I discovered Kris Abdelmessih on Twitter and his substack The Moontower not a long time ago. The more I climb the tower, the more I find him a fascinating person to follow. He arrived both at the best and the worst possible point in my life: being a parent of two I am naturally attracted by his approach to education (to pick one topic) but, being a parent of two, I have also absolutely zero spare time. I timidly dip my tippy toe into this rabbit hole and I get immediately taken away by someone crying, not that unusually a colleague.
Zodiac sign: #QuietQuitting. I really do not see the issue if someone does the minimum to not get fired. Is not that the point? We are creatures motivated by incentives: I have a performance bonus in my contract, if every year I get the same amount irrespective of what I do, am I the problem? There are two things entrepreneurs (and fake ones) out there outraged by the QQ attitude do not get:
- you do the boring and soul-destroying part of your job because you are building something that is yours. I wake up multiple times every night for my son, I am pretty sure I’d not do the same for the son of my boss. Is it that hard to understand? Bestow a reasonable amount of equity and you will see people that believe in the mission perform. You need both elements for the formula to work.
- not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. There should be a place in this world for someone that comes, fix your toilet and then go home without having to think about how to enhance the process of fixing toilets. What is your issue with that? Capitalism already rewards entrepreneurship, there is less competition for you. My suspicion here is that you want the reward without putting in the effort.
Back to Kris. Aside from being extremely jealous of his writing style, my long-term goal is to learn how to build clear blueprints like his Engine Model; but at the point where I am, with few moments to focus here and there, I would be happy if I manage to develop an effective method to take notes based on how he does it.
I have a really bad memory to start with, and age is not helping here. I read a lot of books and written material but what I manage to retain is not that much. Worse, I rarely connect a concept from an author with insight from another one. Funny stuff happens when it takes you ages to write a post: I wanted to write a recent example about this that involves Jason Buck and Taylor Pearson (they run Mutiny Funds together but their role in the story is separated); turns out they started to sponsor Moontower. Serendipity? Am I too deep in my echo chamber?
Skateboarding, gender and tail risks
Stay on Board, the Leo Baker Story is a great Netflix doc. In short, the protagonist is a great skateboarder that was forced to stop doing was they liked (and participate in the Olympics) because they identify as a “he/him” but were born as a “she/her”.
[<rant on/> Gender-based competitions should be a relic from the past, something that does not belong to a civilized society like the monarchy, ground rent or porridge. It is true that men and women are physically built differently, but then why a 1.60m tall guy can play against a 2.10m lad in basketball? Isn’t that a genetic advantage? What I mean is that if we would re-write the rules today starting from a white canvas, I think we would approach it in a different way (obv if you do not give the task to Putin or the like…). It is clearly a “cultural” issue, not a biological one, because otherwise we would have some F1 drivers with a vagina…but imagine the Saudis, that pour money on the thing, be fine with it. <rant off/>]
His story reminded me of a line from a famous (in Italy) mafia-related tv series: one of the protagonists reach the top of the organisation and yet is forced to realise that “we all have a boss to report to”. Leo Baker was one of the best in the world but could not express his talent because someone else created pointless rules: it does not matter if you are the number 1 athlete, the head of the league or federation or call it as you want will rule above you.
Take Colin Kaepernick. Take Daryl Morey and his tweet about Hong Kong. You can pick your own example, as long as is not The Donald and Twitter for reasons I hope I do not have to explain to you. A few days after watching the doc, I listened to Meb Faber interviewing Jason Buck and Jason’s idea about building portfolios to hedge entrepreneurship risk hit me. Leo’s solution to his problem was kind of doubling down, opening a skateboarding clothing brand; what if instead he invested his money prizes in the Cockroach portfolio and started the business with a partner providing most of the capital (in a way, that’s what happened when he got the signature shoe deal with Nike)? That way, if the brand would not take off, including the possibility he would not find anyone to fund his project, he would still have a source of passive income to live on.
Fast forward another few days and on Twitter I stumbled on a link to this article by Taylor Pearson, the other co-founder of Mutiny. The article is a great explanation of a concept called Ergodicity and Taylor refers to Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile; I read the book years ago and while glancing through the post I realised how little I remembered about it. If my life would depend on me summarizing the key topics inside Atomic Habits I would not have a retirement problem. Unfortunately, I can say the same of many books I read, even in the recent past. I need a better way to collect and store ideas and concepts, and unfortunately the blockchain is not going to solve this 😉
Because the solution to a particular issue might be scattered here and there.
I am not a Businessman, I am a Business, man
The solution to Leo’s problem (other than wishing that one day we will live in a better world) is not to become an entrepreneur in skateboarding after being a pro in skateboarding, because that’s simply moving from a fragile situation to another one. It is, check Nassim, to become antifragile. It is, check Taylor, to transform your circumstances from non-ergodic to ergodic. It means effective diversification.
Jay-Z, the “business, man”, started as a drug dealer, a fragile endeavour, to branch out in several fields: each one is fragile by itself but the ensemble is very antifragile. Think about the Kardashians: they started from a fragile situation, E! network could have cancelled the show any moment, and built a sequence of uncorrelated (other than to their faces, maybe) profitable businesses.
