't ask, don't get!). It has been the perfect real-world supplement to my education in the classroom (and the fact that it is helped line the coffers of the "oh my god I am in college and drinking beer regularly again" fund doesn’t hurt either!

Wharton

Overall, school has been awesome. We have made some amazing friendships forged in the fires of shared experience. I have loved being back in the academic environment. In undergrad, I definitely did not appreciate being in the classroom for the incredibly privileged opportunity it was until I had graduated and missed it dearly. I am trying not to make the same mistakes again and really appreciate ever minute that I have to learn and engage with brilliant professors and fellow students. I don't always succeed. It's easy to get caught up with everything else going on personally and professionally, but I am really trying to be intentional about being grateful for my additional time in academia. Once again, school is an area where COVID's shadow looms large. All of my classes were virtual in my first semester (luckily all my classes should at least have some in-class components this semester). There are still friends and classmates I have only met over zoom. I believe the school administration’s lack of nuance and inability to creatively problem solve has had a deleterious impact on my feelings of belonging to the school community. Never the less, my time in grad school has gotten off to a successful start. The primary reason why I pursued getting an MBA was that I wanted to build relationships with super-smart, driven people and I couldn't be happier with how that has gone so far. I still have room to improve in "finding my tribe" of other students who want to pursue entrepreneurship, but I think the steps that I am taking on that front will help massively.

One of the things I undervalued in my estimation of the value of getting my MBA was the benefit of simply having some mental breathing space to take a step back, think, and ask myself some of the big questions in life. What do I want to do long term? Where do I want to live? What is my calling? What are my strengths? I am in the minority of my peers in that I don't have a clearly defined next stepping stone in my career that I am pursuing. This has led to the occasional existential crisis as they are going through recruiting and I am sitting over here twiddling my thumbs and trusting in the power of serendipity. It hasn't always been a pleasant experience grappling with the questions of life, but I DO think it has been massively valuable. When you are working full time, it is hard to just keep your head above water. In some ways, I am still struggling with figuring out what I want to do this summer, post-graduation, and with the rest of my life. I am sure you can expect a blog post on the subject soon. But what I have come to appreciate is that where you are going is much less important than the person that you become along the way. And I am trying to lean into that revelation as I get tactical about my summer plans.

As I look back on a year where so much has changed, I find myself most grateful for what hasn’t. Caitlyn and my relationship is stronger than ever. Our friends and family are healthy. We continue to look towards the past with gratitude and the future with hope. We continue to believe that tomorrow will be better than yesterday.

Thanks to everyone that has been part of our journey and here’s to 2021 being the best year yet!

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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.

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.

With Speed! With Speed!

With Speed! With Speed!

If you have ever watched an Arsenal game with me, there is a decent chance you have heard me repeat this refrain over and over again throughout the match.

One of the keys to soccer is the transition from defense to attack. Teams who are defending deep might get a key interception and have a chance to quickly progress up the field. These “counter-attacks” can be especially lethal as, instead of the usual 4-6+ defenders you would face against an opponent who is in formation, you find 2-4 defenders who are frantically back peddling and trying to get back into position. Counter-attacks can change the course of entire games and often give chances for underdogs to upset the competition, but the execution is of the utmost importance. There is a slim window with each counter-attack where you may find yourself out-manning the opposition, but if you dilly dally on the ball too long the other team will surely get back into position and negate any danger they may have previously faced.

So whenever Arsenal have a chance to counter-attack, I will likely be encouraging them to move quicker to take advantage of the situation before it passes them by.

I am pretty sure I got it from my Dad who is deathly allergic to players who slow-down play or have a habit of passing backward. Even some of Arsenal’s all-time great players like Henry and Sanchez have fallen out of favor with my father due to their proclivity to slow down our play.

Soccer is very much a game of momentum, but the unique beauty of the sport is how one single passage of decisive action can totally turn a game on its head.

I think life is a lot like soccer. It’s a momentum game. A game generally more of miles than milliseconds. But ever so often there is an opportunity that requires decisive action to capitalize on.

Back to School

I’ve been thinking about momentum recently as I have navigated the transition from the working world back to academia. As I discussed in my last post, the process was less than smooth. To top it off, we arrived in Philly the day after Hurricane Isaias swept through the area, flooding our building’s basement and knocking out our A/C. Unpacking in the Philadelphia summer was never going to be a life highlight, but doing so with no A/C turned it into a herculean effort. One which we lost badly. Once we were finally able to get our A/C back online we discovered that our movers had left us with a special going away present: COVID-19.

Suffice to say, our first couple of weeks in Philly didn’t exactly go according to the script. I had been so energized to hit the ground running and get the apartment straight ahead of school starting and instead I got absolutely stuffed on my way to the rim.

Life is like that sometimes. All the momentum in the world can come to a screeching halt due to something totally unforeseen or out of your control. It is impossible to avoid these speedbumps, so the real challenge lies in how quickly you are able to dust yourself off and get back up to speed.

It’s been slow going so far, but I am happy to report that I feel like I am starting to get my feet under me again. Caitlyn and I both feel 1000x better than we did at the beginning of the month and successfully navigated our isolation without exposing anyone else. Our apartment is (mostly) unpacked and school has gotten off to a great start. Normal classes start on Tuesday, but for the past two weeks, we have been engrossed in a business simulation course that was about as interesting and engaging as I could ever expect from a virtual course. The professor did a great job of leveraging the technology available to drive engagement like breaking us up into discussion rooms, utilizing real-time polls to gauge class sentiment, and encouraging us to share questions and comments in zoom chat. It is clear that the human element and opportunity for serendipitous conversations in the hallways are missing, but there are benefits to the remote classroom environment as well. As with many aspects of remote work, one is not inherently superior to the other for the majority of circumstances. It simply requires you to understand which trade-offs you are making and take action necessary to ameliorate downsides.

One of my biggest concerns headed into school was what the social scene would look like. The number one reason why I wanted to pursue my MBA was not the education itself or the credential but the network. And less the “network” as in alumni or professional network and much more the fact that people who are willing to take themselves out of the workforce and potentially spend hundreds of thousands of dollars investing into their career are the exact kind of risk-on, long-term thinkers I want to surround myself with.

Would people still be able to socialize? Would other students move to Philly? Would there be safe ways to engage with one another?

I am pleased to report that the social side of things has gone about as well as I could have hoped. There are way more social activities than I could ever participate in even if it was is all I did. People are taking the initiative to get creative and come up with safe and responsible ways to build relationships. Just as I expected they would. It’s not perfect. I think it can be especially hard for students who are not in Philly even with the regular occurrence of virtual events, but it is about as good as I had any right to be optimistic about a few weeks ago.

Momentum Games

So much about life is maintaining positive momentum and recapturing lost momentum when life inevitably trips you up. I feel like I have more or less been successful in doing that after the gut punches of the last couple of months, but I know that it will occur again.

