The Life of Ven

A feedback request, and gather round for the good news!

Yeah, 9:08, Oklahoma City time

In the lab and shit…

People tryna say I’m going crazy on Twitter

My friend’s best advice was to stay low…

Never listen to financial media producers,

Don’t stare at money too long, it’s Medusa

The ultimate Gemini has survived,

I wasn’t supposed to make it past 25

A few months ago, I wrote a blurb about retirement

Earlier, I mentioned the concept of “retirement”, which I largely don’t believe exists as it’s sold. This entire blog is a never ending rant against passive investing, and I generally consider “set and forget”, “target date funds”, and the literal gating of 401ks to be part of an elaborate scheme to make sure people do not panic sell their stocks all at once and consume more liquidity than exists. Retirement, as a result, is simply a state of mind where you are not prioritizing forward earnings — however and whenever you reach this point is up to you. The people who bought the conventional definition and “retired early” — hanging out at a country club golfing 5 days a week after cashing out of their company, for example, which is a surprisingly frequent stereotype I’ve encountered — are generally some of the most dissatisfied people I’ve talked to, like an athlete who was forced to hang it up early. The “hook” that you won’t have enough money to live on is so powerful that it turns most people into the type of video game player who saves the best resources for the bosses then never uses them, when the price of contentment hasn’t really changed…

which almost seems like foreshadowing now that I look back:

Part of me feels like I’m an athlete retiring nowadays. I’ve spent over 10 years of my life obsessively figuring out how this all works, and honestly, I think I have nothing left to prove…

As to what’s next, I’m not sure, but I have an inkling. For the first time since the summer before college, I truly feel that I have time off, and I’m going to use at least a bit of it to get my health back and “touch grass”.

Something that I had an inkling of, but didn’t fully experience until now, is why those nonstop golfers are somewhat unhappy. “Retirement”, when done out of choice rather than necessity, is a state of existential purgatory. As I like to point out to others, people are so desperate for any semblance of purpose that they will greet people at Wal-Mart or draw a stripe on a Costco receipt for hours at a time. Thus, the reflexive wariness to technological advancements amounts to a form of self-preservation — when the point of your actions is revealed to be pointless, a severe form of dissonance occurs. Which, inevitably, leads to conflict at scale.

I generally think I “choses” to retire out of necessity. 9 month stints where you are not sleeping, working and thinking nonstop and eating McDonald’s and instant noodles and drinking (rather than bumping) takes a deleterious toll on your health. “Burnout” is not something that’s recovered from with a week of sleep, nor is it easy to bounce back even in your 20s. But when you are used to ludicrous levels of uptime and lose your normal motivating psychology to be able to “lock in”, the amount of time that retirement brings is unhealthy. Playing golf is fun — exhilerating really — and I could go on for hours about how it’s probably the game closest to chess, but it’s not meaningful in any way. It’s a test against nature that ultimately doesn’t matter, the ultimate way to kick rocks, so to speak.

There’s a lot of wisdom in older children’s media. The relentless avoidance of boredom that I possess is probably derived from The Phantom Tollbooth in some manner. And currently, I find myself thinking about Avatar: the Last Airbender — particularly the episode where Zuko, the rejected heir apparent to the throne, loses his ability to “firebend”

The show makes a flawed point about motivation — anger (or rather spite) is a great motivator. Indeed, I don’t think it’s possible to achieve anything at the highest level of competition without that psychotic “chip on your shoulder” reflex. But it makes you a deeply weird person — are top level golfers or chess players in any way relatable? I find the closest analogy to how I previously thought about chess, or trading, to be Tom Brady. The guy gave up his wife and kids to get blown out by the Cowboys in the Wild Card round in his 40s. When you get “locked in” for that long, you can’t turn it off.

Similarly, for the past two decades, my entire life has generally revolved around an obsessive tendency to be right about things. Chess is about imposing your will and ideas on your opponent

Chess is almost a pure skill game, in the sense that it’s solely your ideas versus your opponents. There’s no variance. This leads to a supreme validation of one’s skill when they win a game. As Bobby Fischer famously stated when asked what his favorite thing about chess was:

I like the moment when I break a man's ego.

and trading is the logical, profitable extension of this to the world — “I understand what will happen better than everyone else, so I will speculate on the outcome”. A PnL statement is a rough equivalent of how much “I told you so” credits you have banked up.

What you don’t really realize until it’s over is how much pressure you heap on yourself and everyone around you when you enter these “prove it” zones.

