On Talent
Quantity has a quality of its very own. Some writers are good - and they write all the time. The holy trinity of newsletter writers (Matt Levine, Byrne Hobart and Patrick McKenzie) write up to 700k words a year - so 2,000 words a day. I think Matt Levine’s schedule looks a little bit like waking up and doing 4000 words early in the morning about three times a week, then hitting send on his newsletter. Marc Rubinstein (another pretty prolific writer!) recently shared this Bloomberg profile of Jason Goldberg - “a Barclays analyst who has been writing a daily briefing note for 20 years”. It’s not just newsletter writers - for instance, Philip Kerr managed to write 42 books in 29 years by just working obsessively, writing on birthdays and Christmas. Paul Erdös had an even more insane work schedule:
“Erdös first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. "A mathematician," Erdös was fond of saying, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." When friends urged him to slow down, he always had the same response: "There'll be plenty of time to rest in the grave."
Erdös would let nothing stand in the way of mathematical progress. When the name of a colleague in California came up at breakfast in New Jersey, Erdös remembered a mathematical result he wanted to share with him. He headed toward the phone and started to dial. His host interrupted him, pointing out that it was 5:00 A.M. on the West Coast. "Good," Erdös said, "that means he'll be home."
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Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.
Looking at these guys, one feels a bit inadequate. How do they do it? Why aren’t you doing it? What did you get done this week?
One answer to this question is Scott Alexander’s essay is The Parable of the Talents. In the essay, he’s basically trying to square a circle: to reconcile the ideas that 1. natural talent exists and 2. everyone is morally equivalent. Alexander puts a lot of effort into proving point 1, and I think he does a great job. Here are the relevant sections. I agree with all of this, which is why I’m not trying to put it into my own words. But I’m particularly interested in his point that talent is a real thing, and some people are just better at things than others. He takes this really seriously.
“Consider for a moment Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He grew up in poverty in a one-room house in small-town India. He taught himself mathematics by borrowing books from local college students and working through the problems on his own until he reached the end of the solveable ones and had nowhere else to go but inventing ways to solve the unsolveable ones.
There are a lot of poor people in the United States today whose life circumstances prevented their parents from reading books to them as a child, prevented them from getting into the best schools, prevented them from attending college, et cetera. And pretty much all of those people still got more educational opportunities than Ramanujan did.
And from there we can go in one of two directions. First, we can say that a lot of intelligence is innate, that Ramanujan was a genius, and that we mortals cannot be expected to replicate his accomplishments.
Or second, we can say those poor people are just not trying hard enough.
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In high school English, I got A++s in all my classes, Principal’s Gold Medals, 100%s on tests, first prize in various state-wide essay contests, etc. In Math, I just barely by the skin of my teeth scraped together a pass in Calculus with a C-.Every time I won some kind of prize in English my parents would praise me and say I was good and should feel good. My teachers would hold me up as an example and say other kids should try to be more like me. Meanwhile, when I would bring home a report card with a C- in math, my parents would have concerned faces and tell me they were disappointed and I wasn’t living up to my potential and I needed to work harder et cetera.
And I don’t know which part bothered me more.
Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and still seems utterly unjust.
On the other hand, to this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.”
And without some notion of innate ability, I don’t know what to do with this experience. I don’t want to have to accept the blame for being a lazy person who just didn’t try hard enough in Math. But I really don’t want to have to accept the credit for being a virtuous and studious English student who worked harder than his peers.
…When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class.
A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there.
A little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the Yamaha corporate honchos there.
Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”.
Meanwhile, I was always a mediocre student at Yamaha. When the time came to try an instrument in elementary school, I went with the violin to see if maybe I’d find it more to my tastes than the piano. I was quickly sorted into the remedial class because I couldn’t figure out how to make my instrument stop sounding like a wounded cat. After a year or so of this, I decided to switch to fulfilling my music requirement through a choir, and everyone who’d had to listen to me breathed a sigh of relief.
Every so often I wonder if somewhere deep inside me there is the potential to be “among the top musicians of my generation.” I try to recollect whether my brother practiced harder than I did. My memories are hazy, but I don’t think he practiced much harder until well after his career as a child prodigy had taken off.
