Category: finance nomad

I keep on revisiting the idea that you are not meant to accomplish everything you wanted in life. You aim for the moon. Sometimes you miss and you fall back on Earth. Other times you miss and hit the stars. There are a lot of things I wanted in my life. Some things I have accomplished more than I set out. Other things I have not. Some things in life require selection into exclusive groups or resources or opportunities. You are not always selected, and then you have to work around your initial plan to get to where you want.

For the most part, I’ve been able to accomplish what I wanted if we take a big picture lens. On most majors things I’ve wanted, like getting into Penn or finding a position on the buyside, I have been able to accomplish. Other things I have not been able to accomplish. And, for the most part, I feel like I’ve been able to survive despite not being able to accomplish the things I’ve not been able to accomplish. It’s not been great, especially right now, but I’ll survive, and whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I have become stronger.

I don’t believe that everything was meant to be. I believe that’s just cope. There are things that you want, and not everything you want you are able to achieve. I don’t believe that things we don’t achieve lead us to better paths, just different paths, and we love our fate anyways. But reality is that there are better outcomes for our lives that we didn’t take. These outcomes exist in the ideal, but they are not reality. The world is full of outcomes like this. You can’t index too heavily on them because they are not real. I would rather take unoptimal real outcomes over optimal unreal outcomes any day.

I didn’t get into the schools I wanted to for my MBA. To be sure, I am a bit sad, but I am not nearly as sad as I thought I would be. I have changed a lot in the past year, and this change has taught me that the path I thought I wanted to go down is not necessarily the path I want to keep going down. For a really long time, I thought I wanted to get an MBA. It was the last gated “thing” I wanted to do in my life before I moved onto the next part of my life. A lot of things I did for the past couple of years was in service of this. I don’t regret doing the things I did per se, but I should’ve been more open to the fact that these things I do have an uncertain payoff and asking myself, would I be comfortable with my choices even if they didn’t bring me the achievements I wanted them to bring?

I have made a lot of improvements in this — trying to tailor my life to be more process- than achievement-driven — at least compared to how I handled my life in undergrad, but it’s important to remind myself of these lessons every now and then. You don’t know everything. You don’t get everything you wanted to. You have to be okay with these outcomes and live your life with the understanding that these outcomes are real possibilities.

The change in my trajectory has truly been astonishing when I look at it in retrospect. My life was so flat throughout elementary to high school. Then college, one year after the next, I learn something about myself that propelled me on this trajectory I am now. I used to think growth was linear, but that is just because growth always seems linear in the beginning parts of an exponential curve curve. I feel like I am on an exponential trajectory, that I have accumulated so much momentum that I an unstoppable regardless of the roadblocks that exist along the way.

I had this realization that I can figure it out. Anything. I’m no longer constrained by environmental limitations because I have saved up enough where I could maintain a good quality of life even in the event of prolonged unemployment. This is freeing. I have time now in a way that I didn’t before. I have a dissatisfaction with corporate life that makes me understand that there is a trade off to everything, most notably between freedom and security when it comes to your career. Roadblocks don’t bother me because I can figure it out. You never know when a detour could save you some time.

I forgot how much of my writing used to just be me waking up in the middle of the night feeling restless. It used to be a big part of my undergrad experience, although I don’t recall waking up to write as much as I am doing now. Part of it is probably due to the fact I am sleeping earlier and earlier, like an old person. There are remarkable themes across the things I write: uncertainty of the future, disconnection, trying to live a “meaningful” life. Always longing for a life I don’t have at present.

Life is full of beginnings and endings. I’ve become somewhat accustomed to this reality, although it is still painful when you actually see this in practice. Sometimes, it’s necessary for somethings to end, even though it hurts. You are never full accustomed to it. The realization of some global maximums requires going through some local minimums.

I’ve lived in SF for more than three years now. I take the same walks around my apartment in Embarcadero. The routine exists, and the routine is suffocating. I felt like I was learning a lot, that my life was leading to something in my first couple of years here. I am still learning, but not as much. There is less purpose and certainty to my day-to-day life now. The time I spent away from SF during the remote work period seem so long ago. I made the same couple of drives to my photography studio to develop my film photos. These sunsets and sunrises seem familiar. Everything is compressing closer together. The first couple of weeks I spent in SF were so long ago. Everything seemed so slow back then.

