Category: finance nomad

I feel like everyone is fake, as if I don’t belong. I know this is just my enneagram talking. When I feel close to others, I feel so close. When I don’t feel close, I feel so far away. I can be either the life of a party or a wallflower but nothing in between. I aspire to find community, but I often find rejection. When I find community, it frequently does not last. I feel inadequate. Although I have accomplished so much, I feel like I have so much more left to go. I have very few periods in my life in which I thrive. I simultaneously both care and don’t care about what people think of me. I’m ready and not ready to do something meaningful in my life. My solitude hits so close and so far. 

I’ve never enjoyed parties too much. I’ve always felt out of place, except when I know at least half of the people there. In those kinds of scenarios, I feel so connected to everything and everyone. I exist in a state of desolation or exuberance and nothing in between. It would be nice to exist in a state of exuberance forever. I’ve been in that state before, but it’s often fleeting. Either do to situations beyond my control or the speed of change propelling me far from Eden.

I really want to be a VC one day. Not now, because there’s something I want to build, but eventually. I like the aesthetic of hosting networking events in my apartment. I like interacting with founders and learning about emerging trends. I like enabling companies to build the technologies that will shape our future. It seems like a lot of my life has been leading to this. I don’t have the skills or network necessary to be a VC now, but I think I have what I need to be a founder, mostly. I definitely have the personality for one, just maybe not the hard skills that I want, yet.

The world is full of inauthenticity and driven by inauthenticity. Authenticity is such a rarity that the pursuit of it is considered to be strange to most people. My understanding of authenticity is different from most people. People think it’s about kindness or not being fake, but this is merely the phenotype. The underlying qualities of authenticity are about introspection (knowing your values) and alignment (living according to your values).

At this point in my life, I have five years of work experience. It’s an eventful five years, but I’m ready for my time in SF to come to an end. I will probably get my MBA at some point in the near future. I feel like I have to make a choice: whether I want continue going down the path of inauthenticity, which is low-risk and certain, or take the road less traveled down the path authenticity, which is high-risk and uncertain.

In the beginning of my career, I felt like I was learning a lot. It was a fascinating arc of growth. There are parts of every job that you dislike, but the growth made it all worth it. Around the end of every job, you feel like you aren’t growing anymore, so you leave for your next opportunity where you are able to grow again. This cycle continues on and on.

The problem lies in that every job requires compromises to authenticity. Because I work in finance, for example, I must wear business casual. I can’t wear what I want to the office. If I start my company, I am still subject to the whims of customers and investors. Until you reach financial freedom, you are always making compromises in your life, inclusive of your authenticity. If you have kids, then you are making compromises in your life to take care of your dependents. It never stops; it’s just an endless cycle of compromise until you die.

I don’t like to do that. I don’t like to compromise. I like to live my life according to my own terms. I would rather fail on my terms than succeed on someone else’s. This has made me quite disagreeable in life. It has made things quite difficult to me. But I don’t think life is about making things easy. I could compromise my authenticity for the rest of my life, but I don’t want to. The range of outcomes in my life is still so wide, but the negative outcomes have mostly been de-risked. I’m debating between stagnation, limited upside, or outsized upside.

When we did a firm-wide enneagram assessment, the facilitator asked me to reflect on what the weaknesses of the type four are. It’s quite obvious; being authentic makes me disagreeable in environments that don’t value authenticity. But, to me, that doesn’t matter. If being authentic is the most important thing in the world to me, then why would it matter if it costs me in life? Yes, I could have gotten more ahead if I made more compromises to my authenticity, but why would I want to do that when authenticity is the most important thing in my life?

Living an authentic life is difficult in a world that doesn’t value authenticity, which is the world in which we occupy. This journey to be more authentic has cost me in so many ways, some of which I have mitigated by compromising my authenticity. However, we don’t become duller versions of our personality over time. Whatever qualities that define us and make us different only become more pronounced over time. Things I was willing to compromise before become more painful later in life. Every month and every year I become less willing to compromise my authenticity, which leaves me to where I am now. I am continuing my journey to be more authentic, no matter the pain, within reason.

I’ve been getting a lot of stress dreams lately over my future. It’s specific and not specific: over my contribution to this world, over the risks I am taking, over the question if it’s all going to be all right at the end. I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that. People usually say things will be all right, but I’m not so inclined to believe them. I am not like other people. What people think is okay is rarely okay to me. Mediocrity is not an acceptable outcome for me, only greatness.

I feel like there’s a series of escalators in life. When you get on, the outcome is predictable. You go from one floor to the next, from one job to the next, from one promotion to the next. There’s not much change between these paths. Every escalator is similar to one another. Every job similar to the last. Every now and then, you have the option to get off the escalator and carve a path out for yourself. It’s scary because it’s not an escalator, and you have been used to escalators your entire life.