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I dunno. But I don’t think of myself as working hard at any of the things I am good at, in the sense of “exerting vast willpower to force myself kicking and screaming to do them”. It’s possible I do work hard, and that an outside observer would accuse me of eliding how hard I work, but it’s not a conscious elision and I don’t feel that way from the inside.
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But I still feel like there’s something going on here where the solution to me being bad at math and piano isn’t just “sweat blood and push through your brain’s aversion to these subjects until you make it stick”. When I read biographies of Ramanujan and other famous mathematicians, there’s no sense that they ever had to do that with math. When I talk to my brother, I never get a sense that he had to do that with piano. And if I am good enough at writing to qualify to have an opinion on being good at things, then I don’t feel like I ever went through that process myself.
So this too is part of my deal with myself. I’ll try to do my best at things, but if there’s something I really hate, something where I have to go uphill every step of the way, then it’s okay to admit mediocrity. I won’t beat myself up for not forcing myself kicking and screaming to practice piano. And in return I won’t become too cocky about practicing writing a lot.”
Here’s a related piece - his Apologia pro vita sua.
“I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.”
And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?”
And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me.
Just as drugs mysteriously find their own non-fungible money, enjoyable activities mysteriously find their own non-fungible time. If I had to explain it, I’d say the resource bottleneck isn’t time but energy/willpower, and that these look similar because working hard saps energy/willpower and relaxing for a while restores it, so when I have less time I also have less energy/willpower. But some things don’t require energy/willpower and so are essentially free. Writing this is my addiction, so it’s free. Doesn’t mean anything else is.”
Erdös’s genius, then, was that his 19 hour workdays were “essentially free”. He didn’t sweat blood and push though his brain’s aversion to doing maths - it must have come pretty naturally to him. So it’s really important to do things that come naturally to you.
Here’s Jim Donovan talking about his SLA with clients while working as an investment banker:
“When I started at Goldman Sachs … I would say to clients, you can leave me a voicemail, any time, unless I’m dead or asleep, I check it every ten seconds… And I don’t sleep very long either.”
I suspect that for Donovan, this didn’t feel like sweating blood - it was just how he was wired. Some people (not me!) are slow repliers, some people hate always being available, and those people are going to be terrible investment bankers and Jim Donovan is going to take their clients. Because for him, this stuff came naturally. He’s a 99.999th percentile voicemail replier. He was born to do it - and what’s awesome is that he found a way to turn his natural talent into loads of money.
I know professional writers that hear about Matt Levine and Scott Alexander’s work routine, and shake their heads. They produce a book every few years; they need to waste a few hours to get in the mindset to do anything. The can’t just jot down a paragraph here and there in their breaks. And yet even though they can’t hold themselves to that standard, they’re still professional writers. I mean, look how Hunter S. Thompson lived (yes, I know it’s not real):
My writing process doesn’t look much like Levine’s. I don’t have his consistency. The general pattern is that I spend weeks or months stewing on something, and then take a few hours and write it all down in one go, with minimal editing. That’s in contrast to a friend who told me recently that he spent two years writing 52 essays - one every two weeks, with metronomic consistency.
Here’s an example from my finals. I had a coursework essay due at 12pm, and the night before, I went for dinner with my two best friends. At about 5am I had maybe the introduction written - and I felt my life flashing before my eyes. Was this going to be the moment I failed my finals? But because I’d spent six months thinking about the question on and off, over the next few hours I managed to write 2,000 words on the subject of “Only God, not Man, makes an heir”: to what extent did Henry II’s legal reforms strengthen God’s hand?”, and got a 78 for my troubles - my best mark across all my papers.
Honestly, that was super fun - it wasn’t a sustainable or consistent way to get work done, but I enjoyed the pressure, I enjoyed the challenge, and I definitely enjoyed the 78. Writing seems to come to me in these spurts, which implies that I’m going to struggle to work with the consistency that Matt Levine achieves; ergo, I should not become a professional newsletter writer.
If you read enough finance books you start to pick up anecdotes about what makes a good trader. Lots of my friends are traders - there’s an archetype of “British Indian, studied economics at Cambridge, grew up in northwest London” that seems particularly successful - and so I’ve had feedback on these ideas. These guys say that they see themselves in these quotes.
One useful trait is an extreme ability for self-control and rational thinking under pressure:
"Bill [Gross] was to a large extent a trend follower, but he had a unique ability to know when it was time to lean against that trend and take a contrary position. There were numerous occasions where everyone else was scared shitless, and Bill put on his seat belt."
