Seeking Alpha

“There are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time¹

I’ve spent years of my life thinking about what makes people remarkable.

Not “what makes remarkable people”–that hinges upon one’s definition of remarkable (is it happiness, status, glory, or something else?). Rather, I’ve always wondered what makes someone become exceptional, which is more difficult to pin down than I expected.

It isn’t effort–think of how many people you know that work themselves to the bone and get outpaced by others that float around and have fun.

It isn’t exactly money and connections–although those are a good bit correlated, the amount of privileged youth that sputter out prove that it isn’t causal.

It isn’t even talent, because the most successful people (by any metric) are more often than not normal, at least holistically.

Of course, there are some traits that make the road remarkably easy: being born 7'2 is a good ticket into the NBA. But most people live across a number of worlds, in which success varies greatly across them. For instance, as a technologist I look for what I can learn from great researchers, as an investor I look people with the ability to become great founders and leaders, and in other facets of my life (art, school) the picture of being on top of the game looks very different. Being 7'2 isn’t a meaningful advantage for an aspirational founder any more than being a mathematical savant helps be the next Dostoyevsky. But there is a shared substrate: In my eyes, people that go from normal to remarkable do so by Seeking Alpha.

The Case Against Productivity

Productivity is life on autopilot

Before one understands what seeking alpha is, I want to illustrate what it is not: Striverdom.

Do you think the person that makes LinkedIn posts congratulating themselves for insubstantial achievements is remarkable? What about the kid who spent their first two decades focused exclusively on getting into a top college? The fresh college graduate who spends their weekends shuttered in at the office while their peers go out and party, thinking to themselves that they’ll kick back once they’ve pulled ahead in their career?

When we aspire, we look to find metrics along the way that prove that we’re going in the right direction. To be a great CEO, for example, you should found a great company. To found a great company, you should come from a great job, which comes from a good college. To get into the best colleges, you should get perfect grades, which means maxxing out all your assignments and tests. These long-winded decision bases result in people consistently choosing to prioritize their next chemistry final over staying out with their friends, or exploring an interesting side project. From taking risks that could meaningfully change the course of their life. And it’s all due to the disease of productivity.

Productivity is roughly a measure of how many “important” things we do per rate of unit time. The trouble with this is that we only know what was important when looking back–oftentimes the most pivotal decisions I’ve made happened to seem benign in the moment. And yet, we so often cling to productivity as a means to measure our control over our own lives. Nietzsche once said that “Only a slave quantifies its existence by productivity”–I think a relatively modern retelling of this is that productivity is cope. It lends itself to creating strivers, people who focus on farming pedigree and chasing clout more than doing anything of actual substance.

To me, strivers represent the antithesis of seeking alpha. Someone may be capable or successful, but when they show themselves to be a striver it becomes remarkably more difficult to admire them. Part of this may be an irrational personal dislike on my end. But it seems like the other people in the room often feel a similar way–there’s something about overly openly seeking praise, status, and outcomes in general without having “naturally” done the work that feels icky and off-putting. Its the same way how getting muscles with steroids just isn’t the same as doing it naturally–respect is given for the process of growth, not just for beelining towards the outcomes.

But beyond the reputational risk of being overly obsessed with productivity, strivers face a separate risk of loosing the forrest (and the flowers) for the trees. Focusing on output is a detriment to creativity and out of distribution thinking because it reduces boredom. Today, boredom has become an underexplored emotion and as a result we as a society are much less introspective in general. The best researchers I know engage with boredom often–I once heard an anecdote of a staff researcher at Google DeepMind, who, in his interview, requested for 90% of his time to be allocated towards taking walks, chatting with people in the office, and other general leisure. To him, research meetings, code reviews, and project presentations were a distraction from where his real work got done. This isn’t an isolated example either–3M committed to supporting employee side projects, one of which became Sticky Notes, and Google’s internal Moonshot program is responsible for Waymo, the first self-driving car.

All of these tasks were unproductive for outside observers. Arthur Fry wasn’t thinking about his quarterly goals when he created the sticky note. But that is where the greatness came from, not from the countless executive-mandated projects that attempted to replicate it.

Why then do we focus so much on productivity? The first part of this stems from the rise of misguided self help advice that has dominated our cultural zeitgeist. We listen to successful people who retell their life story, and abscribe their success to the path they took as opposed to the person that they were (and became) over the course of the journey. And because we as humans feel the pain of loss twice as much as the joy of winning, we cling to formulae from “experts” and stats like productivity and can fall back on them to feel good even if we miss our goals.

