Talking, talking, talking:

Talking, talking, talking. Some people love to hear the sound of their own voice. How exceptional they are at whatever thing they think is exceptional. Other people mostly don’t care, and it makes the person look worse. If a person is telling you how much they know or how smart they are, they’re probably not that smart. They’re likely hiding from insecurities and they need to portray dominance to take authority in certain situations. “The ‘look at me’ attitude.”

Depending on who you are and the circumstances you’re in, it can be super appealing. If you see someone who takes control of a situation and isn’t afraid to be loud, people are attracted to that. It’s evolutionary biology. We want to be with things that are dominant, just like how we were as apes. If you were a female ape 50 thousand years ago, you wanted to be with the most dominant male because then you’d survive and your genes would get passed on. Genes are selfish (thanks Richard Dawkins).

Men and women both love seeing people who are confident, but there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance.  How do you walk that line? I don’t know but it’s almost like a measured confidence. Like “I’m so sure of myself that I’ll speak up when I need to, but I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I don’t have to say anything. I can watch.”

The issue with that approach is if the smartest person isn’t talking, then the voices you’re hearing are people who are uninformed and not as educated on certain subjects. This is arguably once happening on a global scale because the smartest voices aren’t the ones getting covered all of the time. 

Even though I’ve learned a lot about politics and finance and can have conversations across many different subject areas, people don’t really want to talk about that. They want to feel emotion. They want to be looked at as a person.

They want to talk about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. If you make other people talk about themselves more than you can, they’ll look at you favourably. It’s psychology. Check out How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (notes here). Buffet called it one of his favourite books of all time and Carnegie’s course says it was one of the most important things it ever did for his career.

People want to be spoken to as people. Not looked down upon. They want to be talked to as a person who is struggling just like everyone else. Often people in power like to look down upon people and feel like they were entitled to their success.

This is partly true. Yes you worked very hard to get to where you are, but you also got lucky. If you were born to someone who’s poor in a developing country, your hard work would have got you nowhere. Most people around the world live like that. They don’t have access to opportunity. They don’t have access to education. They can’t read or write because they haven’t been taught. So how are they supposed to progress if they can’t do that basic skill? They can’t get to where you are or where I am.

People underestimate how important basic things like education are taken for granted. If you could walk into villages in India and see people who’ve never left the 10-mile radius they live in, it’s unlikely they’ll ever be successful in society’s eyes. They never got the education or had the means to leave their families.

However, if you have a kid who was born to a successful family that has the ability to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to put him or her in the best schools in the world with access to a network of other extremely successful people’s kids, you think that kid’s going to fail? Unlikely.

Yea he could be a fool in school and not do very well, but the access to a network and to opportunities is extremely understated. If you have parents who can afford to put you in after school classes, you have access to so many opportunities. Then imagine if you have parents who could introduce you to any banker/CEO/business person or contact in the exact business you want to go into? That’s life changing.

You would never otherwise get that opportunity by working hard. That’s luck. That’s because you were born into that family. But this is how the world works for the people at the top. It’s about more than just hard work; it’s about the network. Who do you know where you are and can they help your kids? Look at Trump’s kids and whom they married. You’re telling me if Jared didn’t marry Ivanka, he would’ve worked hard to deserve the role of Middle East Ambassador? Yea, I don’t think so.

Sometimes you get lucky through marriage, but to me, it’s mostly due to where you were born. This is why inequality is such a problem. People don’t have an equal starting line. They don’t. And the gaps are widening. America, and the world at large, is in some real trouble because the divide between the have and have-nots is getting out of hand. I expect a huge rise in socialism, populism and communism over the next decade across the world and more uprisings because people are tired. They have nothing else to fight for. They can’t afford basic things and meanwhile the people in power continue to get richer.

Kids without wifi connections and stable homes are losing out to kids whose parents work from home and are on top of them everyday. What if you were a 10-year-old kid who’s in a single parent household and you can’t get a stable Wifi connection? It’s going to be hard to catch the kid who has Wifi and hasn’t had their education interrupted.

Luck underpins a lot of that, and the issue now is the people at the top are accumulating more and more without it getting fairly distributed. Let’s be honest, the US is a caste system. There’s a lot of old white money that exists in the US that has been built up over generations that black people have never had access to. 