There are few abilities that are as important as one’s ability to roll with the inevitable punches. To be able to intercept the ball when their back is to the goal and to counter-attack with speed.

This ability to execute at speed was by far the biggest indicator of success that I came to recognize after spending the last two years as a VC. The companies that were successful weren’t the ones with the best ideas or the most funding. They were the companies that were able to quickly try something, learn the key lessons, and to iterate. They ran experiment after experiment and eventually worked their way to the solution.

I have written about the power of these kinds of loops before, but I also think of Boyd Varty’s tracking metaphor for life. You often won’t know exactly where you are going, but if you pay attention to the broken twigs and footprints in the mud, you can eventually work your way to the solution.

I am trying to build up structures in my life to support maintaining my own positive momentum and quickly getting back on track when I fall short. Something that has been absolutely key to keeping me on track recently is developing a weekly review. I spend 30-60 minutes on Friday afternoon taking stock of my surroundings and planning for the week ahead. I was inspired by Diego Forte’s thinking on the subject, but customized it for my own needs.

Here’s my current checklist:

This structure has really helped me to pick my head up and evaluate whether I am spending my time the way I want to be. A few items of note: I wrote about my attempts to be more intentional about crafting my identity here. I am utilizing that sweet, sweet student discount to get Superhuman’s help with achieving the mythical inbox zero on a consistent basis (it 100% lives up to the hype. Leave me a comment if you want a referral!) I’ve written about my Personal CRM before and am more grateful than ever that I have built some good habits around being intentional about staying in touch with people as I drink from the social and academic firehose that is grad school (I went ahead and updated my public Personal CRM template if you’d like to give it a shot!)

I’ve also been trying to be more diligent in blocking time for activities in my schedule which has helped a lot. These strategies may seem like a lot and I wouldn’t recommend trying to add them all at once. Pick one or two things to work on and slowly build on top of that foundation as you pick up speed. Putting in structures like a weekly review checklist is the absolute best way to keep yourself from sliding too hard when your life gets flipp-turned upside down.

My system is by no means perfect. My next step is to build out monthly and quarterly check-ins for myself as well. I also know that I will likely need to continue to reassess my priorities and chop things that are not worth the time I am investing in them, but that is a discussion for another day.

Life is gonna hit you. And it is going to hit you hard. You won’t always be able to avoid those punches, but you can be proactive about crafting systems that help you bounce back into the ring afterward.

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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.

Why does moving suck?

Two of my favorite activities I have done since the start of quarantine have been joining a book club and a Dungeons & Dragons group. I look forward to these activities for weeks at a time each month.

One of the recent books we read for the book club was Good Economics for Hard Times. As with most economic books, there were things I really agreed with and things I really didn’t. The authors’ points were all well argued and persuasive, but I couldn’t help coming away thinking that many of the inverse arguments could’ve been equally well argued by an opposing expert.

One of the contentions that I found most compelling was the authors’ critique of classic labor market theory.

Traditional labor market theory posits that labor flows between economic opportunities similar to any other supply and demand resource allocation. If there are no good jobs in your town, economists would traditionally believe that you would move away in search of better economic opportunity.

The authors, on the other hand, believe that labor markets are much stickier than what traditional economic theory may have you believe. They looked at real world examples and found that people who do leave their home for economic reasons do so slowly, reluctantly, and often with the intention of coming back in a short number of years.

The authors argued that people, by-in-large, want to continue living in the community they grew up in and will resist leaving if the only impetuous is a lack of job prospects. They looked at examples of mass migrations and found that the only consistent motivator was some sort of economic, geopolitical, or environmental disaster in a home country forcing people to move elsewhere.

I think they got this right on the money.

I believe that markets are relatively efficient at a macro level, but that pockets of inefficiency exist at more localized levels. Labor market stickiness definitely seems to be one of these areas. Maybe labor flows relatively well across the economy as a whole, but zooming in to individual communities often tells a different story.

So why don’t people move when all signs point to the fact that they should?

I believe I may have found out the answer.

BECAUSE MOVING SUCKS.

It is terrible.

I can’t imagine an activity that is done voluntarily and yet is such an overwhelmingly poor and universally maligned experience.

Think about it. What other activity in life do people just accept as being absolutely terrible? Tell someone you are moving and watch as their face immediately contorts as they remember the sheer agony of their last move which they had done such a good job of suppressing right up until you had the lack of decency to bring up the topic of relocating.

At least when you go to the dentist to get a root canal you get some free toothpaste or something. (My experience is that dentists are generally lovely people and I often find myself enjoying our conversations despite their admittedly one-sided natures).

Caitlyn and I moved to Philly almost two weeks ago and I am still struggling to recover.

It was, without a doubt, our worst. moving. experience. ever.

The company never communicated anything to us and we had to constantly be proactive about reaching out to them for updates.

Our movers were 7 hours late to pick up our things and because they were so late, they had to stop midway through and resume packing the next day. We ended up leaving Columbus a whole day and a half later than we expected.

When Caitlyn called the company to ask for a discount due to the tardiness of our movers and the delay to our schedule, the owner YELLED at her for being “unamerican” by “threatening a small business during a global pandemic”. Needless to say that didn’t go over super well with me.

The packers were PAINFULLY slow and took a full day to pack up our stuff when it probably should’ve taken 2-3 hours.

They were 4 hours late to drop off our stuff in Philly after we drove late into the night to arrive in time to get our keys for the drop off window they told us.

They were careless with our things dropping multiple packages and they were careless with our new apartment leaving multiple scratches and scuff marks on the wall.

Ok, rant over.

Needless to say, it was a terrible experience. And I was paying a pretty penny for the opportunity to experience it! As I was in the midst of our move I kept thinking to myself, “why is moving so bad?”

Why is it that such a universally terrible experience can be allowed to continue.

As with most things, I believe that answer lies in structure.

I am a big believer in structure-based theories of behavior.

The structure of an underlying system determines the incentives for its actors. The incentives determine the behavior that generally follows. People may deviate, but more often than not, they will follow the path of least resistance as defined by their environment.

My guess is that moving is much the same way.

Because it is a task that everyone does, but no one does regularly, the incentives are inclined towards a terrible experience for the people moving.

It’s a large market with low barriers to entry and need for local proximity. An absolute recipe for high levels of fragmentation. This fragmentation has created a business model where much of the industry is controlled by middleman dispatchers.

These are the lovely folks who somehow know to start incessantly calling you as soon as you even so much as think about typing “movers” into that Google search bar. They aren’t the ones loading and unloading the trucks. They sign you up and then they subcontract out the actual moving to local or regional van crews.

🚨🚨DING DING DING🚨🚨

Do you know what that sound is? That, my friends, is the sound of potential incentive misalignment.

