Found Wanting

When you are thinking “I don’t deserve to be at this table”, “I don’t know enough to apply for this job”, or “I am really confused and feel incompetent”... you don’t know how the other people are (also) beating themselves up constantly. 

Even if people do open up, we only get the words they choose, and only in the way we interpret them. We are only exposed to projections. We are only exposed to how those projections land on our internal projections. 

Working on these interpretations is not something that is obvious. Good business ideas are things you can count, and deep work is often not countable. You may need to pragmatically focus on good business ideas to build the internal capacity for work that doesn’t have (obvious) payback. 

I avoided reading “How to win friends and influence people” because the title made me cringe. It seems manipulative. The books surprised me with the well-articulated truth that we are interested in people that are interested in us. 

Truth sits in a feedback loop, as an invited and trusted evolving conversation. 

Feedback is best received when we don’t feel like it is a tool of destruction. When it isn’t a disguise for being “weighed, measured, and found wanting.” When there is a long-term commitment to each other’s well-being. Where there is a foundation of respect and kindness. 

Then feeling incompetent and not enough is the only starting point in every new endeavour, rather than a fearful admission of permanent inadequacy.

Wound Up

Numbers are blunt tools for communication. The message they convey is more important to us than the countable thing they are supposed to represent. How a number is heard, interpreted, and felt, can wind us up. How they relate to ranking criteria or how we are judged. 

Key performance indicators to measure us. Seeing what you have done. Seeing what you haven’t done. How the environment has changed. Have you put sufficient effort in? 

Has effort resulted in output? How clever are you? Should you be given more responsibility? Should you be given coaching/mentoring/the boot? All the various ways we use to decide if someone is good enough. 

It is always interesting to see how this is connected to the broader questions, and the broader community. Many problems are solved in complex groups. Wealth creation is a team sport. Attributing who did what, and ranking those contributions, can be an impossible task. One that pretends that contribution = value = reward. 

If you look at the long-term growth of countries' “gross domestic product”, it exploded with the industrial revolution. Newtonesque jumping on the shoulders of giants. 

We tend to look at meritocracy as the marginal contribution of the individual (“if they hadn’t been there”) rather than the hard Tim Minchin truth that “If I didn't have you, someone else would do”. 

Accepting that we are inherently replaceable *in the world of money*. People will miss you, but someone else will do the job. Don’t get wound up the numbers. They don’t represent you.

Hubris Factory

“The real secret to investing is that there is no secret to investing. Every important element of value investing has been made available to the public many times over, beginning in 1934 with the first edition of Security Analysis.” Investing is enticingly easy to monetise. You get cost centres (need money) and profit centres (make money). A good business is one where you have something that is easy to count and communicate. “I’ll grow your money” fits the bill. Pricing is also easy with, “I’ll take a percentage”. The two key elements are good capital allocation (what work the money does) and reversion to mean (prices typically overreact and true normal is less noisy). The downside of all this simplicity is that investing is a hubris factory. The real work gets done by the underlying businesses, but investors often think it is an extension of classroom exam results (which also oversimplify the process of ranking people). An Investor’s entire career of being a rock star can come tumbling down with factual evidence that they have done no better than average. They’ internalise the good times and excuse the bad. The real secret of investing and good businesses is that it is not about you. It is about putting money to work, and reinvesting. Custodianship, not proof of worth.

One More Step

“Fitting the curve” is when you take the results of an exam and change them to fit what is “normal”. Through squashing, stretching, and standardising unexpected shapes. If a group has an average, almost no one is average. A Standard Deviation is the average amount each result is different from average. Again, almost no one is the average amount different from average. “Normally”, about 68% of results sit between one Standard Deviation below and one Standard Deviation above the average. 95% sit between two below, and two above. 99.7% between three down, three up. That we do this for exams results shows that the goal is not education. It is sorting. Most education is designed to find your role in the world. This is the exact opposite of what we should be doing, and limits everyone to their starting point. Like Samwise Gamgee, the step you need to take is to realise the story is not about you. Education should be about understanding, and solving, the problems in the world. And financing the things that aren’t problems, but need money. At some point, you need to take the vital step that snaps the connection to the constraints you don’t find helpful.

Normal Results

Degrading Categories

I hate feeling incompetent. Almost as much as I hate the feeling of having gotten it wrong by someone. In a way that I can’t correct. Intellectually I get the idea of the importance of not caring what other people think. But I do care. And people, all people, have limits to their skills and knowledge. Money lets you hide it somewhat. You can pay people to do the things you can’t do. You can even convince yourself that that is because your time is worth more than theirs. That the thing you specialise in is more important than the thing they do. Particularly if it pays more. So, paying them to do the thing you can’t do is protecting your time. You can even convince yourself that you could do the thing they do, if you chose to. Underlying a lot of problematic prejudice is a fundamental belief in superiority. Dividing people into binary categories of “good enough” and “not good enough”. Second class citizens. Surrounding yourself with people you feel are good enough. Not doing the work to see the others. Underlying that is probably the internal voice telling you you aren’t good enough. The voice that is secretly aware of all the things you can’t do.