🟢 The cheat code I learned from Steve Jobs and Ray Dalio
The lifehack that Ray told me (and Steve Jobs has mentioned too)
(3.5 min read)
“You’re all dumb shits,” Ray Dalio told us.
The ~30 of us were students in the class he taught to new hires within his hedge fund.
Despite the insult, I wondered what glitch in the universe allowed me to come to this gorgeous office 5 days a week (on its own tiny island in the middle of a river that acted as its moat in a nature preserve in Connecticut) where I was paid so well to learn from this legendary investor.
How is this a good deal for him?
Bonus tip:
Find a situation where a person pays you while you learn.
You'll be pinching yourself like I was.One of his first assignments?
“Read these 10 books about macroeconomics by the smartest authors we could find.”
No problem. Consider it done.
After my classmates and I finished reading the books came the twist.
“Now tell me why they’re all mistaken.”
<Record scratch>
Huh?
You recruited me from college knowing that I was NOT an Economics or Finance or Accounting major and instead focused on bioethics.
Me? Pointing out flaws in economics books?
I’m out of my depth here.
I’d be lucky if I could even regurgitate to you what these books say.
But now you want me to improve upon them?
What drugs are you on?
(I didn’t ask these questions running through my mind.)
He explained:
“Don’t assume that what other people say is true.
You need to understand the logic of their claims.
If their logic doesn’t make sense, throw it out.
If it does, build upon it.
It’s not complete.
We want to push the envelope.”
An eye-opening experience
Growing up (in elementary school, middle school, and high school), I often felt smarter than my teachers.
But most of them weren’t trying very hard, and they weren’t paid very much, and they certainly hadn’t earned the admiration of top contributors in their field.
They weren’t bestselling authors and Nobel Prize winners.
So it didn’t feel like a leap to assume that maybe sometimes I could outperform them in some way.
But Princeton was a different story.
There, it was abundantly clear that I would never catch up to the level of expertise of any of my teachers.
And now here I was at this hedge fund in my first job after college, and Ray was demanding that my fellow new hires and I discover something (anything) that Nobel Prize winners had overlooked.
And teach it to him.
“I can’t come up with all of the new ideas myself,” he seemed to be saying.
Here was a billionaire regarded as one of the smartest investors of all time.
Telling us what should have been obvious:
Very few problems in the world have been solved.
Very little is truly understood.
Worse, what we consider to be fact, we often later discover to be wrong.We should train our brain to think in terms of first principles.
(Side note: Later I learned about 0th principles, but that’s a separate story.)
Think of the world mechanically.
Break down the relationships. The incentives, the pressures.
Get deeply curious.
Explore.
Run experiments.
There is nothing stopping any one of us from revealing a huge insight.
It might even change the whole world.
He had done it several times already personally, and he was telling us that we could do it.
😮
The famous Steve Jobs quote
Another person who drastically changed the world has offered similar encouragement:
“So, the thing I would say is, when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
But that’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is:
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it.
That’s maybe the most important thing — is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus: embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important, and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better.
’Cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
(1m39s video)
Impostor Syndrome
On one hand, I was born in the USA in the 1980s into a family that (like so many others) told me that I could achieve anything I set my mind to.
(Absurd amounts of privilege + boatloads of optimism.)
So I grew up with a head that was too big for my own good. And lots of delusion and overconfidence.
On the other hand, even so, I still experience plenty of impostor syndrome.
So I shudder to think of how unempowered 99% of the world feels.
The takeaway?
It’s not like Game Genie.
I don’t have it all figured out.
Nobody granted me some special power that will make life easier.
I hesitate to even publish these articles.
But I keep repeating to myself ever day (since every day I have doubts about whatever I’m up to), almost as a mantra:
Nobody has it all figured out. And I’m just trying things.
I think the people who shape the world most are the ones who have that thought playing on loop in their minds.
🕙 What we learned in recent posts:
🟢 The 2 (contradictory) ingredients to happiness
🟢 We got rid of all of our possessions
👀 Caught my eye this week:
Tom Cardy’s “Why am I anxious?” song is incredible. 😆 There’s also an animated version.
(1m47s video)
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