Anytime you see the word “subcontract” your alarm bell should already be going off. These dispatchers secure your business by promising lower prices than competitors. Low barriers to entry in a highly fragmented and low-differentiation industry creates a race to the bottom to compete on price.

This can often be good for consumers, but because of the middlemen involved in moving, consumers don’t get the benefit of those decreased prices.

Because what do we know will happen without a doubt as part of every move? Hidden fees! Once movers have all of your valuables packaged up in their truck they will inevitably have some reason or another why they unfortunately need to up-charge you. How convenient they let you know that as soon as they have all the leverage?

What are you going to say?

“No, thank you sir. I will not be paying that charge, but please do be extra careful with my grandmother’s priceless porcelain.”

I think not.

So you have a terrible experience where you pay more for it than you were expecting. But why don’t bad movers go out of business?

Shouldn’t the fittest survive in the darwinian capitalist markets?

The answer is usually, but not always.

Bad movers stay in business for two reasons: a lack of transparency into the industry and a lack of repeat customers.

Movers don’t care about delivering an excellent moving experience because the chances are that you are unlikely to be a repeat customer even if they did (there is some exception to this with movers that are focused on more local moves, which, wouldn’t you know it are where it seems like the majority of positive moving experiences stem from). There isn’t really an incentive for them to do so since if you do move again, it will be years down the line, you won’t remember who your mover was last time or the particulars of the move itself (remember we all try to suppress these terrible experiences).

The industry also suffers from a significant lack of transparency. Our movers had over 4/5 stars on Angie’s List. Look how they turned out. Ratings are conflicting depending where you go and purposeful misdirection is common place (look at how many local and regional movers include “United” in their name to try to get you to associate them with United Van Lines, one of the largest moving companies in the country). The best way to ascertain the quality of movers are personal recommendations, but given the low frequency and the already-cited suppressed memories, the likelihood of someone having a positive experience along a similar move to what you are about to be making is minimal.

So there you have it. One of the great mysteries of modern economics solved. Why does moving suck? Structure.

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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.

Good.

One of my new favorite life hacks is listening to motivational speeches set against the backdrop of electronic music while I workout. It feels like an absolute cheat code similar to listening to podcasts or audiobooks on a higher speed (I recently got up to 3.5x on Audible, an achievement I feel irrationally proud of as evidenced by my slipping it into this post where it is totally unnecessary.) Whereas before, I would need to choose between being pumped up/focused or turning on my brain, now I can do both. I can’t wait until the day someone builds a tool where I can “pump up” any audio file, but for now, I am making do with listening to the fantastic, Akira the Don (he’s got clout).

One of the people whose speeches I have been listening to is Jocko Willink. His no-holds-barred style and concept of radical ownership are exactly the tonic one needs when awake far too early and feeling unmotivated.

One of my favorite tracks of his is called Good.

In it, Jocko shares his preferred response for any challenge or unforeseen obstacle.

He simply responds “good”.

He has developed a mindset that looks for the opportunity in every challenge.

Don’t get the equipment you wanted for the mission? Good. Now you can focus on keeping it simple.

Don’t get the funding you wanted for your company? Good. Now you have more ownership.

Didn’t get the job you wanted? Good. Now you have more time to prepare.

I love this mindset. Looking for the good in every challenge or failure. Choosing to focus on the opportunity to learn and grow instead of dwelling on what went wrong.

As much as I love this mindset, it is definitely easier said than done.

This past week I have been trying (and often failing) to say “good” to a challenge in my own life. One of the great things about writing a weekly blog is that forcing your thoughts onto (digital) paper can be the world’s greatest form of therapy. Writing out my thoughts on this challenge has definitely helped me and I hope that it can help you to.

Remote Minus

A few weeks ago I wrote about how excited I was for the opportunity to get my MBA at Wharton. Getting my MBA is something I have always wanted to do and I have always wanted to get it from Wharton. Making a big transition is never easy, but I have been really pleased and optimistic about how Wharton was handling the global pandemic.

Until last week.

Last Thursday, Wharton announced that the fall MBA experience would be 100% online. I was pretty floored by the announcement. All summer long, administrators had excitedly been touting the benefits of their “remote plus” model. They promised that if you felt comfortable, there would be an avenue for you to interact with people in a safe, in-person setting. If you didn’t, there would be access to every class and community resource virtually.

I loved this approach and as recently as a month ago had bragged to others about how well Wharton had been handling everything. These are difficult times and I believe that the best approach is to let people opt-in or out of experiences based on their health, comfort level, and risk tolerance.

I was disappointed two weeks ago when the school announced the falls’ class list and we discovered that only 10% of classes would offer any sort of in-person component. Given the makeup of the first-semester schedule, I would be lucky if I could get into even 1 in-person class. But still, the school had said that they would be offering in-person classes, but they didn’t ever commit to an exact number or scope. It wasn’t ideal, but not wholly surprising either and, while disappointed, it was something I, and many other students, felt like we could live with given the context of the day.

Now, not two full weeks later, we received the news that the entirety of the fall experience would be virtual.

The worst thing isn't even the outcome.

With the current state of the world, I think we all knew that a virtual semester had the potential to be in the cards. What frustrates me is everything that led up to this outcome.

Consistent communication that in-person teaching would be happening from the beginning of summer to as recently as two weeks ago. I know this situation is always in flux, but I struggle to believe that the broad brushstrokes of the environment we find ourselves in have deteriorated that meaningfully in two weeks.

Poor communication of the decision itself. All morning we started hearing rumors popping up in various forums and group chats that Wharton was going to make the move to online classes. The official announcement came in an 8-minute speech by the new dean with the message that “School will be online in the fall. There will be no change in tuition costs. We won’t be taking any questions.”

Didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Now I know that classes moving online at an ivy league grad school is not exactly the sob story of the year, but a lot of people have made significant personal and financial commitments based on the information provided and it is a tough pill to swallow to have everything change two weeks before school starts. Many of us have been working on the MBA process for as long as a year. We quit jobs, took out significant amounts of debt, and made commitments to move to a new (and in my case much more expensive) city all based on the promise that there would be opportunities to connect in person.

I’ve always expected a rationalization in higher education, but I didn’t think that I would be the guinea pig. At this point, I feel committed to my decision to move to Philly and attend. We have bought our way out of our lease in Columbus and already paid significant deposits for a new apartment in Philadelphia. Our movers are picking up our stuff tonight (6.5 hours late. A story worthy of its own blog post 😑).

I feel committed.

But I don’t feel trapped.

Caitlyn and I knew that online school was a possibility and we agreed that we would move to Philly irrespective of what the modality of fall education looked like. So much of the value of an MBA is tied up in building relationships with others that we decided to trust that there would be a critical mass of other students in town no matter what and that we would all be motivated to connect in safe and responsible ways.

If we wanted to, we could still get out of our commitment. I can cancel my student loans without a penalty up until school starts. We could move to Philly and I could look for a new job or we could cancel our lease and lose our deposits.