Pimco partner Ben Trosky, quoted in The Bond King
"When the financial stakes were high, though, [Steve] Cohen demonstrated an almost inhuman ability to stay calm and make rational trading decisions.
…
It was practically a genetic anomaly, this ability to behave like a reptile when he was trading, as opposed to a human being prone to fear and self-doubt. When he interviewed new hires he tried to test for this quality as best he could."Sheelah Kolhatkar, Black Edge
Another is being inscrutable. For example, people talked about John Meriwether from LTCM like this:
“John has a steel-trap mind. You have no clue what he's thinking.”
William McIntosh (who hired Meriwether into Salomon Brothers), quoted in When Genius Failed
“He wore the same blank half-tense expression when he won as he did when he lost. He had, I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders - fear and greed - and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his own interest so fiercely can be."
Michael Lewis, writing about Meriwether’s time at Salomon in Liar’s Poker
Mostly, though, the key is to be an obsessive:
“My interview with the company - that is, with [Thomas] Peterffy - was memorable. It took place it his apartment in Greenwich, where his butler (his butler!) served us drinks. I made an offhand joke about programming, and he chided me for not having respect for the practice. He told me: 'To be successful in this business, you have to think about it all the time. Lots of people in this business are very smart, but not everyone can think about it all the time.' These words - you have to think about it all the time - made a deep impression on me. Peterffy's phrase has pretty much become my motto - at least, it's one of them. At the time, I was struck by how simple and obvious it was. In fact, it was exactly what I did when I was faced with a complex programming challenge.”
Igor Tulchinsky, talking about how he came to work at Timber Hill (a Connecticut prop trading firm) in The Unrules
"Intentionally isolated, he said, 'a quiet oasis of serenity.'
Serene for him, maybe, but his personality mangled whatever peace the rest of them could have enjoyed. The place was suffused with Gross's clinical insecurity that someone might catch up, that someone might threaten Pimco's dominance.
No moment wasted, no dollar left unsqueezed. This was the dominant culture, trickled down from the trade floor: Gross's 'Pimbots' ground their teeth in their sleep and woke up screaming: their marriages and livers disintegrated. It was precisely that they were so intensely obsessive, going beyond what everyone else did, that made them so great, they had to convince themselves...
Failure to deliver wasn't tolerated. Pimco would sniff out anyone's weakness."
Mary Childs discussing Bill Gross’s decision to locate Pimco in Newport Beach, in The Bond King
And finally, a quote that hits the nail on the head - even though it doesn’t come from a trader:
"A man has to live and sleep with his business if he wants to make a go of it. You have to take it home with you at night, so you can lie there in the darkness and figure out what you can do to improve it. In fact, you have to become sort of a 'nut' about it, so that you become so enthused that you will bore your friends talking about it. You have to be a one-man crusade."
George Mecherle’s answer to the question, “what is the secret of your success?”, in The Farmer from Merna
Nassim Taleb once said, "unless you're a trader, don't trade. Unless you're a baker, don't bake. Unless you're a dynamite maker, don't make dynamite." I think unless you can see yourself in at least some of those quotes, you probably shouldn’t be a trader.
I once spent a huge amount of effort on something in which I had zero natural talent.
I started playing rugby at seven years old. I was always pretty useless, but I always tried really hard. I remember deciding age 12 that I wanted to be better, so one day, at my (boarding) prep school, I woke up early, got a tackle bag, and started doing tackle practice - on my own, at 7am. A teacher walked by, and said ‘what are you doing?’ Slightly sheepishly, I packed up the bag and went back inside. I didn’t get picked to go on the rugby tour, and never played for the U13 A team. When I went to secondary school, I was, again, rubbish - I think at one point I played for the U14 D team. And then, in October 2014, Bath, my favourite rugby union team, signed Sam Burgess: the Yorkshire-born Australian rugby league star. I watched his documentary on YouTube, and it changed my life. The Russell Crowe narration at the start made a huge impression on me:
“Now I have this theory about a certain kind of player. Like a Ron Coote, a Steve Menzies, a Gorden Tallis. I call it the Sparkly-Eyed Man. He’s a man who can be as vicious as he needs to be over the course of eighty minutes to get a result for his team. And the moment that final whistle is blown he’s a completely different person. He’s able to laugh easily, he’s good with kids, respectful to women, and he appreciates life. Which is why he’s the Sparkly-Eyed Man. He has that thing built within him to never quit, and if you’re going to do something, you do it to the absolute utmost of your ability. Those sparkly-eyed men, they carve their names deep in Rugby League.”
