Ulysse Pence

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The Path to Greatness

Front-Loading Life for Compounding Experience

September 13th, 2020

A sentiment that many people working towards Financial Independence share is: “Today, I will forgo risk and personal enjoyment so that tomorrow, when I save up $X, I will do what I want!” It's a pretty sensible idea, leveraging compound interest over decades to create a perpetual money machine [0]. I am not here to criticize this strategy; in fact, I myself am following this strategy. However, there are many different ways to implement it, some that influence your decision-making more than others.

Back in 2013, I read an article describing the author's decision to travel abroad for a year [1]. My initial reaction to it was “Woah that's cool. I wish I could do that.” As the months passed, my thoughts transformed into “Hmm, maybe I could do that,” then “I should do that,” and finally “I'm going to do that!”

It wasn't long before I quit my job of 2 years and went traveling in Asia with my friend Tasshin. We ended up staying there for the better part of a year. During the trip, I reflected on what I wanted right now in my life. Some wants were very basic: delicious foods, novel experiences, meeting people from different cultures... But the biggest want I had was to escape the monotony of white-collar work to start pursuing my dreams.

It was on this trip that I realized the false compromise of sacrificing the present for the future. Every major diversion from my routine influenced the rest of my life. I normalized each successive experience and wandered further and further away from my original path towards something more exciting. And the further I wandered, the more exciting it became. Up to this point, I had neglected to consider that life itself was a compounding experience; if I waited until the end to take the first fork in the road, I would never end up where I really wanted to be.

Each time you step outside of your comfort zone and have a novel experience, you move further and further away from who you would have been and towards who you want to be.

I decided to “front-load my life” with the best experiences. Once I got another job, I continued investing in my retirement, but all the while I looked around for what I wanted to do and could be good at. Once again, I left my job, this time to pursue a nonprofit endeavor. But a new obstacle emerged: fear. Fear of falling behind my friends, fear that my life would pass me by, and fear of failure.

This time, being unemployed came to feel like drifting through space, unattached from all points of reference. I hadn't realized how much social, emotional, and aspirational support my job had given me. Unemployed, I was vulnerable. I watched as the amount in my bank account fell, but now there was no travel abroad to distract me. Now, I was free to throw my energy into whatever interested me, instead of my employer.

This is the real reason I believe many people seeking Financial Independence will do basically the same job for decades: fear. As long as they haven't hit their retirement goal, they have a safe, defensible reason to maintain the status quo.

Leaving your job to look for something that resonates with you can seem scary, but the risk is probably not as high as you think. And if you succeed, you will have a fulfilling life and career. Really, the thing you should worry about is who you'll be if you stay where you are. Each day that passes is one less potential day doing something you love.

What's so Important About Being Important?

If I enjoy my life, that should be enough, right? That's not what my actions suggest. It's nearly impossible to shake off your craving for status. We want others to respect us. Whenever we see someone doing something impressive, we try to figure out if we could do it too in order to impress others [2].

To that end, I frequently find myself unconsciously living by the mantra “I want to be great”. What I actually want is the respect of my peers, but what I end up doing is telling myself I like things my peers like and I should do things my peers would find impressive. This is wanting to want something, or pursuing things that will give us status in a community, instead of doing things we actually want.

Growing up, I read about great people like Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Plato, Socrates, and Shakespeare... people who changed the world and had a lasting legacy. In their time, while many of them were political or thought leaders, they probably didn't know that they'd be idolized and memorialized like they are today. In my mind, they are all people who were intimately in touch with their craft, whether that was state-building and war, creative works, or philosophy. My guess is that most of them didn't work on their craft to get rich or famous. They worked on it because they loved it and it made them feel alive.

At some point, I internalized that reading Great Books could make me great. Over several years in my adulthood, I tried reading Great Books, but except for reading a few excerpts or shorter pieces, I failed for lack of interest. I continue to see people that I admire promote this idea: reading Great Books (“the classics”) is how you live a good life [3] [4] [5].

But what does it mean if you can't seem to bring yourself to read Great Books? It's a trap: doing the same things that people we admire do will not necessarily make us admirable. The reality is that the people who read Great Books and the people who are doing great things do them because they want to. It sounds simple, but most of us underestimate how our environment, affect, familiarity, genetics, and so on can make something that's hard or boring for others seem fun or rewarding for us. Everything that we do, we do because these influences aligned to push our motivation over a threshold [6].

Giving Advice

Do you like sailing? Perhaps it's because your family went sailing when you were young and doing it again sounds easy. Imagine if you suggested to a friend or coworker that they should go sailing with no prior experience. The warm place in your heart for your family overlaps with sailing, but theirs does not. They have no memories of moving the sailboat from the yard into the water and putting up the sail, no understanding of the point of sail nor the difference between a rudder and a keel.