They couldn’t buy a house. They couldn't open a bank account and accumulate wealth. They didn’t have access to the best jobs or best schools. They were under Jim Crow. They sectioned neighbourhoods. And because of the history of slavery, they’ve always been subject to a different set of rules, especially compared to white people. Whether consciously or unconsciously, black people and white people are not equal in America.

You can’t tell me that people born into poor black neighbourhoods have an equal shot at the American dream. Especially today where there’s likely to be more substance abuse going on and kids not having parents that can afford to help them. Imagine living in the poorest neighbourhoods where you don’t know how you’re going to eat your next meal because you always got it from school, or never seeing your parents because they work an essential job. But, these kids get the same equal shot at the American dream as kids going to the best private schools? Nah. They don’t.

It’s ok to accept that. We just have to acknowledge how much of our life happens outside of our control. We had no control over certain decisions and yet we ended up where we did. We capitalized on opportunity, sure, and had to work hard. But we also have to acknowledge that doors were open for us that other people never had.

That’s also what’s so special about today. If kids had a stable Wifi connection and could learn about the value of the Internet, they could learn and do whatever they want. I was thinking about this today; could you have a sprinter from a random country in the middle of nowhere just learning sprinting videos of Youtube and training obsessively? It's unlikely Jamaica ever loses that but it’s certainly possible.

People are teaching themselves to do all kinds of things online. If you can instil in a kid that he could learn anything he wanted off the Internet, that would be life changing. You can change your life forever if you understand the value of it and use it properly. All the resources are out there. But it’s hard if you’re not being taught and don’t have that drive to succeed.

Part of my goal is how do I teach people the lessons that no one is teaching them. Stuff like cold emailing, setting up a LinkedIn, how to get into VC, how I lost weight, read so many books, etc. Almost like a personal manual on how I improved my life. People will hate it and think ‘who are you to tell me what to do?’ For those people, I don't care. If one person read my thing and took something useful that made a positive difference in his or her life or learned something new, then it was worth it.

As you can tell from above, I attribute my journey to a lot of luck, but there’s definitely a bit of hard work in there as well. You don’t get to be the one of the youngest healthcare VCs in your country without hard work. Question is how do I explain my journey and show other people how to do what I did?

You tell your truth. You tell your story. People don’t have to listen to you. They don’t have to read your stuff. You’re not making them sit down and ingest your content. So who cares if they don’t like it? 

But if you created something that 10 years from now, you could have a conversation with someone from the middle of nowhere who got a job in VC because of what you wrote, that’s life changing. That’s real impact. That’s changing someone’s world.

Do it. Stop overthinking. You’ve done a good job this year so far but you have to keep going. Consistency over time is how you get to be successful. There’s no shortcut. Do something over and over again, every day, and you eventually become good at it. People want a shortcut in life, but you just have to do things again and again to become better. Once you become a bit better, your life improves significantly. My journey to self-improvement began when I did something that seemed impossible.

My goal in 2018-19 was to read 50 books, just to see if I could make it. The previous six years, I read maybe 2 Dan Brown books in my entire university career.

I surpassed my goal and read 52 books. Then it was fitness and getting a six-pack. I basically got there in the middle of a pandemic while reading 45 books and losing 30 pounds. I did that. But only by doing a little bit every day.

When you tell someone you did that, they would think it's super difficult. In my head, it’s more willpower than anything. It’s a decision you make with yourself to say I am going to do this thing no matter what. I am not going to fail myself. I don’t care if people laugh or say whatever; I’m going to do this thing. Once you start telling people as well about this audacious goal, you’re holding yourself accountable. Like do I really want this person to watch me fail? To me there’s no way. There’s always been something in me that said if someone says I can’t do something, let me show you.

Parents told me when I dropped out of IB that I would never get into an international school. Boom, St. Andrews/Edinburgh baby with a public school academic education in Ontario. Then I finished an internship at a VC fund in Amsterdam and they said ‘I think you should consider going back to medicine.’ Boom, working at one of the largest VC funds in your country. Getting there is holding yourself accountable and proving to other people and yourself that you can do anything.

Little less talking, and a little more doing.