People say time flies when you’re having fun, but I never really believed that. I don’t really enjoy my life right now, but I don’t think it’s slow. It’s quite fast actually. I don’t have that many times in my life when I am having fun, so I remember the times I do very fondly. Those periods seem quite long in retrospect. Like the summer of ’23, I am waiting for the next phase in my life, which is possibly my penultimate chapter before I settle into a life of routine. I left behind in the last chapter in my life. I expect to leave even more behind for the next chapter. Things never endure as long as you think they do or should. Life changes quicker than you might think.

I used to want to escape my life so much. Through video games or books or movies, I always pursued means to forget about how lacking my life is at any moment in time. I’ve filled many of those holes over the years, and my framework for understanding my values and purpose have improved, but there’s rarely periods in my life in which everything feels like it’s clicking. I’ve had a couple of those periods in my life, and I cherish those moments, but I don’t know where things are going from here. I don’t know if I’ll ever have one of those periods in my life again, whether I have already experienced all the happiness I have experienced in my life.

I could feel my heart slowing. I don’t know if I’m meant for this path I’ve chosen for myself. I don’t know if I’m meant for this professional life, which is crazy because it’s also so important to me. I want to do something that matters. I also want to do something that is fun. I don’t know if those two things are compatible with one another. I hope they are. I’ve decided that I want to go off the well-traveled path. There’s more to this life than following everyone else’s footsteps.

What is a romantic partner except someone who is responsible for your happiness?

I have always been hesitant to call people friends because what is a friend? The world is filled with indifference. People who come in your life at one point leave your life at another moment. For most of life, you are fending for yourself against demons, both external and internal. People come in when it is situationally convenient for them and leave the next moment when it is not. People often call each other “friends” colloquially, but these words are often meaningless under the scrutiny of actions.

Romantic partners are the solution to a world filled with indifference. Although there are friends who transcend time and distance, they are the exception and not the rule. Friends operate in absence of commitment. Friends are interested in your happiness, but they are not invested in your happiness. Friends do not have a stake in whether or not you are happy. They would like you to be happy, because happy friends are more fun to be around, but most friends are unwilling to make considerable sacrifices to make you happy. Romantic partners are different; they are willing to sacrifice their own happiness for your happiness.

These types of thoughts have dominated my life for so long. Late last year, I thought I was ready for some permanence in my life, but I realized recently that I was not. I don’t crave loneliness anymore, but I feel like I have one more bout of solitude left in my life before I fully commit to a life without individuality, which is what it means to be in a romantic partnership.

The truth about starting a romantic partnership is that you are trading freedom for security. When you are feeling insecure, this is a good trade because you have an abundance of freedom and a lack of security. When you are feeling trapped, this is a bad trade because you have a lack of freedom and an abundance of security. This oscillation occurs for much of our lives in our twenties, but at some point this cycle permanently ends when you partner up and get married and have children. At some point in your life, you have to choose this security permanently to enable you to live the next chapter of your life.

The world is full of considerations such as how you want to express yourself, who you want to surround yourself with, and what choices you make to feel most authentic. The other day, I retook my Enneagram and discovered my dominant type moved from 6 to 4. The results, I would say, were surprisingly accurate and insightful.

As an Ennea 4 you tend to romanticise life and love, leading you to idealise things that are beyond your grasp. This may be evident as yearning for unattainable love interests, desiring meaning and fulfilment that you’re not feeling right now or a tendency to compare yourself with others and what they have. [] This creates a sense that others have something that you are missing in your life or that something you had before in your life is missing at present. It may also lead you to cling to frustrating relationships.

I write about that very frequently as the concept of negativity collapse, where you are exposed to a part of yourself that you are missing by other people, particularly through limerence, and you spend the rest of your life trying to fill that void. I never knew it could be so easily described in a personality inventory. But I suppose that makes sense. A key attribute of 4s is that they tend to dramatize very simple things.

Lately, I’ve had a new way of understanding my relation to my emotions. The things I feel are feelings, which should be self-explanatory, but I never thought of them as such. I learned a couple years ago that feelings can be boiled down into neurochemistry and nothing else. Even the emotions that I feel like are magical, like euphoria or awe. There is little about these emotions that exists outside of the neurochemistry, which can be replicated through inorganic means. For a time, I found that distressing because I was under the impression that because they were neurochemistry that they were not real. But now I am more okay with the fact that the lack of a distinct, non-physical property to emotions.

My enneagram recommends me to create more distance between me and my emotions. I found this interesting because I never considered myself to be an emotional person, but I guess my actions say that I am. In context of all the art I have created, it makes a lot of sense. Who makes art when they are not emotional? It’s interesting because I tend to think of myself as a very rational person, but I can understand that I probably come across as someone who is very intense and moody. That’s probably my INTJ-ness showing.

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.