Crafting Your Average

You Are What You Think About

Jan 20, 2024

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I'll be covering a bunch of topics you all voted on in the coming weeks, from Books 2.0 to Tastemakers to The Death of ESG. But, as is so often my modus operandi, I can't help but write each week about what is most on my mind. So, in the words of mouthy 16-year old Kyle when he's talking to his Mom about cleaning his room, "I'll get to it when I get to it."

I've written several times (here and here) about my personal source code. The things that make up who I am. So often, I'll be talking to my wife and I'll quote Uncle Buck, a Blues Traveler song, a commercial from 2003, or VH1's "I Love The 90s," and I'll realize just how much all this stuff impacted me and, more importantly, crafted who I am.

I think often about a talk I read while I was in college by Hugh Nibley called "Zeal Without Knowledge". The talk was originally from 1978, and it starts out talking about a specific feature of brain function: "You can think of only one thing at a time!" I've thought about this paragraph every few weeks for 10+ years:

"If you put on a pair of glasses, one lens being green, the other being red, you will not see a frey fusion of the two when you look about you, but a flashing of red and green. One moment everything will be green, another moment everything will be red. Or you may think you are enjoying a combination of themes as you listen to a Bach fugue, with equal awareness of every voice at a time, but you are actually jumping between recognition first of one and then another. The ear, like the eye, is, in the words of N. S. Sutherland, "always flickering about. . . . the brain adds together a great variety of impressions at high speed, and from these we select features from what we see and make a rapid succession of 'models' of the world in our minds." Out of what begins as what William James calls the "great blooming, buzzing confusion" of the infant's world, we structure our own meaningful combination of impressions, and all our lives select out of the vast number of impressions certain ones which fit best into that structure. As Neisser says, "The model is what we see and nothing else." We hold thousands of instantaneous impressions in suspension just long enough to make our choices and drop those we don't want. As one expert puts it: "There seems to be a kind of filter inside the head which weakens unwanted signals without blocking them out. Out of the background of the mind constantly signals deliberate choices." Why the mind chooses to focus on one object to the exclusion of all others remains a mystery. But one thing is clear: the blocked-out signals are the unwanted ones, and the ones we favor are our "deliberate choices."

I've written so often about storytelling, not just because I love a good story, but because stories represent our reality. Our stories are what we think about. And what we think about defines who we are.

Another common framework for thinking about this is the quote, often attributed to Jim Rohn: "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." But I think it's so much more than that. You, as a person, are the sum total of all the things you do, think, hear, write, and say.

And one of the most impactful things you can do is deliberately and proactively decide who you want to be like.

One important caveat is that no one is the same as anyone else. So I'm not saying "choose who you want to be." Instead, I'm saying that you should deliberately and proactively choose the influences you invite into the creation of who you are. Choose the repos you're going to fork into your personal source code. In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant there is a great section called "Choosing To Be Yourself":

"A lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now—beating yourself up and scribbling notes and saying, “I need to do this, and I need to do that, and I need to do…” No, you don’t need to do anything.

All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.

I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But his message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity.

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am. I’m never going to be as good at being you as you are. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development."

I've written about this idea of determining influences in pursuit of being yourself when I wrote about parenting, but the same applies whether its parents helping their kids find defining experiences, or if we're doing it for ourselves:

"Life is too noisy to leave you alone. If parents don't help their kids get exposure to a broad variety of experiences, then life will put something in front of them. And the loudest, flashiest thing is unlikely to be the best experiences life has to offer."

So while we should be radically in pursuit of discovering ourselves, I think we have to be deliberate about not only the types of media and ideas we let influence us, but we should also be deliberate about the types of people whose characteristics we emulate.

Meeting Your Heroes

So what has me thinking so much about the deliberate role models we identify that we most want to be like? This week I had the chance to meet one of mine. I've been following Ho Nam on Twitter for years and this past week, finally had the chance to chat with him. And it did not disappoint.

If you don't know Ho, he's one of the co-founders and managing directors of Altos Ventures. They've invested in Roblox, Coupang, Krafton, Dunamu, and Toss among a host of others. My thirty minute chat with him was a borderline spiritual experience.