Striving isn’t what makes people become great. But then where does greatness come from first principles?

An Orthogonal Basis for Cognition

What is important to be

Greatness comes from within your mind. People orders of magnitude smarter than me have spent lifetimes exploring this subject, so I’m instead going to offer something a bit simpler–an orthogonal basis for cognition.

Borrowing from linear algebra here, a basis refers to a set of vectors that define a vector space. What this means is that any point in this space can be represented as a linear combination of its basis vectors. Orthogonal means that these basis vectors have no projection onto one another–they are at perfect right angles. A simple orthogonal basis is the Cartesian x, y, and z axis, which collectively define 3D geometric space.

Finding an orthogonal basis for cognition necessitates first understanding three (semi) orthogonal vectors: knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom. Note that these are distinctions I’ve determined in my head that are not necessarily related to their dictionary definitions (I didn’t check semantics). You might call them anything you desire but I figured mind-related words fit better.

• Knowledge is mastery of a specific domain. Think of the ability to perform on a physics test, familiarity with C++ syntax, or awareness of Football strategies from past Super Bowl tape. I think of it as a basket of tools you can use to do something.
• Intelligence is the ability to achieve a goal given a set of tools. You see intelligence when outwitting a player that is stronger than you by finding a flaw in game-time, or by hacking together a movie that doesn’t have the budget of its competitors, but spins its moniker of “cheap” into “boutique” and “niche”. It’s like knowing where you should use a hammer and when you need pliers to build the best craft.
• Wisdom is the ability to pick the right goals. I could decide at this moment that I wanted to become the fastest man on the planet, but (1) I most likely don’t have the genetics to compete at the top level and (2) it wouldn’t give me as much fullfillment as other passions of mine do. Wisdom is knowing when to build a bench and when to build a throne.

Obviously these aren’t perfectly orthogonal–there’s generally a positive trend amongst all of these. But after meeting incredible savants who get lapped by average Joe’s and watching people who constantly “win” in life look so unhappy, I’ve become reasonably confident that Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom are different enough from one another to become a cognitive basis.

Remarkable people have a mind that drives them towards being great. If every vector in cognitive space can be represented as a combination of knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom look like, then what is the winning formula?

Besides the trivial answer of maxxing out all of them, I think the highest leverage can be found in wisdom, followed by intelligence and then by knowledge. Knowledge is roughly additive, intelligence multiplicative, and wisdom exponential in the returns they give to you. But what does it take to get better at each one? Knowledge improves linearly with respect to effort expended–studying, training, and practicing are the only way to do it. Intelligence scales with goals attempted to be achieved–the more shots you take the better you get at using the tools at your disposal to land them. And Wisdom scales with experience–the more you live and the more you feel, the better you get at learning what matters and what doesn’t.

With this in mind, it makes sense why striving is often suboptimal to becoming truly remarkable. Striving is heavily oriented around knowledge acquisition, is in favor of one goal (less scope to become more intelligent), and is long-horizon with regards to emotional payoff: you won’t know if it was worth it for years, and so you live less and are less disposed to becoming wise. Not only does this point you in the wrong direction of cognitive space (knowledge heavy with low intellect and wisdom), but it actually makes it harder to achieve your long term goals! The world changes and the value of knowledge can erode: overly focusing on the mechanics of making horse carriages falls apart when cars come into vogue, but the insight on how to manufacture a high volume item (intelligence) and awareness of what the next wave looks like (wisdom) will get you a lot further. Especially for someone young, like myself, there are people with a multi-decade knowledge acquisition head start, and realistically much more life lived. To be great not just for your age but as a human, leverage comes from intelligence-maxxing by trying to do a lot of different things, knowledge-maxxing in new areas where you and the generations before are on equal playing ground, and wisdom-maxxing by exploring more of what life has to offer before you decide to become the world’s foremost Artic ornithologist.

Reward Functions

Becoming what is Important to Be + Patterns for Local Optimization

“The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be building a social networking site. The next Larry Page will not be building a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be building an operating systems company. If you are copying these people, in some sense, you don’t understand them” - Peter Thiel

Becoming great does not mean to chase in the path of greatness. Its like trying to shoot a moving target using a photo you took of it during flight–by the time you get there, its gone. Wearing the shoes doesn’t make you a star like Jordan. Its the effort, grit, and talent that gets you there. And an ability to not just read where the ball is going, but to steer it in a direction that works for you. Curry didn’t set out to master Jordan’s dunks and physical style-he found a setup for which he had the most leverage, and used it to rewrite the game around himself. Today, kids grow up looking to become great 3-point shooters like Curry was, but if they really sought to emulate what worked for him, they would be better served by understanding their own mechanics and mastering a style they could do better than anyone else, and taking that to its extreme.