Sam Burgess won the 2014 NRL Grand Final with South Sydney, just before he left for Bath. He broke his cheekbone in the opening tackle of the game, was man of the match, and won the Bunnies their first premiership in 43 years.
This blew my mind. I wanted to be that guy. As a teenager, I absorbed all the sports motivational videos on YouTube. I watched this one, I watched this one, and this one above all. This stuff is burned into the back of my skull. I watched these things over and over again. I tried to figure out how to set them as an alarm.
“When you immerse yourself in your craft, you not studying to get a grade, you’re not playing to score points, you immerse yourself in it, so you become it, you gon’ go to another level.
The most important thing is this: to be able to sacrifice yourself at any moment, to sacrifice what you are, for what you will become. Listen to me. Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute, or an hour, or a day, or even a year, but eventually it will subside. And something else will take its place. You ain’t gon’ die. At the end of pain is success! You’re not gon’ die because you’re feeling a little pain! I dare you to take a little pain. I dare you.
Your life is in your hand. You are the captain of your ship. You could have, you could be, you could do whatever you want to do, remember boy, if it was easy, everybody would do it. It’s what they eat, it’s what they sleep, it’s what they drink, it possesses them.”
So I decided I was going to play for the school first XV. I had about two and a half years to get ready. Let’s be honest, there wasn’t that much pain involved in that process - not like the pain Ray Lewis, who’s quoted in the speech above, had growing up. But this was the most difficult a quest I could find. A lot of people told me I couldn’t do it - my tutor, the U16A coach, told me I’d never play for the first XV.
I ate so much food I vomited. I drank a gallon of milk a day. I did squats until my nose bled. Here’s me, age 16, pulling 180 at Villain Strength in Mill Hill; and age 17, squatting 140x5 in my South Sydney jersey.
And ultimately, it worked. I played a few games for the XV. I proved the doubters wrong. I achieved my goal. And I was still actually pretty useless at rugby.
I knew what it felt like to be effortlessly good at something, because I had that academically; when it came to maths tests, spelling bees, quizzes - I just had it. “Do you know how easy this is for me? Do you have any fucking idea how easy this is? This is a fucking joke! And I'm sorry you can't do this, I really am because I wouldn't have to fucking sit here and watch you fumble around and fuck it up.” In the classroom, I was Will Hunting; on the rugby pitch, I fumbled around and fucked it up.
It didn’t matter that I’d spent three years getting bigger and stronger and fitter and faster - I still wasn’t anywhere near the level of the players with actual talent. They could see the game, they knew how to be in the right place at the right time, they could throw the final pass - and I had spent enough time trying to be like that that I knew I never could. I spent 8 years at school with a guy who’s probably going to be an Olympic hurdler this year; he had talent. And so it didn’t matter how many Tri-Nations games I watched or how many pushups I did, because I’d never get it like they did. I had worked as hard as I could, and it wasn’t ever going to be good enough.
That was my Scott Alexander sweating blood experience. I learned what it felt like to stick with something. But my learning from that experience was that next time I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength. Do more of what comes naturally.
I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out what that is. I studied linear algebra, I read Marsilius of Padua, I wrote essays, I wrote SQL, I managed ad campaigns, I travelled the world selling software, I hired and fired a team, I tried to respond to messages in 10 seconds, I networked my way into industries and learned what makes them tick, and I raised some venture capital. Some of that felt natural; some of it didn’t. I’m still looking for what comes next.
I was in LA last week, on a mission to meet great people. The best person I met was the World’s Strongest Man, Martins Licis, at his gym in El Segundo. It was a complete accident; I didn’t know he was there, and I didn’t expect to work out that day. But the reason I was able to walk in and learn strongman from the best in the world was all those hours spent under a bar, squatting until my nose bled.
So I guess it’s ok to bake bread even if you’re not a baker - we’re all allowed hobbies. Just don’t make it your full-time job.