It would hurt, but we could do it if we wanted to.

But we don’t. We are choosing to follow through with the experience.

We are saying “good”.

School is online? Good. It will give me more flexibility to pursue building my personal and professional network.

School is online? Good. I won’t be able to rely on any administrators to create events to help me meet other students. I won’t have any choice but to take the initiative myself.

School is online? Good. I can take all the skills I have learned about networking and relationship building and I can bring those to school as a leader in the community. This change provides me with an opportunity to leverage my expertise in a way that I might not have been able to before.

School is online? Good. I can see first hand what the future of the education system looks like. When you strip out the old brick building what is an ivy league school? It’s an expensive way to run an experiment, but I will be sure to find out and report back to you all.

School is online? Good. It will give me additional flexibility to pursue work or internship opportunities.

School is online? Good. I believe that much of my career will be spent working online. What a fantastic opportunity to develop best practices for this modality. If businesses are going to be mostly online in the future than experiencing school through that lense could be helpful. Whatever I do, I know that I want to be a leader and this experience will equip me with good habits and an understanding of the positives and negatives as I equip myself to lead companies that will, in all likelihood, have remote employees.

School is online? Good. It gives us an opportunity to visit family or travel with friends now that we won’t be bound to staying in Philly for the entirety of the semester.

School is online? Good. My ideal goal at grad school is to start my own company. Online school could give me the additional flexibility to do that.

They aren’t lowering tuition? Good. The bar for the value of online education just shot through the roof. The imperative is on Wharton to deliver the best damn virtual educational experience ever. I sincerely hope they succeed. It could serve as an example to other schools and businesses in this brave new world. And if they don’t or can’t, well, that will be indicative in its own right.

The school totally botched communication throughout the entire summer? Good. This experience is already bringing the new class closer together than we would’ve ever been otherwise.

This is a huge disappointment to me and it is not what I was hoping for or expecting? Good. Life’s that way too. I have lived an incredibly privileged and blessed life. Challenges are opportunities to learn and grow and I am sure this will be too.

I am really frustrated with how this all transpired? Good. Frustration is potential energy that I have the opportunity to channel towards positive-sum relationship building and learning.

I am anxious about all the ambiguity in the fall? Good. Another opportunity to continue to grow stronger in my lifelong battle against anxiety and self-doubt.

School isn’t handling this the way they should? Good. This has been a lesson on crisis management and leadership in and of itself.

Students have no leverage with the school? Good. This situation presents an opportunity to hone our skill of negotiating when your counterpart is the one with all of the leverage. Negotiating is easy when you hold all the cards. It is a lot harder when the other person does.

This is a major negative impact COVID is having on me? Good. I have been too insulated from this global pandemic for too long. Facing some hardship as an outcome of it will only broaden my perspective and provide me with additional empathy for those who have been impacted far, far more than me.

It’s disappointing how the school isn’t focused on coming up with creative solutions? Good. Gives us an opportunity to take the lead with a solution-focused mindset. We can be focused on coming up with creative solutions to these problems instead of just throwing our hands up in the air and calling it quits.

Why does an MBA have value?

Is it the education? The credential?

Most will say that it is the network you build. But going to a good grad school doesn’t automatically give you a fantastic network. Not really.

You still have to work for it. But more than that, the network upgrade isn’t intrinsic to the school itself. I believe that it is simply a function of the type of people who are willing and attracted to the idea of foregoing two years of income to invest in themselves and their careers. It attracts people who have a risk tolerance commensurate with that level of commitment and who believe they will achieve the kind of success over the long term to make any short-term sacrifice worthwhile.

I am hoping the current pandemic will be a similarly powerful forcing function.

The students who have the risk tolerance and drive to make the most out of this situation are likely the exact people I am going to want to build relationships with.

Transitions are never fun and they are never easy. It is not the ideal time to be making a life-altering transition. But it isn’t the ideal time to be doing much of anything.

Life goes on.

I am frustrated, disappointed, angry, anxious, sad, and hurt that this experience will be different than what I wanted when I started this process almost a year ago.

My MBA experience will be different than anyone expected. It will be the first year that we are operating in a global pandemic. It will be the first year that students are going to pay for an in-person experience and receive a virtual one. It will be the first year where networking events and recruiting will be held over zoom and not in person.

It isn’t want we wanted.

Good.

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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.

How to fail at everything and still succeed

Life has been taken over by preparations for our move to Philly. This has taken the form of trying to get together (safely) with friends before we leave, preparation for school, and packing. Lots and lots of packing.

It also has been a time of introspection. There’s a lot I don’t know about how my life is going to change in the next month, but one of the things I am fairly confident of is that I am about to be inundated with tantalizing opportunities to invest my time and efforts. As such, I have been thinking about what I want to make sure I focus on and prioritize once school starts.

As sometimes happens to me, this short-term question exploded into a long-term one. Not just where do I want to prioritize my time over the next 2 years, but what do I want to prioritize over the rest of my life? (This thinking lines up well with some of the thoughts I have been having on the Power of Identity.)

As I pondered this, the question struck me “What are the handful of things I could succeed at that would allow me to fail at everything else and still win?”

Put another way, how could I fail at everything else and still succeed?

I have spent the last couple of days thinking about this question and here are the endeavors I came up with.

A quick note before digging in. At times, this may wander near dangerously “preachy” sounding territory. At others, this may sound like banal self-help platitudes. Trust that the below is an earnest attempt at outlining what I believe to be answers to important questions. They are likely not the only answers and yours may differ compared to mine. I do not have this stuff all figured out. I am 26. I am happy with where I am at on some of these pursuits (I think I knocked #2 below absolutely out of the park), but others are still very much a work in progress. Remember this exercise started with thinking about where I wanted to prioritize my time. Hopefully, these rules can be a guidepost for you and me both.

Without further ado, the 5 things you can do to succeed, even if you fail at everything else:

Live Within Your Means

This is perhaps the phrase that has been hammered into my skull more completely than any other. It was a frequent favorite of my parents growing up and they still refer to it regularly. The idea here is to give yourself breathing room. Life happens. It takes all sorts of twists and turns. Your resiliency to low points could very well have just as much to do with your ability to follow this rule as any sort of personal amount of grit or drive. Living within your means is both downside protection and upside optimization. On the downside, it gives your breathing room and the ability to handle nasty surprises. On the upside, it gives you the flexibility to be able to take advantage of serendipity when it knocks on your door. I am a big believer in the idea that everyone gets lucky breaks in their life, but very few take advantage of them. Living within your means allows you to do just that.