The Source Material

To go super deep on Ho's philosophy and thinking, there's no better resource than Kevin G's compilation of his writing. We covered so much that I've been thinking about that I took the equivalent of five pages of notes. So, as you might imagine, when I sat down to panic write this morning, there wasn't much else I could think about. Instead, I found myself reflecting on the things we talked about.

I've quote Ho Nam over and over and over and over again in my writing. Some of the most impactful things I've read on Twitter were some of his threads, like the ones on why companies have to eventually make money, or why VCs are so often focused more on their next fund than their current one.

Ho even has, conveniently, written a thread on this exact topic I'm talking about when it comes to identifying the right role models.

The Role Model

I'm coming up on my tenth anniversary as an investor. And after doing this for ten years, when I think back to when I was just getting started, I remember very clearly having role models. I looked at people I'd hear on podcasts or read about in the news and think, "Oh man! I want to be just like so-and-so." Fast forward ten years, I've met a lot of those people. I've co-invested with them. I've sat on boards with them. And I've realized... "huh... I guess I don't want to be like them at all."

In many cases, what I, as a young investor, was resonating with was the loudness. I went looking for role models and *boom* there they were. Everywhere I looked. But just like the quote above about parenting, "the loudest, flashiest thing is unlikely to be the best experiences life has to offer." The same is true of role models.

Instead, the longer I've been in this game, the more I look up to people like Ho who have crafted a very deliberate philosophy. Here are some of the pieces of that philosophy that we touched on in our call:

Venture Is A Discovery Business

I remember the first time I heard Ho describe venture as a "discovery business," was on a Twitter Spaces in April 2022. "It's a discovery business where you're discovering the most interesting people and ideas." He then elaborated on it in the thread above in May 2022.

Ho described himself and the approach they take at Altos as a very bottom-up focused investor, in contrast to others who may be more top-down thesis driven. The discovery in this business is finding exceptional people and becoming participants with them as they discover what Doug Leone calls "black magic."

Ho also made the point that it can't be exclusively about the founders in the discovery process. Steve Jobs, as an example, was an exceptional founder. But NEXT was not an exceptional business. Outside the Apple ecosystem, Steve Jobs wasn't a guaranteed success. Pixar was certainly exceptional, but you could argue that was Steve Jobs actually playing the discovery role on the other side of the table, seeing the black magic that John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were cooking up.

People Discovery

At Contrary, we talk constantly about talent vortexes. I've written about it a bunch before. Kevin's compilation of Ho's writing starts with an exceptional quote that really captures this idea:

"The compounding value of relationships is something people talk about but until you live it over a long time, you can't comprehend it. I've come to realize that's what keeps me going. At some point along the way, it can't be about the money."

In the same way VCs build a portfolio of investments, there is also a deeper, much more intimate portfolio of relationships. One of the reasons the halo effect is so powerful in venture isn't just because future founders hear about your success with Company A and want to talk to you. It's also because being around the success of Company A exposes you to a talent vortex of people that will continue to compound as relationships, and lead to additional success down the road.

Hype Cycle Reality Distortion Field

One last collections of nuggets I'll share comes from our discussion on hype cycles. Hype cycles are one of the things I've written about so much (here, here, here, and here) that it has its own section on my personal website. Understanding the danger of hype cycles goes back to the idea of venture as a discovery business.

Discovery is more than just "find great people, invest." It is finding great people tackling meaningful problems in categories that are built on first principles. Ho compared it to this quote by Jeff Bezos:

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

So you're trying to discover reality! The things that are real, and will stay real for 10 years. So what impact do hype cycles have? They distort reality. Huge amounts of unsustainable funding tumble in, which distorts the reality of whether or not the business is really what it claims to be, or if it is primarily a VC subsidy program; selling $2 for $1. That’s the danger of investing where everyone else is paying attention.

Scratching The Surface

This is maybe half a page of the five pages of notes I took in this conversation. And as much as I'm just scratching the surface in this post, its just an infinitesimal bit of the tiny bit of surface we managed to scratch in a 30 minute call.

I think the reason this conversation was so impactful for me is because over the last few years I've started to stand on my own philosophy of what type of investor I want to be. And finding kindred souls, like Ho, helps me to validate and refine how I think about certain aspects of what I want to be.

And I think everyone should have that experience. So go find the people whose perspectives and philosophy you want to invite into your own personal source code.

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