In most careers, high pressure make-or-break situations are fleeting. You only have to pass your Series exams or Bar exam once. It’s not the end of the world if you fail an actuarial exam the first time. Pretty much everyone makes it through college, even if you fail an exam or two — C’s get degrees. The highest pressure situation the standard individual faces is usually some type of entrance exam, where your performance is entirely relatively scored. Naturally, people tend to freak out about these exams — “overpreparing” is more a symptom of unresolved anxiety than it is meticulously “outworking” everyone around you (though they correlate.) And this isn’t a negative! Odds are, if you spend all your time prepping for the CFA for months on end, you will score higher than everyone else. But when we are faced with constant high pressure situations which directly impact your net worth, such as trading and managing assets, we need a better framework to optimize our time allocation and maintain risk-neutrality in our approach.

The best performance psychology manual I’ve ever come across is Relax and Win by Bud Winter. The essential lesson iterated upon throughout the book is to learn to consciously calm down. My favorite example from the book is the section about how soldiers slept in trenches in World War II. I’ll defer to the writing in the book itself, but essentially it highlights that, while you cannot replace sleep, that tiny bit of relaxation that you grant yourself operates as a cocaine-hitting-your-blood revival during a long night out drinking, a “reset” that allows you to operate at near full capacity again. Prior to chess matches, I would “sleep” for roughly 15 minutes to fully reset before I played. Note that efficient napping either requires exiting sleep before you enter a full cycle or completing the cycle, else you wake up groggy and paradoxically more tired than when you started. Similarly, during trading days, I frequently took a 15 minute nap (with zero days open, for peak absurdity) instead of eating lunch due to the performance drop-off that comes with a full stomach. Sometimes, you just need a little bump to keep going.

In David Foster Wallace’s meditation on Tracy Austin, I constantly recall precisely one thing he said, which was maybe the most powerful insight into optimal performance I’ve ever read. He rhapsodizes about the vapidity of her memoir and her inability to say something that isn’t formulaic, isn’t cliche, about how she developed. But he asks, what if that’s actually the case? When Tiger sank that iconic putt at Torrey Pines, what if all that went through his head was “make the putt?” The complexity is in reducing oneself to the simplest form of an idea, the pure truth that if you allow yourself to execute, it will come. As DFW puts it:

There’s no magic trick to relaxing and controlling anxiety. Certainly, putting yourself in certain situations may aid one in doing so — a yoga studio with a view of the Highline is probably preferable to a trench being shelled in a vague location in Western Europe. The simplest advice I can give anyone who wants to manage their head, whether it’s trading, chess, or tennis (as Spassky once said, tennis is the closest thing to chess), is this:

If you can’t quiet your thoughts, just focus on what you can control and what you can’t, and solely operate on what you can. You control the placing of an order, the swing of the club, the movement of the pieces. You don’t control whether someone blows up a pipeline and nukes /CL, what people might do in response to an earnings release, the wind and landing angle, or your opponent. Why bother with them? It really is that simple.

Think about that book title though: Relax and Win.

What do you do when you don’t care about winning, and just relaxing?

Money is literally a social credit score game past a paid off house and enough to cover your expenses without earning. If you keep compounding wealth, society respects your skill, whether it’s manipulating people, understanding them, or connecting them, and it’s precisely why people obsessed with social clout almost certainly don’t have any actual skills that society values…

This is also why returns aren’t everything when you manage other people’s money. If people trust you, they don’t want to look at the market and judge you. In a VC environment, this is flipped — returns are directly reflective of how much people want in on your portfolio. It literally cannot be reflected any other way

The ultimate luxury, as a result, is privacy, and it really can be acquired by just not caring. But it's more fun to be left alone on Pebble Beach rather than your local muni.

While I ponder this question, and wait for my Pebble Beach tee time,

I’ll make a quick request for feedback.

I haven’t exactly done anything notable in the public eye — I like to say I had a resume, not a life, for the first 17 years of my life, and the inverse for the next 10 — but I have done a ton of writing. I grew up reading essay collections, and I consider myself an essayist (even though I dream of writing fiction, like every literary obsessive does), so I’m preparing an anthology of sorts. Generally I want to edit and streamline some of the standalone Malt Liquidity posts, the longform, and put together my shortform fiction posts into something a bit more coherent. As such, I’d like to take any pointers on what posts were the best received or provided the best launching-off point, perhaps the one that “hooked” you into reading.

The other request I’d have is some reading suggestions. I haven’t found anything worth reading in a while — I am calling this “short form summer” myself, because I mostly just read tweets — and would like something fun, rather than philosophical, to read, as “no existentialism” summer is the other way to frame this.

I can see a thousand years from now in real life
Skate on the paradigm and shift it when I feel like
Troll conventional thought, don't need to question
I know it's antiquated so sometimes I get aggressive
Thank God for Jay Electra, he down with the mission
Did it with no permission, on our own conditions

And, of course, the Kanye retrospective will follow soon.

Thanks for reading, as always, and I hope summer is treating everyone as well as it is me!