The difficulty in all of my preaching so far comes from hazy reward signals. How do you know if you’re on track or not? Firstly, I would push back against the notion of being “on track” to greatness–it falls in much the same bucket as producitivty obsessiveness due to its constraint to a distant arbitrary goal. Happiness is leagues more indicative of going in the right direction than productivity. So is the number of failures. This goes to show that intrinsic motivation is a better gauge of development than extrinsic signal, which brings the dregs of prestige and clout chasing with it. So focus within, not outside? Not exactly.

The best reward signal is alignment with a good environment. Firstly, why does an environment matter? Contrary to the notion that everything is from within, we are remarkably social and part of a society, and you need to live within and around structures and people to learn how to interface with them. Environments (which I denote to be associated people, organizations, and objects in your orbit) shape us far more than we can shape ourselves. And that is the best tool for self actualization that there is. Joining a fraternity makes you fraternal–you learn how to become a certain flavor of socialization, extroversion, and laissez-faire, and will calibrate to reflect that balance within your environment, which changes you relative to the world. Similarly, the same person instead joining a basketball team learns that the norm is windmill dunks and crazy fast breaks–and will hopefully become more in distribution over time.

We are product of the many environments we live in, and if one understands what they want to absorb from each one and joins groups that are full of people they would like to be like, you generally will end up doing so. This doesn’t mean to be a snake that tries to “level up” social and professional circles. For me, finding the right environments has been about finding people with qualities I deeply admire and spending time with them in the domains in which their craft shine and I have a good time. That has taken the form of doing research with people I consider orders of magnitude more technically competent than myself, understanding company building with the best investors I know, working out with my incredibly jacked roommate from college, and going to social events with the best storytellers and funniest people I know.

You can’t search for the right environment for you, they will form all on their own. Just like the old addage about finding people to run with: don’t ask people you know to run with you–instead, go running and meet the people who are running on the trails of their own volition. Instead, the onus of self-actualizing yourself through environments is centered around which environments you choose to remain in, delve deeper into, or allow to coast. This can be very dynamic and variable over time depending on your interests day to day, but knowing when to leave a place that hurts you and to hone in on places that magnify you is an incredible quality to have.

That’s what understanding alignment with your environments do to you–if you can read the pulse on whether you’re in a place that is good for you (fun, challenging, and inspiring) then growth is automatic. Because you don’t have to think about working out as a chore when you’re doing it with a great athelete–to them, it would be harder to not exercise, and that mentality of becoming someone that does what would make you better because that is who they are is a remarkably powerful way to self actualize yourself to becoming remarkable.

Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Rainforest

To find Alpha

A friend of mine recently got back from a trip to the Amazon Rainforest, where he was part of an expedition to observe uncontacted tribes, note down their behavior, and catalogue interesting behavioral artifacts. However, he’s no anthropologist–he’s actually an incredibly successful angel investor who was the first check into multiple unicorns before turning 25. This expedition is just the latest of his side quests–before investing, he dropped out of college on a whim, moved to London to become an art dealer for Sothebys, and when he wanted greener pastures moved to New York with the plan being to “figure it out later”.

What he does well that is hard to understand for an outsider is seeking alpha (I’ve borrowed alpha as a term from quantitiative finance, where it is roughly analogous to something valuable you have that other people don’t have). Seeking alpha in your life takes the form of pushing your environmental self-actualization in a direction that your wisdom finds meaningful that is uniquely leveraged to you. It involves developing experience and doing things that people in your lane just “don’t do”–like taking a calligraphy course for fun that ultimately results in you creating digital fonts, or using a multi-year pilgrimage to Japan as an opportunity to create a product with a sense of design that is unlike anything Sillicon Valley has seen before. Its impossible to connect the dots looking forward, but by living a life only you would choose to live, the alpha you’ve created for yourself enables you to become one of one, the best you you could be. And when you are aligned with yourself, becoming remarkable is a foregone conclusion.

So what is seeking alpha, simply?