They respond back to you that they'd rather sit in the library and read the classics. They attended seminars in school where students discussed great works. They grew up reading hundreds of books because there was no TV in their house, but not you. When you think about tilting your head down to read a book for several hours, all you can think about is how much the neck injury you got sailing two summers ago would hurt.

But you don't have to be a prisoner to the interests and activities that have arisen naturally in your life. You can change [7]. Use a small amount of energy now to make integrating a new behavior take less energy later. Books on habit formation highlight the importance of not relying solely on willpower. It's easier to start with small commitments to slowly integrate the habit into your identity [8] instead of making it a huge test of self-worth.

So the next time you find yourself thinking that some activity is the activity that everyone should do to have a good life, stop it! Not everyone has the same influences in their life as you do. Let's avoid making this about morality; your inner critic is probably loud enough. When you hear someone say something like this and you want to follow their advice, ask them how. “How can I get to where you are, given who I am? Show me how you came to love it.” It's not necessarily their role to help you, but then they shouldn't be creating a standard if they won't provide guidance. Being a good teacher means not being a hypocrite [9] and making time for your students.

Although, even if you think you're giving helpful advice, consider why you think it'd be helpful. People often suggest to:

But rarely do we examine why our suggestion would work for someone else. The reason is that we probably don't know why it worked for us. My guess is that the significant majority of successful people don't know why they're successful. Why would they? Success doesn't necessitate being analytical or introspective. A skill they know intuitively never has to be explained. And even if they do understand it, they probably don't possess the pedagogical knowledge to convey it to someone else.

The survivorship bias also leads us to focus on the people who succeed; when the same method is applied by two people and only one of them succeeds, we don't see the failure and are unable to scrutinize the method and what actually made it work. I estimate that a large portion of self-help literature is the result of well-meaning people not understanding correlation ≠ causation, nor regression to the mean [10].

Creation is Vulnerability

Creating something takes skill and intention, whether it's art, software, books, or policy. When we see other people creating impressive things, we have a natural inclination to ask if we could create or do the same thing [11]. One possible result of this thinking is that we decide we could do it and therefore it's not impressive. But no good comes from trivializing someone else's work [12]. And indeed, we didn't do it, although putting aside the time to do it may be a helpful exercise [13] [14]. Perhaps you can do it. The truth is, creators spend a lot of time thinking about and working on their creation. If what they make seems simple and intuitive, then they've succeeded in creating it for and attracting the right audience: you. There are an infinite number of novel ideas floating around out there, but they're more than one step away from our current understanding [15]. Creating the bridge to any of them is impressive.

But creation is not just a skillful labor, it requires vulnerability. What comes out of creation is a creation, a thing you can point at and say “I did that,” a new surface area exposed for others to laud or lament. At some point, that thing was just an idea. And now this thing that was inside you exists on its own, with your name on it. This vulnerability is at the heart of what I believe is greatness. To be great, you need to get skin in the game). Put your pride, money, career, or reputation at risk. Take on something completely of your own, where its failures and successes are yours. Peter Thiel's Zero to One stresses the importance of understanding power laws, or pouring a disproportionate amount of attention, time, money, or confidence into one thing [16]:

Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing...

There's something beautiful about doing it from scratch. It's your offspring and more. So many things about yourself are difficult or impossible to change (habits, voice, appearance, intelligence, traumas), yet your creation is the result of intention and it is completely changeable.

Authentically You

Perhaps an equally difficult undertaking is figuring out what you should do. The best advice I've ever read is to find things you like intrinsically [17] and avoid things you feel you ought to do. That's wanting to want. Forget how your peers will react. This is your life, not theirs. Take it seriously and find the activity that is its own motivational feedback loop [18].

What is the thing that is authentically you? The sooner you go out exploring for what you like, the sooner you will complete your hero's journey, arriving right back where you started [19], but with an idea in mind.

When you have an idea, ask yourself which aspects are more transferable and focus on those. For example, if you want to make Bossa Nova music, prioritize learning your instrument well over knowing every facet of the genre. If you want to work in intelligence, prioritize learning analysis skills over specific software tools. When you prioritize a more general skill set, there are more things you can do, more paths lead to success. And when more paths lead to success, you will be more likely to win [20]. You will be more agile and better equipped to cope with your changing interest and the changing world. Apply your energy disproportionately as well, just as you do your time. When you're excited by something, sprint as fast as you can! When you're not, relax [21].

Reflect often. I've discovered so much about myself by reflecting on failure. In this way, you can invert the problem and figure out what to avoid [22]. Here's what I avoid when looking for new endeavors:

What is at the heart of your biggest failures? What are the telltale signs to avoid?

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Footnotes