home

A public record of my quarter-life crisis

Originally posted: 17 September 2024

Last updated: 7 November 2024

Update count: 12

Current word count: ~2.5k

This is a living (ie. incomplete, being edited, updated) list of reflection, list of lessons, advice, and experiments through my quarter-life crisis.

Notes on this update (November 2024)

First, thank you much to the several people who have reached out to ask questions, chat, and help after reading this. It’s been a real pleasure meeting you!! Special thanks to Joe, José, and Alexey, in part for their mutual consistency in flying the EV Grantees/”Greater George Mason Co-Prosperity Sphere” flag. (kudos to this very sassy but witty blog for that bit)

The next chapter looks pretty great at this point. Very excited. It looks like:

I’ve also updated the reflection below to represent my current thinking. I have a short meta-commentary on the process of reflection—please indulge.

I’ve chosen to put my thoughts online as I go through this journey because I believe that part of charting a course forward is leaving a path behind you for others to learn from (or follow). To do that well requires vulnerability and honesty.

There are two kinds of truth in reflection: the kind that exists in the short term (micro truth, truth in the moment) and the kind that emerges over a longer period (macro truth). The last version of this was written while I was very much “in the weeds” of processing and kicking off a values reset, and emphasised micro truths. Because of that, some parts were overweighted, and I was wrong about some things.

You can read a prior version on Github I think (version control rocks) but the point is: I’ve come out of the weeds with time and rest, so this updated reflection is closer to a macro truth. That’s the point of this put-it-online project!

Reflections

I like to think of the foundations of my self as having to do with learning, generosity, and rigour. I am most my self when I am learning and creating new things that are excellent (well executed, something to be proud of, novel) and that make other people’s lives much better.

I ticked those boxes over the past few years as an Investment Associate, but something was still missing.

I learned plenty about business, about a subset of frontier-tech markets, and (mostly) about people, working, and getting things done in a growing organisation. I learned about VC and fundraising, which I think will be a powerful tool. We created Foundry, which is doing good things for ECRs in Australia and is something to be proud of. I broadened my horizons and grew up a bunch. I met some very ambitious people who continue to inspire me.

The missing part comes down to a few other things that are foundational to me:

  1. Agency and ownership;
  2. Creativity;
  3. Challenge;
  4. Doing, rather than optimising;
  5. Ambition and opportunity for scale.

I like the craft of early-stage investing at what I think is its best: clear and expert judgment in the face of huge uncertainty, building trust, and finding overlooked outlier individuals to whom to give cash-shaped opportunities.

However, it’s an optimisation or enablement layer, not a core layer; it’s not where I want to be right now. I believe in building substantive expertise—the ability to understand most every task in the stack before making decisions about it.

A person I like and admire asked me recently what my number one passion is. I have never thought of myself as a singular-passion kind of person. I have lusted after it—to be single-minded in devotion to a single thing, whether it’s a god or a mission or whatever. I’ve put it as this in an earlier version of this reflection:

(start) The thing that makes it all worthwhile. The thing that isn’t you, that is part of you but is for everyone. The soulful thing. George Bernard Shaw puts it as:

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

And in a quote that I used to have hanging above my desk, Marie Curie describes:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.

And Flea, in his memoir Acid for the Children, puts it:

Nothing special about me, we’ve all got our own sacred place, but to access it, your mission must be pure and your aim true. Just a little thought of trying to use it for a power tool, a career move, and the process becomes corrupted. You gotta go for the joy, the pain, the adventure, the search, the journey to love. I learned that from Kurt Vonnegut. You have to be willing to dedicate your life to that journey, not as a means to an end, but just as an opportunity to trip the fuck out. Ya gotta suspend all self-judgement, and embrace all. The reward is the journey itself. And that’s how I became the bass player I’m still trying tobe. Just exploring for a sense of purpose.

(end)

After this period of reflection and experimentation, though, I’ve found that I am a singular passion person. It’s just been a little hard to describe. I just like building people-machines that solve ugly, science-related problems. That’s the higher level. Requires expertise at all the lower levels. Requires excellence. Etc.

I’m a technical people person: technical detail nourishes me, I love people and am surprisingly good with them (when I don’t piss them off with too-honest short-term stream-of-consciousness nonsense), and I feel most at home with “technical” (ie. in the weeds, in the detail) people.

So that’s when I’m “in the groove”, per an earlier version of this:

(start) And because I wasn’t quite doing my thing I usually wasn’t in the groove, which again—Flea describes in Acid for the Children:

When I’m rocking a groove, there is only nature working, ain’t no one gonna rock it harder than me. Free from all prison of my mind’s construct, I am a fucking mama grizzly bear protecting her cubs, and I don’t care if I die. I trust my animal instinct completely. I let go of every thought, let go of all the world, and KILL the groove. The hurt and pain in my heart is my ticket to fly, I surrender all earthly desires in the moment, when it’s time to rock and tap the source. I gotta be the groove and nothing else, fuck the world so I can uplift the world.

An aside—what a groove that is!

I think of this—being in the groove, in some way in the pocket—as the same flavour of thing as C.S. Lewis’s looking along the beam:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

(end)

The best lesson I’ve learned over the past couple of months has been recognising what it feels like when I’m trying to do something because I think I ought to be doing it. It’s been fun to put that instinct on ice. It’s the wrong kind of people pleasing, and it’s rooted in insecurity. But relinquishing it has meant (1) I’m back to doing, not optimising, and (2) I feel oh-so light.

Experiments

Suggestions from people

References