Now I am not advocating a lifestyle of a modern hermit. You can definitely take this one too far and budget yourself into a pulp. Instead, think about what you care about and allocate money there. I am not a big car guy and likely never will be. But I love to travel and that’s something I would definitely like to do more of in the future. I care more about location in an apartment/house than appliances or square feet. You gotta decide for yourself what is or is not important. There are a million best practices for living within your means. Caitlyn and I use a tool called YNAB that really helps us keep on track with our budget through monthly check-ins.

By far the biggest thing you can do to live within your means is to select a home or apartment that is within your budget. The general recommendation is to spend about 30% of your gross monthly income on rent. I’ve always tried to get that number closer to 20% (not always succeeding). For most people, their rent/mortgage will be their biggest single monthly outlay and as such the easiest one to suddenly become an undue burden.

The last really important thing that living within your means can do is to help you safeguard your ethical well-being. Sound a little melodramatic? I don’t think it is. Otherwise good people do bad things when they find themselves backed into a corner. Giving yourself extra financial flexibility helps to minimize the chances of you ever compromising yourself because you feel like you have to. You always want to have “screw you” money. Enough money that you can tell your boss to take a hike if they ever pressure you into doing something unethical. You can question whether stealing an apple to feed your family is moral, but by far the better solution is to make the choices that mean that question is never necessary in the first place.

Marry Your Best Friend

Ever heard the phrase “you are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with”? Well, whoever you chose to spend your life with will have more of an impact on who you are than the other 4 combined. The world is very skilled at making us believe every choice we make is the most important choice in the world. I’d argue that the only one that really rises to that incredibly high bar is who you choose to marry. This choice is the one with more leverage than any other. Choose correctly and you have a very high likelihood of life working out. Choose incorrectly and it will likely have unpleasant and longlasting ramifications. Now I can’t tell you what makes a healthy and happy couple. That is probably different for everyone.

But if I had to give one piece of advice it would be to marry your best friend. If you get this one thing right, everything else seems to kinda take care of itself. I’ve been married for 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days. I am not the world’s foremost expert on the subject of marriage. But I may be the world’s biggest advocate.

The past 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days have been the best of my life. There is nothing quite like having someone who you can trust so utterly and completely. Who has your back against the rest of the world. Who you don’t agree with on everything, but you agree with on the big things. Someone you can more easily picture growing old with than looking good on your honeymoon with. Someone who fills your life, not with happiness, but joy.

I got married young, but that doesn’t mean that it is for everyone. If it is for you, great! It definitely was for me and it has been awesome. If it isn’t, that is totally fine too. Just don’t fall into the trap of being afraid of commitment. I worry that my generation is more interested in freedom than it is in meaning. In my experience, meaning more often comes from responsibility than freedom. I worry that people chase freedom expecting that if they finally found it, their life’s meaning would somehow magically appear. You are much more likely to find that meaning once you commit yourself to something. Or someone.

Freedom < meaning. And meaning comes from responsibility. And boy is marriage one of the quickest ways to increase the amount of responsibility in your life. It isn’t always easy, but with the right partner on your team, it is worth it. It takes a lot of work, a lot of faith, and a lot of grace. But believe that a life shared is a life made whole.

Take Care Of Your Health

In every sense of the word. Physical, mental, spiritual, emotional. Your health is another great leverage function. If you are in bad health in any of the four aforementioned ways it will lead to negative impacts on your life. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but health is one of those things that has a nasty habit of eventually catching up to you (and often at the most inopportune times). This has been an increased area of focus for me recently. I’ve realized that my health is not just about me. It is about being at my best personally and professionally. It is about making sure that I will be there for my family. It is about having the energy to be present and engaged with my wife after work. And it is about reaching the potential I know that I have.

A few quick rules I have found effective.

Exercise regularly. Spend time outside. Eat everything in moderation except fruits and vegetables. Eat as much of that as you want. Avoid falling into the trap of thinking that every meal is a “special occasion” (I am a certified black belt in the mental karate necessary to talk myself into thinking that lunch on a random Tuesday is a culminating reward of my entire life’s work). When you are “on”, be “on” and when you are “off” be “off”. Spend >0 minutes every day investing in your spiritual wellbeing through prayer, reading your holy words, or meditation. Focus on the things you have control over and don’t stress out about the things you don’t. If you are unhappy about something, do something about it. Appreciate the good things you have in life and focus on acknowledging all that you are grateful for. Make sure you have one thing you are looking forward to every single day, no matter how big or how small.

Do Something Meaningful

It seems like you fall into one of two camps. Either the “Follow your passion” camp who believes that you are entitled to make a living doing whatever you enjoy most. Or the “work is work” camp that thinks if work was supposed to be rainbows and butterflies they would call it rainbows and butterflies. I’d like to offer an alternative narrative.

Do something meaningful.

This is different than following your passion. Doing something meaningful isn’t always fun. Often it isn’t. But I believe that is what makes it worthwhile. It is about doing something greater than yourself. Doing something that moves the world towards a higher state of being. Doing something that pushes back the darkness to expand the light. I believe that at our core, meaning is something that every single one of us yearns for. For an acknowledgment of how we fit into the world and that our existence matters. What you do can be an avenue to that, but only if it is something that is meaningful.

I believe the key to this is finding something where the process is its own reward. If you find something that you find meaningful, irrespective of any outcome like money or fame, you are probably on the right track.

In the words of the Knights Radiant, “Journey before destination.”

Avoid Blowing Up

Ok, so this one is a bit cheating. This isn’t something you actively do so much as it is an active practice of avoiding certain things. You avoid “blowing up” by avoiding doing things that could cause you financial, emotional, or physical ruin. Life is uncertain and disaster can strike at any time, but there are definitely activities that increase disaster’s chance of knocking on our doorstep.

An important aspect of this is maintaining proper perspective. A naturally long-lived life gives you plenty of opportunities to change and succeed. If you wanted to you could have multiple successful careers. Take the tract of optimizing for the long-term over the short. Avoid doing things that have a chance, even a tiny one, of absolute catastrophe. If 2020 has taught us anything it is that black swan events happen. Based on the regularity with which airlines get bailed out, it seems like they happen every decade or so in the financial markets.

To a certain degree, this advice is impossible to really follow since an aspect of almost every blow up is chance. But you can engage in activities that decrease those chances and avoid activities that increase them. Avoid metaphorical bungee jumps. Just doesn’t seem worth it for the risks. But then again I am not great with heights so maybe that is just my genetic makeup talking.

Alright. That’s what I got. These 5 rules are the strategies I believe will make me successful in life. I don’t think any of them are a secret, but as with most wisdom, the doing is harder than the hearing.

What have been the rules you’ve followed for success in life?

What are the things that you have done that allow you to fail at everything in life and still succeed?

Until next week.

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Marathons, Motivation, and the Positive Power of Identity

Lately, I have been thinking about the concept of identity.

Identity is an extremely powerful force. For good and ill. Things we associate with our identity are the things that we hold most core to who we are. Recently, it seems like most of the discussion around identity has been negativing. It is looked at as a source for partisanship and tribalism.

