Year: 2023

Categories
Emotional Work Finance

Day 824 and Ego Loss Aversion

One of my favorite cognitive biases is loss aversion.

The pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. The loss felt from money, or any other valuable object, can feel worse than gaining that same thing.

The Decision Lab

Isn’t it wild how much we hate loss? The pain of losing $100 is worse than the joy of finding $100. In behavioral economics “loss aversion refers to a phenomenon where a real or potential loss is perceived by individuals as psychologically or emotionally more severe than an equivalent gain.” I guess we don’t like to win as much as we hate to lose.

But we have to train ourselves to tolerate losses. Otherwise you’d never play a sport of any kind. And you’d be an absolutely terrible investor of money. So it’s clearly possible for some of us in some situations to get over loss aversion as we have professional athletes and money making fund managers.

But what if we have to address loss aversion in our own ego? How much do we hate to lose a part of ourselves? What if we stand to gain something significant by letting go a part of ourselves. I don’t think we can always predict where in our own sense of identity our ego will fight against loss.

They say the therapeutic process is just mirrors. You have no real sense of what anyone sees except as a reflection. Everything else is just our faulty sensory equipment. And imagine what a colossal fuck up you could make by ignoring what the mirror says and only relying on the faulty sensory data from your ego.

Stew on that a little bit and decide how much you really want to win and get back to me. Could be you need to see how much you hate to lose before you can see what you stand to gain.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 823 and Non Attachment

Have you ever read a piece of literature and seen a character described as “a man of great passions?” I feel like it used to be much more acceptable to discuss appetites and the grasping griping hand of man. Perhaps this mentality passed just as Bejamin Disraeli did, unto another era of fallen archetypes. Now we are civilized men with passions well in hand.

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

Bejamin Disraeli

I was raised in a family that meditated. We went to ashrams. We had family vacations in silent retreat. We settled in Boulder where Naropa is as much a part of the institutional fabric of the town as your typical church.

Non-attachment was a concept that was familiar to me long before I felt I had any secure attachment style of my own. I’ve written about my recurring nightmare of packing for a trip or a move. Non-attachment may even be my style of attachment. I am fearful avoidant for anyone keeping score.

Being in chronic pain has been a gift for deepening my understanding of non-attachment. In order to survive pain, you remind yourself it will pass. But accepting that knowledge is a double edge sword. You accept that your joy and happiness is also passing. And you are offered a choice to grasp at them with mean jealously or to hold them as lightly as you would hold your agonies.

Non attachment isn’t just practiced on the negatives in your life. It’s an equal opportunity philosophy. The money you have. The things you own. The beauty you possess. All are fleeting. They are rare intangible things we must value as both priceless and worthless in equal measure.

I believe we can act in greatness in our passion, even if, or maybe especially if, we practice non attachment. I am both saved and damned. I am powerful and meek. I am a woman of great passions and I am capable of separating myself from them as reality dictates.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 822 and Increased Load

Maybe I should lay off the space opera as this is the second blog post this week in which I’m tempted to use a metaphor about gravity. I’ve been recalculating fuel costs and orbital mechanics for all the journeys in my life as of late. Just to see if I can go the distance.

I’m feeling good about the increased load of an accelerating life. I like that so much is happening. But I do feel very like it’s a bit by the seat of my pants. Various things aren’t tightened, shit is flying everywhere, I’m finding out who gets sick to their stomach.

I am finding that my adjustment to the increased load is a bit uneven as well. For a couple days I’m flying and then I realized I need to recalculate my fuel inputs and it gets a little bumpy.

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Internet Culture

Day 821 and No Joke

I’ve never been much of a fan of April Fools. I like pranks and jokes but I’ve always found the idea of forced merriment to be a bit of cultural drudgery. Most holidays have a bit of marketing attached but April Fools feels like all marketing and no meaning attached.

Despite my dislike I was surprised to see April Fool’s come around and see almost no jokes or pranks. The closest I got was seeing a shitposter buddy of mine Alex Cohen declare he was becoming a leadership poaster. Fun and harmless good stuff. But otherwise it felt like crickets.

I hazarded a guess that it might be because everyone is feeling a bit gun shy. Lots is going on and most corners of the internet feel like they could pop off at any moment. Twitter is has the tension of a neighborhood under siege in some corners. Lots of ingroup fighting is happening in particularly contested spaces like crypto and politics. You can tell it’s information warfare out there.

In that environment I guess no one wants to hazard a shot. It’s too embarrassing to consider that your fire dunk might accidentally be regarded as World War 3’s Franz Ferdinand moment. No laughing matter indeed.

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Finance Startups

Day 820 and Ripped Off

I like doing favors because I don’t care for being overly transactional. I’d rather cultivate something over time to build trust than put a firm price and set of boundaries on what I’ll deliver up front.

