I’ve been following Shane Parrish from Farnam Street for years. There’s many nuggets of wisdom to be gleamed from his project which tends to focus on perennial content not just the flashy, passing kind. In all this content whether explicitly or implicitly allows us to focus on is that whatever pattern is repeating in your life has one common variable: You.
The next job or the last job you took. Whatever title right now is put up on your LinkedIn profile right now is just the role you’ll play — for a time.
In business and particularly in the software world, people often talk about how mission-critical something is, to determine the degree to which it is “sticky”. If your product is mission-critical, you have built in high switching costs. Well, you cannot switch from yourself.
There’s fixed parts of yourself that you learn over time and then of course there are high flexible parts that grow overtime, can take in many different viewpoints. So that’s why I call it a variable; you’re still the variable in the larger equation, but one that is slotted into this role, this team, this group, this department and so on and so forth. Well, the common denominator is you.
The One Story
One of my favourite business/investing folks is Mohnish Pabrai, who most people will know him from being a friend to Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s right hand man.) But long before Pabrai because a money-manager and investor, he was a tech worker.
He tells a seminal story that made a huge impact in the trajectory of his career. He founded and ran an IT consulting and systems integration company in the 1990s called TransTech.
He was quite successful, but yet he always felt something was off. Through all the success, he always felt like he was forced to play the standard corporate game. While he was the main operating partner and CEO, he struggled with constant social friction, team management and daily operational problem solving.
At some point in his career, he turned inward. He decided to take an in-depth personality and psychological evaluation with an executive coach. This wasn’t the standardize Myers-Brigg.
The result was perhaps subconsciously expected by Pabrai, but still shocking. The assessment told him that he was in the “wrong game” for years. It came back telling him that he wasn’t naturally wired for the demands of managing large teams. Instead, his profile showed an extreme aptitude for solitary work centred around probability, pattern recognition and numerical decision making.
Armed with that new-found self awareness, he stopped swimming upstream and instead sold his company for a cool 8-figures and went into who he does today: money management and investing.
The only variable you cannot change (much) is you and you are the most mission-critical when you are aligned to the way you work, the way. you’re wired and where you can grow. Since Pabrai’s self-evaluation, he’s been able to grow his net worth by over 350x since he sold his IT business in the year 2000.