But we shouldn’t underestimate identity potential as a force for good either.

Britney Runs a Marathon

I watched Britney Runs a Marathon a few days ago. The movie is a true story about a woman trying to get their life together and using the New York City Marathon as their motivating goal. After many ups and downs along the way, Brittney achieves her goal (I feel comfortable sharing this spoiler since it is literally the title of the movie). Watching the movie it struck me that the key to her success was how she changed her identity. At the beginning of the movie, she accepted being overweight as simply “who she was”. She was never going to achieve anything and would just coast through life because she was a lazy screw-up.

After being faced with some hard truths she decided to take action by starting to run. This was the keystone habit that helped her get other aspects of her life in order like getting a new job, investing in healthy friendships, and being open to positive romantic relationships. It all revolved around her habit of running. I love that the movie didn’t glamorize her taking the initial step to get going. She didn’t listen to pump up music or watch a motivational youtube video before she got started. She didn’t buy herself brand new workout clothes or running shoes agreeing that she would get started once she looked the part.

She took action.

She put on a ratty sweater and was able to run just 1 block.

But she stuck with it. She put one foot in front of the other and eventually she started seeing progress.

The movie perfectly mirrors Jeff Haden’s framework for motivation (great explainer video).

Motivation is not a spark that ignites the fires of your genius. It is the outcome of taking action.

As Brittney started to make progress her identity changed. She wasn’t someone who went out all the time and got wasted. She was someone who ate healthily and exercised. This was her new self-identity and it was what gave her the motivation to keep going.

My Marathon

This movie really resonates with me and some of my personal journey.

I have always struggled with my weight. Psychologically as much as physically.

I’ve been some level of short and stout for the entirety of my teenage and adult life. I played sports and exercised growing up, but I was always on the heavier side of things. Sometimes in a healthy way, but often in a very unhealthy way. There have been stretches where I made really good progress on my weight/health, but I never really built long-term sustainable habits and so I would inevitably back slide.

This time is different though.

The Last Year

Instead of going 0 to 100 on some unsustainable diet or workout plan, I have slowly been building up healthy habit on top of healthy habit over the past year. I have been focused on sustainable lifestyle change and falling in love with the process of being healthy instead of being overly focused on the goals/outcomes I am working towards.

And most of all I have been consciously working on changing how I think of myself.

How I view my identity.

It started last year at a summer reunion with my college buddies. We rented out a lake house for a long weekend where the usual debauchery, hilarity, and fun times ensued. One of the big surprises for the trip was seeing a friend I hadn’t seen in years who had gotten in really good shape and lost a bunch of weight. He looked great and I found myself thinking “if he can do it why can’t I?’

The first thing I started doing when I got back was trying to establish a good workout routine (I wrote about it last labor day). Instead of trying to do something that didn’t come naturally and that I didn’t enjoy (running) I refocused my efforts on doing something that I did enjoy more (weight lifting). (Side note: Since quarantine struck I have since started running more and even started to enjoy it. A bit). Over time, I was able to get in a really great workout habit where I now work out every day before work. Just like Brittney, motivation came from action and not the other way around. I used an app called Fitbod as an AI Personal Trainer. This allowed me to track my progress on all of my weights. The more I worked out, the more progress I would see, and the more I was motivated to continue working out.

Over the course of six months, I built a really solid workout habit but I wasn’t losing any weight. I was building muscle, but I was still eating as terribly as ever. Around the holidays I decided to make a change and started trying to eat healthier. I didn’t want to do a diet that wouldn’t work. I just wanted to focus on eating simple meals with lots of greens and minimal carbs/processed food.

Instead of just hoping that it would work I put some structure around it to measure my progress.

I started weighing myself every day (This scale makes it a breeze to track). Once a week I would also measure my waist, stomach, chest, and arms so I could track my progress in those areas as well. This really paid off because of how weird any progress journey is.

On the weeks where I had plateaued a bit on my weight, I was often able to see progress on my measurements and visa versa.

Weighing myself also had the benefit of shortening the feedback loop on my eating. The hard part about eating healthy is that eating something bad for you feels good immediately and you only see the negative results over time. The inverse is true for healthy eating.

By weighing myself every day I had a much quicker feedback loop. If I ate like crap, I would see it on the scale and I could make sure to eat better the next day.

This ability to recalibrate and adjust daily had a hugely beneficial impact. Without going on a diet or changing my exercise routine I was able to lose 15 lbs over the course of 3 months. Just by weighing myself every morning.

At this point, I started to plateau a bit more. In an effort to jumpstart my progress again I started using an app called Noom. Since starting that app I have lost another 15ish lbs and am really feeling good about my progress again.

Noom has helped me in a few ways.

1. It gives me skin in the game. Noom isn’t free. It costs something like $30 a month. This act of paying for it has really helped me commit to using it. If I don’t I feel like I am wasting money.

2. The app is focused on the psychology of building healthy sustainable habits. It is not a dieting app. No foods are off-limits. It is about building self-awareness to understand why you act in certain ways and to shine a light on the thought distortions we have. Things like telling ourselves that we will never be in good shape. Or throwing up our arms and saying what is the point if we have one stumble eating something we shouldn't.

3. Most importantly the app has made tracking my food easy. This has been something I have tried before but have never been able to stick with. Noom makes it super easy to use and it really helps me to be accountable for what I am eating. It helps me be aware of what is healthy and what isn’t (when you start tracking your food you quickly learn how many foods that are marketed as being healthy are actually anything but!). So far I have been tracking my food after the fact, but I am working on trying to track my food before I eat a single bite to increase my awareness of what I am about to put into my body (instead of learning about it after the fact).

The Power of Identity

I know this has been a bit of a long-and-winding-road of a post. Talking about my weight is pretty personal and I wanted to provide a window into the journey. So how does this bring us back to identity?

I am feeling really good about the progress I have made so far, but I know that I have a long way to go. I want to keep building on the healthy habits that I have nurtured and continue to design a sustainable and healthy lifestyle for myself.

I think the biggest part of this going forward will be changing aspects of my self-identity. Just like Brittney, I used to think that I would never be in good shape. That I was lazy and that my body was something out of my control. Now I am healthier than I have been in almost a decade. And let me tell you, I am loving stomping around in my old arsenal jerseys that I haven’t fit into since freshman year of college.

In addition to relying on the Action -> Progress -> Motivation loop to help solidify identity change, I have written out some affirmations of how I view myself. Some of these are aspects of my identity that have always been there. Others are new. Others are a bit more aspirational and things that I am actively working towards.

Here they are.

My chosen identity:

• I am a life-long learner

• I eat healthily and enjoy eating simple meals

• I exercise regularly. I love being active and I am at my best only after I have exercised

• I love being outdoors and doing fun things outside

• I have value not because of what I do or achieve but because of who I am. I am a child of God created in his image and as such my value is infinite. Just like everyone else's.