And I’d prefer a similar stance from you. Intangibles are hard to price and I’d usually prefer a little time before I settle on them. It’s a trust thing. Everyone gets a fairer deal that way and I only do business if I think it’s win-win.

But once I trust you I generally assume that you won’t fuck me over because I’ve shown that I won’t fuck you over. I’ll value your resources as my own. And I expect you to value my resources similarly.

It sounds a bit old school but I believe we should respect people’s unique styles and contributions. Doing so requires trust and delicacy. We must believe others use us well and we shall use them well.

I find this trust necessary because if I do business with you I’ll use my social capital. Because spending social capital is what gets things done. You make think it’s money, but I can assure you fiat is just a convenience.

Capitalism’s wheels are greased by social capital. If there is too much tension in the system you will never achieve the necessary momentum with only one type of capital. The money is just a stand in for trust. It’s one reason some parties yearn for trustless systems. Because everyone is setting different prices for different currencies and no one likes getting scalped on a forex favor trade. It’s a dick move to undercut social capital.

I’ve found crypto people are some of the worst at understanding this basic social rule as they are the ones most desperate to make all markets legible. The indignation you see across much of technical cultures in general is dismissal of forms of capital that are harder to make legible.

I recently felt ripped off by a transaction I thought I’d priced appropriately to an incentive alignment. It turned out the other side of the deal didn’t have the same understanding of the intangibles. It made me feel like they don’t value my time and work. They’d asked for something, I trusted someone, and then another actor they had vetted spent it in such a careless way I was briefly incensed.

Now you can argue it’s my problem. I priced it wrong. And I had pricing signals coming in negatively from everywhere. I told my counter part this and they took it in stride. And then they went and demonstrated to me exactly why I was getting negative signaling. So I know it’s a risky use of social capital.

Now I’m not sure if it’s a bad trade yet. Maybe I have the tolerance for the volatility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t look at what the numbers were telling me. Someone ripped me off. Reality says it’s probably just as much me as it was them. Which is, I believe, what you call a lose lose. And that means I’ve got to change the odds if I want to run the trade. But it’s hard to justify it to yourself after you feel like you got ripped off.

Categories
Community Media

Day 819 and Calculating Gravity

When astronomers discover a black hole they don’t get to it’s position by observing it directly. They calculate the position of it by its gravitational force on other bodies. We only know it’s there because of what it is doing to others.

I like this as a metaphor for a lot of things recently. I can calculate the gravity of a media narrative by calculating the gravity of all the players. Sometimes what you are being shown is simply the gravity of other players being acted on by something larger.

A good reason for owning a media property of any size, from Twitter to the New York Times, is that you can exert your gravity in ways that are much larger than your surface area might presume. A black hole is super dense. Please insert the required Elon Musk joke.

I’d like you to take this metaphor into your own life. See where you exert more gravity on life than someone might presume. You will discover a lot about your power in relation to individuals, your family, and your professional & personal organizations.

The center of gravity of a situation may not be apparent on first blush. But if you calculate out the positions and their orbits perhaps you can find a path that serves your needs. And most crucially one that serves your resources. If you can’t escape the event horizon you tend to get sucked in. So be sure you have done your fuel calculations too.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 818 and Lucky

My favorite apartment (though not the best) was #8 in a building on Bayard (whose address also contained an 8) deep in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

I’d often wondered how I came to be the tenant of such an incredibly lucky apartment in Chinatown. I’m not Chinese but somehow I stumbled into a very luckily numbered apartment.

The number 8 is believed to be the luckiest number in China because ‘8’ is associated with wealth. ‘Eight’ (八) in Chinese is pronounced ba and sounds similar to fa (发, traditional character: 發) as in facai (发财), meaning ‘well-off’ or ‘becoming rich in a short time’.

China Highlights

I do consider myself lucky. Maybe that’s why I’ve had so many good things happen to me. Though I can recall a few bad things along the way too. The luck of the double 8 apartment brought me many good years while I lived there. I was sad to leave it but I moved in with my soon to be husband and that was lucky too.

I feel lucky today remembering my double 8 home. Seeing the double eight in todays post of 818 reminded me that lucky is all around us if we are willing to look for the signs. That sounds superstitious but I’d prefer to think of it as believing that will find luck through deliberate action. Like renting a great apartment or writing every single day. If you look for luck it finds you.

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Startups

Day 817 and RIP SVB

I hadn’t expected to grieve the death of a bank. It sounds so preposterous. Who the fuck feels sad about a bank failing? But I am genuinely sad that the Silicon Valley Bank name doesn’t appear be living on with its new owner First Citizens Bank.

I guess I look forward to banking with First Citizen. They seem like nice enough folks. And maybe a bank is just a bank. But as I look back on the firsts that Silicon Valley Bank gave me I realize I will miss it. I’m sad they are gone.