Seeking alpha is deliberately choosing paths that create non-obvious compounding advantage unique to you

Uncontacted Tribes don’t just exist in the Amazon–you can find them at labs, in academia, in finance, or even on DePop, where a friend of mine stumbled upon a referral to his current job. Alpha lies in having a chat with your future boss on an early morning bike ride and not during a stuffy interview; it lies in learning Karate for fun and using it to become a remarkably acrobatic soccer player; it lies in saying the kind thing to the person nobody understands even when it doesn’t look cool because you know it to be right, and finding a friendship that lasts for life. The hard part about Seeking Alpha isn’t to encounter it but rather to chase after it: it is hard to bet against the trend. It’s hard to go out on your own, and deviate from the successful environments around you. It’s hard to take a path that only exists for you, because you have nothing to blame for your failure. But choosing to seek alpha and push yourself to chase what is enjoyable in the short term and meaningful in the long term instead of just following the paths the people around you follow is the best way to become yourself. (and becoming yourself is far more meaningful than becoming “great”)

Is This Play About Us?

I am not a hypocrite.

I remember being a senior in high school around college admissions time. It was March, when the most prestigious schools people would dream about getting into began releasing admissions decisions, and I remember a classmate mentioning to me that they hoped they’d get into Stanford, because if they didn’t, “it would all be for nothing”.

That statement stuck with me on my way home. From the outside looking in, I was someone that was in a great spot for college admissions. From a young age my parents had encouraged me to pursue my interests wholeheartedly, and I had experienced competitive math, tap dancing, piano, baseball, swim, and more, before focusing on competitive robotics and research. I had international awards, trophies, distinctions (I even made the news) but the idea that it would all be for nothing felt so strange to me. I did what I did because I enjoyed it, and so even though I competed with my peer in competitive math and we both would spend hours learning and studying, I could take solace in the fact that I didn’t feel the same way as them. No matter what college I got into, I’d be happy to do it all the same again.

I won’t pretend to be perfect. I spent a good bit of my youth optimizing productivity, chasing after goals that people around me (my parents, teachers, peers) had placed upon me instead of what I sought myself, and focusing on work in the hope that it would all be worth it in the end. But around when I was 16, I started to fail at a lot of the things I thought myself to be good at. I didn’t make the US Physics team that year, nor did I make Robotics Worlds, two goals I had been working to for a while. And for the first time in my life, I had to seriously understand who Hari was if he wasn’t the “smart winner” I had been for my whole life.

After a good bit of soul searching I resolved to focus on just having fun, and found myself to somehow do better as a result. Having whimsy in my work enabled me to pour more earnest effort into it, and giving myself breath to pursue other hobbies like painting not only gave me more peace of mind but also improved areas like design and product sense, which I had long dismissed as “wishy washy” because I didn’t understand how to improve in them. I couldn’t go back and plan to be the person I am today, but allowing myself to smell the flowers enabled me to blossom much more.

I went to college–Berkeley M.E.T., the most selective university program in the US. I chose to join not for the admissions rate, but because I was so inspired by the students I met on admit day and knew I had a lot I could learn in so many different areas from them. And because it was fun. At Berkeley, I consciously stepped back from research, robotics, and the like, even as I saw others become even more specialized and spiky, in order to reexplore what there was to learn and do. After all, there’s no guarantee I got things right as a third grader when planning my life purpose. I explored fintech, social connectivity, investing, and through each of these lenses ended up rediscovering my love for the technical and robotics as a hom. For me, seeking alpha meant combining research with investing to get great insight, it came in doing a lot of grunt work to help my first founder friends raise great rounds to learn the process, and it meant doing favors for every interesting person I met because the most important investment is people. It meant choosing not to drop out even when VCs offered me term sheets for the side projects I’d been working on, and instead drilling down on doing more research because I wanted to build a more ambitious company. Today, my life has a lot of things people plan a while to get to, like working for labs such as OpenAI and DeepMind. But those came about naturally from my exploration–they happened to be the right environment to be part of when I was with them, and not something I had been optimizing for long term. I suspect as I continue to live my life it will fall in and out of fashion–there was a time when research was too academic and undesirable, and the alpha I’m seeking will hopefully be misunderstood for some time.

People often like to compare life to walking a path or going on a quest. There are maps, there are journeys, and there are experiences and stories you have along the way. To me, life is about climbing a mountain. Each day, you wake up from a tent with no map, and survey the land ahead. You figure out a good path around you, decide if you’re going down the wrong direction, and set up camp for the next day to re-survey again once more. There’s only one thing you know for sure–the direction to go is up–and the experience isn’t about making a straight line path from top to bottom, but finding the path for you: the one that moves at the pace that’s best for you, the one with the scrambling you can just push yourself to accomplish, and the one that takes you to the viewpoints you want to see.

We’d all be better off focusing on climbing the mountain instead of trying to plan the route out in one go: or better said, instead of spending so much time thinking about how to live a perfect life, just go out there and live it yourself.