• I enjoy being spontaneous and trying new things

• I prioritize my family over my career

• I am process-oriented and focused on internalizing my goals by trying my best and surrendering the outcomes

• I am slow to anger and don't let things get to me. I take life as it comes and don't sweat things that are out of my control

• I am a writer and enjoy honing my craft by writing weekly through my blog

• I am a bridge builder and I seek to find commonalities instead of differences

• I am encouraging and empathetic towards others

• I am humble and low-ego. I am as at home talking to a janitor or a CEO

• I am confident and willing to fight for what I believe is right

• I am a master of staying in touch with people and I am happy to go the extra mile to maintain a relationship that is important to me

• I go first. I introduce myself first and invite people first. I am open and I break down awkwardness and barriers.

• I work hard and productively on things I care about

• I happily do nice things for Caitlyn and help her out around the house as a way of showing her how much I care

• I act ethically in all things I do. I don't take shortcuts and I don't compromise on my morals

Our identity has so much power.

It has the power to propel us forward and the power to hold us back. The power to divide us and the power to bring us together. What is often missed in discussions about identity is that our identity is malleable. For most of us, it is the outcome of our life’s circumstances.

But it doesn’t have to be.

As with most things in life, at the heart of our identity lies a choice.

So what identity will you choose for yourself?

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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.

Just keep driving

When I was growing up I had a lot of anxiety. I have written about my experience with it before.

Outside of social settings, the area where my anxiety cropped up the most was driving. During the first couple of years having my license I was perpetually worried about making a wrong turn and getting lost. This was especially anxiety inducing whenever I was driving in a new place or had to make an adjustment with minimal notice.

I distinctly remember driving with my dad during one of these times and him telling me something along the lines of “If you make a wrong turn, just keep driving. Eventually we will get where we need to be.”

Learning to adopt this mindset really helped me manage my anxiety levels while driving. If I missed a turn, I would know it wasn’t the end of the world and that I would eventually find my way back to where I needed to be. After successfully finding my way when I had thought I was lost a couple of times, I no longer feared that happening. I had faced my fear and it turned out it wasn’t so bad.

Life is a lot like that.

We spend so much time worrying about missing a turn when the downside scenario of actually doing so really isn’t all that bad. If we just keep driving we will find our way back on track. Ironically, the act of worrying about missing a turn likely increases the chances of it happening significantly.

I am going through a period of transition (more to come on this soon) and I have found myself getting stressed about all the different balls that I feel like I am juggling. I’ve been getting anxious looking at everything I need to do instead of just coming up with a plan and starting to knock things out one by one. This has been especially true when I am in uncharted territory or if I need to make a split second adjustment. Just like driving.

And just like driving, the fear of something is much greater than the act of doing it itself.

Problems seem big and scary when they are nebulously swirling around our head. The second I get all my To-Do’s on paper (Notion) and start knocking things out I immediately feel much better. Despite knowing this, it is easy to fall into bad habits and let things build up.

It’s easy to worry about what could go wrong instead of acknowledging that the worst-case scenario probably isn’t that bad.

It’s easy to be so focused on the destination that we forget about the joys of the journey along the way.

What isn’t easy is to turn off fear and worry. Only action really can do that.

When you do make a wrong turn, don’t sweat it. Come up with a plan.

And just keep driving.

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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.

The Pluto Paradox

You know which cartoon character I have always thought was a little weird? Pluto.

Pluto is Mickey Mouse’s pet dog first introduced in the 1930s. Mickey and all of his friends are anthropomorphic cartoon characters that walk and talk and think like humans.

But not Pluto. Pluto is a pet dog.

This relationship is especially weird in light of Goofy.

Goofy is theoretically also a dog. But he is an anthropomorphic character who wears clothes, talks, and walks upright like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Is he a dog? Is he a human? What’s the difference between Goofy and Pluto?

You start to see where I am coming from when I said it was all a bit weird.

So what does this matter?

I think the characterizations of Pluto and Goofy especially give us a great metaphor to explore.

Hear me out.

The most straightforward interpretation is that we all, at one point or another, find ourselves in the role of Goofy.

We all at some point have looked down on someone else as somehow less than. We build out our identity along cultural, political, ideological, and even sports team lines. Anyone on our side of the aisle is superior to anyone on the other side. We view ourselves as superior to someone else who is not nearly so different as we tell ourselves (except for Tottenham fans, they really do have some pretty big character red flags).

If there is one overlying theme of human history, you would struggle to find one more prevalent than the story of two peoples who seem to the outside to be almost identical fighting over nuanced ideological differences.

The solution to being a Goofy is to keep your identity small. Paul Graham has a great essay on this. He argues, and I agree, that issues are divisive, not because answers are opaque, but because people attribute parts of their personal identity to one side or the other of the debate. People hold too many things as part of their identity in this day and age, and because of that there are infinitely many ideological hills they are willing to die on. You keep your identity small, and all the sudden you don’t have a bone in many of the fights you see play across the news and social media. You can look at people like people instead of Pluto.

Now, what if we turned the metaphor around a bit?

What if we aren’t just Goofy sometimes?

What if we are Pluto?

How often do we attribute false significance and importance to someone else while belittling ourselves?

I don’t know about you but this is something that happens to me, if I had to guess, only about all the time.

We build others and their accomplishments up in our head while simultaneously minimizing our own.

This is a serious issue in the age of Instagram.

We get these tiny windows into the top 5% of someone’s life. We extrapolate that 5% and then we compare this unrealistic perspective to our own life.

Our faults, our struggles, our challenges, and our failures.

How can we measure up?

We can’t.

But that is only because we are stacking the deck against ourselves.

We perceive that others have power over us and in doing so give them power over us. We live inside prisons of our own creation.

I know I do this. Especially professionally.

I compare my achievements to what others achieve without even knowing 1% of the picture of their lives.

If you find yourself falling into this trap, it’s important to remember that comparison is the death of joy. Don’t compare yourself to someone else whose life you don’t really know anything about. Instead compare yourself to where you were three years ago. I bet viewed through this lense things look quite different indeed.

Whether you are a Pluto or a Goofy, it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, we are all just dogs.

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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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Run like no one is watching (because no one is)

My wife and I have been watching a lot of Friends recently. And when I say “a lot”, I mean A LOT. We were too young to really appreciate the show when it was on tv and we have really been enjoying watching it from the very beginning.

A recent episode left me with something that I have found myself continuing to think back on in recent weeks. At one point after they have recently moved in together, Rachel and Phoebe decide to go for a run together. In short order, Rachel is horrified by Phoebe’s “emphatic” running style. More than that, she is mortified by what other people would think of her running with Phoebe.