I am not necessarily throwing away everything I have built, but I am close. Instead of taking another escalator, I’ve decided to take a rocket ship. A rocket ship could take me to the moon, or it could fall and explode in spectacular fashion. I’ve never enjoyed rollercoasters or skydiving that much. I want to, but I just don’t. The idea of plummeting to my death is not appealing to me. The idea of going to the moon doesn’t appeal to me much either. But I just want to live an existentially meaningful life. To do that, sometimes you need to take a rocket ship even when you don’t enjoy the experience of rocket ships that much.

I feel like a lot of my life has been culminating to this. All the difference I’ve felt from others at every point in my life has led me to understand that I am not someone who is content taking escalators in a world where people can only contextualize their career in terms of escalators. I am and always have been so different from others. I used to hate that. I now accept that. I’ve learned that being different from others has its advantages and disadvantages, and I should lean into these differences instead of running away from them.

I’m guessing that this will be one of many essays of the sort. I haven’t felt a deep angst about my future since undergrad. Life has been fairly predictable in the past couple of years. It might get unpredictable somewhat soon, to the dismay of my anxiety, but to the excitement of my soul.

“If you could start your life from start to finish, would you change things?”

Most of the movie Arrival takes place during sunrise. At least the scenes that made the final cut of the the movie. There’s a certain quality to it. It’s symbolic of new beginnings. It’s pure. It’s vulnerable. When I was in undergrad, I tended to index heavily on sunsets because they were symbolic of endings. It made sense considering how dramatic I was back then. And, while I could appreciate a good sunset, I’m more of a sunrise guy now. Not only because I have an east-facing apartment and can’t really see sunsets, but because I find the prospect of new beginnings to be a lot more poetic than endings. Sunsets often are defined by magnitude and intensity, while sunrises are subtle and blue.

We have unlimited room for redemption in life. While I always want things to end beautifully, the truth is that there is more to life than how things end, even though that is how I pay attention to. I’ve always liked the imagery of phoenixes because it symbolizes the cycle of death and rebirth. This preference has grown stronger over time. Unfortunately, I’m at the age where it’s getting too painful to get new tattoos, so I probably won’t be able to get a (large) phoenix tattoo in my lifetime. Or, more accurately, I don’t want to endure the pain required to get a large back piece.

The song that plays at the beginning and end of Arrival is called On the Nature of Daylight. What is the nature of daylight? Why is there a redemptive quality to it? Why do countless humans before me find meaning in the cycle of day and night? Sunrise is a bridge between the glory of the day and the stillness of the night.

I wonder if everyone changes from being a sunset person to a sunrise person in their lives. Maybe that’s why people wake up earlier.

And so, I don’t know if I would change my life. There is a poetic quality to live life as it is, but I’ve never been one to err away from change when it was presented in front of me. I reside in some contradictory middle ground between acceptance and agency, where I accept my life as it is but also willing to change when I desire to.

I’ve been having a lot of stress dreams lately. I’ve been waking up earlier than expected. I’ve been in a low-stress environment for so long I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel stress.

In college, I was stressed about not knowing what was next. Now, I am also stressed about not knowing what is next. When the future is not yet determined, it has infinite possibilities. In the making, everything is so tumultuous. After it has been determined, everything seems so inevitable.

Successful founders and entrepreneurs always recommend you take more risks when you are younger. Well, I’m “younger” right now, and the prospect of risk still scares me. I thought it would get better over the past couple of years, but it really hasn’t gotten significantly better. I still feel delicate. I still feel like I am flower in violent storm, singular in beauty, but struggling everyday to merely exist in a violent world.

I wonder if it will get worse over time. My ability to switch jobs decreases over time. My depedencies increase. While I would like to think that my stresses about my career would decrease over time, there is very little to suggest that would actually be the case. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. People become more risk-averse and more stressed over time.

People say I should spend more time networking. I have an idea of what that means, but I also don’t have a good idea of what that means. How is that different to how I am living my life currently? What is the point of superficial connections? There’s a lot of advice that I get that I accept but don’t understand. Perhaps that will make more sense to me when I’m older. But at the moment, I’m just focused on doing things in a way that I don’t entirely understand.

I thought I had a good idea of what I wanted to do a couple years ago, but I’m more confused now. Plans I made three years ago are still applicable, but just less obvious. 

I embark on a series of journeys in life, each more exciting and perilous than the last. Stagnation. Followed by professional, romantic, or social change. Back to stagnation. This is the journey of life. This is the way. In each step, we give up a little bit of ourselves for another identity. I’ve stopped thinking about it as becoming my more authentic self and more about going through the motions in the passage of life. Life has a build-up period. Life has a peak. Life has a plateau.  Life has a decline. Life has the same properties as companies and chemical reactions and friendships. We should lean into that as opposed to leaning away.