The first check I saw with more than one comma was from Silicon Valley Bank. My very first company was acquired by a startup that banked with them. Ironically, right before the 2008 crisis was beginning to come onto the scene. I had a small window of fleeting security where I enjoyed a steady paycheck every two weeks with payroll done by Silicon Valley Bank. I remember thinking I was so rich. Even though I was super pissed my cofounder had a better salary than me as Silicon Valley culture dictated at the time that engineers make more.

If you are a fan of history then you will enjoy knowing that yes I did get fired during the infamous RIP good times affair. Thanks Sequoia! They were our main investors. Still I appreciated the opportunities as I was so young I wasn’t very good yet. I’ll forever have loyalty to my CEO for having treated me much better than I thought I deserved.

I also I also really loved the steady paychecks from Silicon Valley Bank. Now I think to myself why didn’t I take any pictures of it? Why don’t I have that moment recorded anywhere but my memory? Why am I now recounting this fifteen years later.

I’ll never get another check from Silicon Valley Bank again. I just didn’t have the expectations in life that I’d be the sort of person with a bank account with more than a million dollars. Let alone that I’d be in control of one and entrusted to do something responsible with it. Which has now happened multiple times at Silicon Valley bank over the years for me. Guess no one wants to have more than $250,000 in a bank right now though huh?

So goodbye Silicon Valley Bank. I’m so sad I’ve got nothing to remember you but. I didn’t take a screen shot of the bank app on the day Stowaway’s first round closed but I should have. I spent a lot of time in their banking application over the years running my cosmetics startups P&L. I remember being so proud to be the sort of person that even needed to deal with the bank. And I trusted Silicon Valley Bank with my employees because I’d seen it treat me well when I was an employee.

It seems so silly to mourn not taking a picture of a check or a screen shot of a mobile banking app but I don’t really know how to mourn a bank that failed. We failed them. They failed us. And it’s dead and I’ll never ever get a chance to do it all over again, and even if they are a villain, I remember when they were the hero in my life.

Categories
Startups

Day 816 and S Tier

I fancy myself as someone who enjoys playing games. I mostly play the great game but I enjoy a good stupid grinder. Pokémon Go, Duolingo, and Fitocracy all appeal to my sense of hard work mattering.

But, of course, games have exploits. Some of them are significant. Sometimes leveling up is just a matter of getting lucky. A side quest dropped you an s tier item and the game engine smiled on you. Yay!

Silicon Valley mistakes luck for skill pretty regularly. And we don’t take it that well when other people use the same exploits as us because damn it that’s just not fair!

So rules tend to get rewritten and the hacks get patched and the economy in grinder games reliably defaults back to rewarding repetitive work. It’s not that different from the real economy. Gamers want to know clever game play works but not as much as they want to keep the value of what they have earned. It’s a real tension those sunk costs! Even if starting over benefits you the tendency to cling is understandable.

You’ve got to know when to spot when an activity is worth more than the general perception. You used to have to do this sort of work on your own but thanks to the internet we’ve got cheat codes literally everywhere for everything.

Don’t confuse the fact that cheat codes work for the fact that grinding came be the right approach for the game you are playing. Sometimes putting in the work means being a team player is valuable. Sometimes you are the glass cannon. Sometimes your style of play will offend others. Don’t take it all so seriously that you cannot stomach making a move. What’s the worst thing that happens?

Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 815 and Kayfabe

Here is a mindfuck for you. Pretending works. The mimicry of the thing occasionally, though not mostly, can lead to having the real thing. Fake it till you make it” works if you’ve got a long enough runway to allow for take off. If you’ve judged the resources correctly is more art than science but you should still be able to do the math.

There are, of course, laws of physics to account for in all of this but your reality is more fungible than you realize. I wouldn’t try manifesting a whole fantasy world, but if you are Brandon Sanderson you might have a shot. That guy rocks.

In discussing whether it is better to fire founders or product managers on Twitter today I got to see a lot of the cargo cult culture of Silicon Valley coming off a high. A lot of people can perform innovation and we’ve maybe even got it down to being well liked by financial markets. But sometimes you actually do have to go and do the thing. And you can’t fake it.

If you aren’t familiar with kayfabe, it’s a term used in wrestling. It means you don’t break character loosely. You keep the secret even if everyone is in on it. You can take things a bit too far and the blending of fiction and reality has now given us a reality tv president.

But what happens when you don’t make the jump? Does reality crash in? Will the market punish you for not delivering on a convincing enough value proposition? Do you have to keep your ambition within some scope that can exist in our agreed upon reality? Yes of course. Fuck you it’s called civilization. But every once in a while someone goes from vapor ware to the Revolution. Don’t be so sure you can spot the difference though. Kayfabe doesn’t just fool rubes.