Believe it or not, we should all strive to be a bit more like Phoebe

Embarrassed by Phoebe, Rachel avoids her during subsequent runs. Eventually, she confronts Phoebe on her unusual running style. Phoebe says something along the lines of “remember how it felt like to run when you were a kid. Running was fun and you felt like you were going so incredibly fast and the wind would just rush by you. I still run that way.” By the end of the episode, Rachel has adopted Phoebe’s “technique” and is having more fun than ever before.

Too few of us run like Phoebe.

We are so scared about what the rest of the world thinks of us, we aren’t true to ourselves. This is even true (maybe especially true) when our only witnesses are strangers.

It is not an accident that we are status-obsessed creatures that spend an inordinate amount of time focused on what others think of us. Not so long ago in most of our genetic histories, our ancestors were living in small villages with little to no mobility or communication with other communities. In this setting, an obsession with not doing anything to look bad makes a lot of sense.

Do or say too many stupid things and you may just ruin your chances with the few suitable mates in your community. This was a big issue when there weren’t a lot of eligible bachelors/bachelorettes in your community. Make an off-color joke about the blacksmith and Gertrude Smith could just write you off as a compelling candidate for a mate altogether. Congratulations. Your chances at procreating just dropped by 13%.

You can see how this becomes a problem. (With the number of times I regularly put my foot in my mouth I can almost guarantee I would not have continued the genetic line had I been born a few hundred years earlier.)

Unfortunately, our lizard brains are still stuck in this scarcity mindset despite having overwhelming abundance. The internet. Telephones. Cars. Tinder. You literally could offend 99.99% of people you come into contact with and you would still have a decent shot in this day and age! And yet we act as if saying or doing something stupid in front of people we will literally never see again will somehow be the end of us.

But I want to let you in on a little secret.

The only psychological trait that overpowers our incredible fear of what others think of us…

…is our even more impressive self-absorption.

That’s right.

You shouldn’t care about what other people think of you, because they AREN’T thinking about you. They are all too focused on their own life to expend calories thinking about what you just said or the fact that your boots and your belt clash. And you know what, even if they are looking at you, who cares? Chances are your paths will never cross again. Go ahead, live your life.

This may seem like a pessimistic perspective, but once you accept it, you will find it incredibly freeing. You’ll be able to start living how you would if you weren’t afraid what other people thought. You’d be able to start playing Grand Theft Life.

If I can be honest with you, this is an area where I definitely do not always practice what I preach. I definitely worry sometimes about what others think. This is one of the many (many, many, many, many) opportunities I have for self-improvement. But it’s an area I have definitely improved on. It is something that has been key to overcoming self-doubt and anxiety. And if I can do it, you can do it too.

One of the biggest areas in our modern world where I have seen this obsession with what other people think trip us up is social media. It may seem like everyone and their grandmother have 6 Twitter accounts, 2 Snapchats, 3 Instagrams, and a LinkedIn for their dog (not even the dog still has an active Facebook account though), but I actually think we could use some more people sharing their views and perspectives on the interwebs. Some of the smartest, most interesting people I know refuse to share on social media.

They are worried about what people will think. They are worried that other people are watching.

Here’s what I have learned about sharing content online.

Say something smart and people will find it, share it, and potentially open doors for you.

Say something stupid, and no one will do anything. People won’t spare it a second thought. Now there are limits. You can’t say anything toooo obscene.

But for the most part, sharing content is the ultimate asymmetric bet. Big upside. Minimal downside.

If you are afraid of putting yourself out there, don’t be. People are too busy focusing on own their own feet to notice your missteps. But they will notice your greatness.

My advice:

Run like no one is watching.

Dance like no one is watching.

Tweet like no one is following.

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Lets get ethical, ethical

Living a life of uncompromising integrity is as difficult as it is important. As with many important things in life, it is a goal that can never truly be reached. It’s the act of reaching for it that matters.

One of the topics that I have written about most on this blog is the power of little things. Little things done over and over and over again turn into big things. And those big things have a significant impact on your life.

I believe morality is often the same way. In the words of Albus Dumbledore ”We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” Rarely are we met with ultimatums between right and wrong. Much more often it is this simple choice between doing what is right and doing what is easy. Between taking the high road and the low road.

The sinister part of these decisions is that there is often no immediate negative feedback to choosing the easy path. There is no hot stove to teach you not to place your hand on top of it. In fact, that is often exactly why the wrong choice often appears to be the easy one. It is less a question of avoiding some sort of pain as it is a question of delaying it. Wrong choices compound. They come back to bite us at the worst possible times.

The right choices are usually the opposite. They generally involve short term pain. Telling your boss when you messed up. Apologizing to your spouse when you still don’t think you did anything wrong.

But they tend to compound in the long run. They build trust. They build your reputation. They help you sleep at night.

Your character is what you do when no one is looking. I think we all say we want to be high character people, but how many of us actually take tangible steps to do so? I’d wager not many.

I am trying something. I think it has been helping me and I think it may help you too.

It’s called keeping score.

I got this practice from Chop Wood, Carry Water. A book that has had an immense impact on my life and the way I view the world.

What you do is that you make a list of the 5 values that you most respect in other people. That is your new scoreboard. Forget about money or status or fake internet points. Measure yourself against the things you most value and respect in people.

Here’s my scoreboard.

• Uncompromisingly Ethical

• Brave and stands up for what is right

• Hard-working and persistent

• Treats others with respect and compassion no matter who they are

• Maintains a Learner’s mindset (Focused on the process, views the world as an interconnected system, sees every challenge as an opportunity to learn and grow)

• Builds bridges between others. Seeks to connect the world. Always adds more value to any conversation than he takes away

Clearly, I have built upon some of these. They change and evolve over time. Just as I, and what I value, does.

This is how I determine whether I had a good day or not. No matter what else is happening in life, if I am living according to these principles, then I am at least heading in the right direction. And I think it has made a tangible impact on my behavior. It’s like building muscle memory. Grade yourself down for using someone else’s salad dressing in the work fridge or park in a “For customer’s only” space a couple of times and all of the sudden you start thinking twice about doing something you would’ve done without thinking before.

And it is that pause where you think twice that really allows you to make the changes you want in your life.

I made a tool to help me do this, and I think it can help you do.

In a previous post, I shared the personal CRM that I had built in Notion to help me hone my superpower of building and maintaining genuine relationships. I got some great feedback from people who were able to leverage that tool so I decided to add to it and start building a dashboard for others to utilize.

Here is the public dashboard that I have added Personal CRM and Scoreboard templates to. Feel free to duplicate in your own workspace and customize to your liking.

Hopefully this is as helpful to you as it has been for me. Big changes are made up of small changes. And small changes take time. I’ve found holding yourself accountable to even the smallest thing is the best way to enact long-term change.

There is no silver bullet. You won’t magically wake up one day being the person you’ve always wanted to be.

But you can get a little bit closer to being that person.

Every.

Single.

Day.

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