The past couple years of my life have been defined by transition: to college, to professional life, to New York, to San Francisco, to my most recent apartment. I am about to make another transition, one which is unlike all other transitions that I have done in the past. For most of my life, I have been doing all I can to minimize risk. In high school, I did I could to get into the best college I could. In college, I did all I could to get the best job I could. One job led to another job. There was always something to be achieved. The road was clear, and all that was left is to put in the hard work to walk the predefined path to success.

I have reached the end of that path. I could continue to walk the path I am walking on, which would lead me to a modest and predictable level of success. Or I could do something crazy. To add risk to my life. To go for greatness as opposed to comfort and insignificance.

We are propelled to take the path of most taken. Humans are risk-averse creatures. Rising up the ranks is a low-risk activity. However, by nature of entropy, rising up the ranks means falling in line with lesser greatness. True greatness only exists in isolation or in context of other greatness. Greatness, in a field of platitude, is not perceived to be great. Very few individuals are great. Even fewer pursue the path of greatness despite having the potential to be great. I will choose that path. It’s a crazy decision, but I must do this.

I had a discussion with my mom at dinner today about all of my exes and where they were now. My mom asked me if I kept in contact with any of them, and I said no. She asked me why, and I didn’t know how to reply.

It’s strange that I have to explain to people how frequently I go on 1-on-1 trips with girls I have crushes on — some of whom who like me back I end up dating but most of the time whom don’t like me back and I never speak to again after the trip. It’s a staple of my development and explains 99% of my personal growth. I am motivated by these short bursts of intense interaction where I am able to push the boundaries of conversation to revealing deep truths about myself and my traveling companion. I oftentimes feel that these trips are more valuable than relationships themselves. You are able to push the envelope and learn more about yourself in a intense week with someone you don’t know that well than you are able to in a mellow year with someone you know well.

I’ve always thought it was interesting how quickly you can lose touch with someone you have shared such intensity with. It’s always me trying to keep in touch. It is often my counterpart that is slow to reply or leaves me on read. The memories is always still fresh in my head, and I wonder if they meant as much to my travel companion as it did to me. Unlike investing, you can’t really do a post-mortem on one of these trips. You never know what your counterpart is thinking. You don’t know how you messed up, if you messed up at all. All you can do is label the data you have, let it run in your subconscious, and move on with your life. It’s like reinforcement learning without human feedback.

We coexist in a world with residual horrors, peripheral indifference, and illuminated stars, and we are expected to do so silently and independently.

I’m in my Ibis hotel room in Budapest, and I bought 10 postcards. I know I am going to send nine of them, but there’s one I’m not sure if I am going to send yet. Every year, I re-evalute who I am going to send postcards to. I try to keep it less than 10 for my sake, so when I travel, I don’t have to spend more than 20 minutes addressing postcards. This gives me a space to reflect who I want to keep in my life and who I want to take out. My postcards are my art project, and I choose carefully who I want to be the recipient of my art.

Very rarely in friendship do you have a fallout that is irreparable. Friendships do not follow the same up-or-out model as relationships, so oftentimes friendships can be left unattended and pick back up at a later date, with the caveat that doing so would depreciate intimacy at some rate. However, there are so many factors that go into how active a friendship is at a given time. Proximate friendships are stronger than distant friendships, but that could change at any point given a change in proximity.

I still don’t have a cohesive algorithm for how I decide who I want to send a postcard to. I have rules, but then I also have exceptions to the rules, and so the rules are not that helpful. The rule of thumb is that if I have not talked to someone in the past year, then they are off the list. In some cases, I reach out to someone to confirm if there has been a change in address. More often than not, it just comes down to a feeling. I have a thing for poetic ends, but I’m not sure what is an ending and what is not.

I feel like all friendships, and relationships, can be boiled down into potential and kinetic energy. There is a set of unique attributes between two people, or a group, and the course of the friendship is more-or-less mapped out in the beginning. The strength of the friendship is dependent on the uniqueness of the traits. But once energy is spent, it cannot be restored to a previous state. There is little use trying to recover things to the “way things were.” There is a natural course in which friendships run, moving towards heat death.

It is for this reason I feel especially drawn to certain people. I see potential energy yet to be unearthed. There is a set of conversations to be had, a set of experiences to be shared, a set of memories to be made. Friendship is a process of exchanging energy. Change is a process of exchanging energy. We enter a friendship one way and leave a friendship another way.

There are so many things you thought you would eventually get to that you never did. So much alcohol accumulated from high school that you thought you would drink one day. The excitement of alcohol was so great in high school. The experience was so unique, and the thrill of breaking the law embodied an adolescent excitement that is very hard to replicate later in your life. Adulthood is characterized by a state of less energy. There is just less energy to go around. Experiences are less exciting in experience.