As I said, we are not all cut to be entrepreneurs, less so serial entrepreneurs. But the barbell approach is open to everyone. And it cuts both ways, meaning if you are in a very antifragile position, like a Government job, then you should only invest in moon projects like venture capital and crypto, definitely hold a portfolio with zero cash and bonds.
AND OOOOOOOOOONE!
If you want to have a nice counterfactual to the KimK story & clan, look no further than another great Netflix doc: Untold, the rise and fall of AND1.
AND1 became a famous and profitable basketball brand publishing a VHS Mixtape featuring some of the best American street ballers. For a couple of years, those athletes became as famous as NBA players. But when the entrepreneurs behind AND1 decided to sell the company to someone else, the players’ career cratered faster than a meme stock. They never took ownership of their personal brand and, more crucially, they never built on top of it when things were rolling their way (yes, the fact that social media did not yet exist did not really help them). Not only they had a fragile career being athletes, their fame was built on someone else platform. They did not follow the advice of another group of blokes that realized from the beginning they had to build their career like a business: you better Protect Ya Neck.
What is the LGBTQ+ version of “Behind Every Great Man There Is A Great Woman”?
I do not want to engage in any thorny topic here (or at least, not more than I already did). I discovered that Kris’ wife Yinh started an amazing podcast in 2018 called Growth from Failure.
I never had a healthy relationship with failure. Knowing how hard it is to get up after you trip down, from the beginning of my career I focused my attention to avoid any possible bumpy road ahead. Which is not great for two reasons:
- there are a lot of things I cannot control. I can do a great job and still end up unemployed because of a recession or a merger. Going back to Taleb again, is it better to get used to failure, possibly in small doses, than thinking you can engineer a smooth ride only to get smashed on your face really hard, even if it is only for one time. It is the same in investing: assets that go steady up to the right are the ones that hide the biggest risks (see Madoff pitch).
- low risk means low return. Chasing the easy and secure path prevented me from fully testing my potential but, more crucially, “get lucky”.
I cannot go back in time and change the decisions I took in the past, but it is never too late to learn. This podcast looks like a great place to get help and grow. Obviously being a stupid Italian, I had to start from the episode with Sarah Piampiano (“pian piano” means “slowly slowly” in Italian, not the best omen for a racer).
What I found really interesting are the MAXIMS Yinh have gained hosting the show (you can find them here). Rather unconsciously, I already mentioned two of them, MANAGE SERENDIPITY and CONTROL WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL, in this post.
This is a great maxim for the F.I.R.E. community. It has already been written by people far smarter than me that instead of focusing on the final goal, the FuckU number that would make you finally free (but won’t), you should enjoy the journey. The point is to progress towards spending most of your time doing what is meaningful for you. The instant switch from one state to the other would probably leave you asking and now what?, grinding out an increasing amount of time will help you understand how you really like spending your time.
Being a parent of two, I frequently find myself thinking “when they will be XYZ year old I will be able to do this and that”. I read this maxim as a push to focus on the present.
Without going into a cul de sac a la Scott Galloway (sorry but the English keyboard does not have accents), being deliberate about friendships looks like a good idea to me…as long as you do not use it like Christian fanatics would use a passage from the Bible. One weekend I met a friend and told him how tired I was, he laughed and replied “like you never tell me that”; outside rare moments, I am not that a brilliant person to hang with, especially now. I guess the reality for us with sub-1000 Twitter followers is closer to having pals similar to Trainspotting characters than the bloody Avengers; cutting ties with someone pushing you toward heroin cannot be bad, innit? Is less about measuring success and more about removing pointless negativity/bitchyness.
You have to put up the work to cultivate friendships. After moving abroad, when coming back to my hometown I was expecting my friends to free their calendars for me, even if I gave them very short notice. I was thinking I deserved something…and obviously this is not how the world spin.
It does not mean that you should never go out and get drunk with whoever you would fancy doing it at that moment. But having someone that can give you great advice at the right point is priceless; and you cannot reach out to them only at the point of need, you have to build a relationship first. Like networking for a job.
Recently, I am struggling a lot with the “do not waste time” maxim. One year ago I proposed to my colleagues to have a meeting-free day per week, a day that we can therefore all use for long-term projects that are hard to put together if you are interrupted every other hour. I did not manage to get them on board. At home, the situation is even worse: you cannot schedule anything around a baby and a toddler. Forget writing, I cannot even read anything that is longer than a tweet.
Then there is the struggle about rest. I might try to achieve something in that spare hour I have between dinner and the ‘early night activities’ (milk bottles and bringing my daughter to wee wee without waking her up) before going to bed, but the late screen exposure plus some excitement/stress related to what I am doing can ruin pretty badly my sleep. Should I still push it or is better if I rest?
I started writing this blog at a time when I realised I was really wasting too much time. Now that my circumstances have changed, it could be fine to re-prioritise things but is not easy. And let’s not even go to the more pressing question “should I change jobs and take on more responsibilities or should I wait at a year so that my son will at least let us sleep?”.
Here I am a total failure. Accept? Positive mindset? I react exactly the opposite way. But as they say, admitting that you have a problem is the first step to solving it. It is going to be a long journey for me 😉
Let’s conclude on a positive note! C.R.E.A.M. = compounding rules everything around me. I know it, I do it, I leverage it. And if you arrived here, you most likely know too.
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