The Talent Perspective

I bolted awake at 5:30am, leaping to bang out a few draft sentences. I stumbled on my desk treadmill, brain groggily battling biology. The wonderful new Frankenstein movie had kept me up late... But clarity tore through my dreaming unconscious like a fresh crack loud in the desolate arctic ice.

The story of course is a classic. It shows humanity in full force. We question Dr Frankenstein's failure of responsibility to overcome his father's misguided tiger-parenting torments. We learn in macabre fascination how intent matters when evaluating if someone (or some thing) that doesn't look like us should be shot or shouted greetings.

How Shelley managed to conjure such a genius critique of Man at age 20 is worth pondering. More than 200 years ago, before telephones or electric lightbulbs were invented, what was her relationship like with her father? Wikipedia says he home-schooled her, and described her at 15 not wondrously but factually (perhaps a László Polgár of that era):

"singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible."

Dumb modern men like me are still a couple levels behind, learning stories from history's greats at the close of our defining decade. In fact, I'm probably early to the game. As I was discussing with married friends about single women in their mid-30's, they don't usually want to date much younger at all. This tracks with our data at Shuffle and the whole masculinity crisis, Scott Galloway phenomenon, etc.

Personally, my horror fiction was trash in Junot Diaz's storytelling workshop. I now see clearly this was because I had very little real world experience prior to age 21 (in addition to the latent brain development biology), as he had already told me even before I strategically enrolled in his exclusive class.

But this blog post is not really about Frankenstein, or me, or writing. It's about people. It's about all of us. Specifically, I'd like to dissect three common wisdoms: "people are everything", "keep showing up", and "believe in yourself". Let's see what we can do with the corpses of corpuses...

A person who keeps showing up has a particular ambitious disposition. Their outlook may be optimistic or pessimistic, but they are certain enough—for some reason at some time—that they will continue a set of behaviors which others deem irrational or nonobvious. Whether it's getting to their shift at McDonald's on time or patiently feeding a crying baby... They, put simply, believe in themselves.

Bezos says to focus on what doesn't change. As conscious sapiens, the world and everything else may change around us, but it's pretty hard without serious drugs to truly imagine ourselves as a really different person. I, at least, think I was me at age 8 and will be me at 88, Ship of Theseus notwithstanding. That's 2nd order.

We could argue about this common wisdom too: "People don't change." It was probably the only interesting thing my Aunt Jennifer has ever said to me, with a tired sigh at a family Christmas years after social services had kindly permitted us to escape that woman's godlessly Lutheran, frankly Frankensteinian, reach.

As we all know, people do change. Maybe other people don't, but we do. I'm unsure exactly how to evaluate all these things together, but I do see something very concretely I'd like to explain—namely that "talent" is remarkably persistent.

I contend that a talent-based perspective says you can bet on a certain person, or certain traits of a person, especially when it comes to ambition and skills, and outcomes will converge around this person. Eventually. Stochastically.

It may take 50 years. Steven Pressfield is one of the most remarkable people to have banged his head against the wall for decades, and The War of Art (++ the sequel) is his pain and suffering transfigured into gifts to our species. These gifts say: "just keep showing up, but in this certain way."

I retroactively added the above amazing 4min Kevin Hart clip to the zLevels Gauge because he's speaking the same language as the wise old writer guy. If death doesn't come for you, you're golden. Keep on chugging. Joe is experiencing Kevin here talk very succinctly and expressively—ingeniously and poetically even—about ambition, curiosity, and a whole bunch of other good stuff.

What accumulates, what accrues?

Over the course of one's life, one way or another, we all are familiar with scars and wounds. Loss aversion guarantees it.

But Frankenstein's monster has Wolverine-like healing powers. It's a miracle. It cannot die. In fact, we learn, He's the embodiment of Life. Elizabeth was onto something when she observed his purity, his innocent quality. She had an eye for talent (footnote).

Even if our computational universe is stochastic or unpredictable, outcomes around a person with consistent behaviors will asymptotically accrue. This is not karma, although kindness is one such trait I claim to be predictive. It's truly destiny.

Naval would tell us it's the simple yet perpetually underestimated math of a flashlight shining through two slits in a piece of paper. We live the multiverse in realtime.

One's orientation is not random. This is well determined, and it's perhaps the only thing which obviously is. A mind processing reality. The singularity of consciousness.

Welcome to our shared potential vector kinetically time-stepping through the multiverse.

Check out Alfred Lin's chat with Jack Altman. I didn't see Roelof's turnover coming and loved the firm culture he subtly hinted at in Sept, but it's obvious what happened there even though spectators including other VCs like Harry Stebbings and the boys are mystified on Twitter.

The culture is Sequoia's competitive edge. It's amazing they are even so public about this change which nobody else seems to understand, to get ahead of the narrative implications to their bottom line on a 50-year time horizon.

Alfred wants it to remain process power rather than brand power, and Roelof casually assuming his new "managing partner" label on tour didn't serve the firm's public story. I'm sure Shaun Maguire had a critical say in the matter. He doesn't seem to have a problem speaking out these days, so why not speaking in?

Alfred's explicit "special" method of founder-market fit assessment: Is this person pulled into the opportunity space? It's the same model Peter Thiel and PG have independently come to, as far as I can tell.

An individual, just like the organism of a company or a society, has a functional version of the mathematical property of continuity.

The corollaries to this theorem are endless and timeless as Frankenstein's monster or the strongest of trees.

"Human Invariant" is a good name, just as I hope "Capitalism Unlocked" becomes.

Footnote: Tragically, Victor the unnaturally abrupt youth-now senior does not care to develop his own eye for talent until his progeny forces it upon him. With the wrathful vengeance of (human) nature righting itself, of course. Bernie Sanders might be proud: "Watch out for this ungodly technology before it gets out of hand guys...it could really do some unintended harm to us and all our jobs...not at all like the gun already in mine, and the massive inflation I'm continuously perpetuating and wielding as a cudgel." *waves arms, stares into camera for dramatic concerned smart old man effect, imitates Noam Chomsky*

Also: not sure why my comments aren't posting to Youtube, just these last 5 paragraphs to Harry's vid for example, somehow getting spam filtered?