The Things That Really Matter
Three Things #99: December 24, 2023
A few years ago I got into the habit of reading biographies of successful entrepreneurs and I noticed a theme: the people who are the most successful in the traditional, social sense (wealthy, influential) are almost always the worst people, and I think most of them were not happy people in spite of their material success. They’re the worst in the sense of the things they had to sacrifice in order to achieve the things they did: family, friendships, community, and connection more generally. There are a precious few notable exceptions such as Chuck Feeney who gave away essentially all of his wealth and Ed Thorp who from the very beginning decided to prioritize family, but they’re the exception that proves the rule (and most people probably haven’t heard of either of these men).
I was thinking about this pattern when a few days ago a good friend posted a moving series of posts about the tragic experience of losing his life partner recently. He wrote about the daunting burden of raising a toddler as a widower, and about the things that his partner understood towards the end and that he in turn learned from her. One is that the only things that really matter in the end are family, community, and connection. This message resonated very strongly with me, and it stood out as the antidote to the mistakes that so many successful people make (and that I’ve seen so many of them make).
It goes without saying that money doesn’t buy happiness (or family, or community, or connection). In fact, in my experience, while having enough money to pay the bills, put food on the table, and buy a degree of freedom is quite helpful, more than this can be actively destructive to these important lifelong projects. It’s worth considering why.
This week as the holidays are upon us and as we take some time to reflect on the past year and set our goals and intentions for the new year, I want to share some thoughts on these projects, on why they’re so important, and on how best to achieve them.
Thing #1: Family 👨👩👧👦
“Sometimes people who affect the course of humanity have better relationships with humanity than they do with the humans sitting around them.” - Walter Isaacson
I’ve said this a few times recently but becoming a parent last year changed me in ways I didn’t expect. One difference is that I now have a deep, abiding respect for the power and importance of family—not only for my own family but for family in general.
Growing up I had a small family (three grandparents gone before I had any memory of them, no aunts, uncles, or cousins) and it never bothered me. In fact when I saw what my friends with big families had to deal with—remembering everyone’s birthdays, big family gatherings, buying presents for everyone and everyone’s drama—I felt grateful that I had a small family. Nor did it bother me that my family was scattered: my father, mother, sister, brother, and I almost always lived in four or even five different states, and at times we were even scattered across several continents. I had my life to live, they had theirs, and that was all there was to it. We saw each other from time to time, we kept in touch occasionally, and that’s about where the obligation ended as far as I could tell. Private, personal matters like work and my own relationships and freedom mattered more: these were paramount.
Starting my own family made me flip my perspective 180 degrees. I now feel that family is the most important force in the universe. What’s the point of my career if not to support my family and to build a better future for my son? And when I have freedom—free time, money, energy or attention—I almost always want to spend it with my family.
What’s more, I can’t understand now how I ever felt otherwise and I can’t understand modern, liberal, American and global culture. It now seems insane to me the way families scatter the way mine did, and it seems insane that we expect one or two parent households to raise children in a “nuclear family” unit in a city far away from home with little to no family support. I regret spending so much time so far away from my parents. As a parent, today, it pains me to empathize with how that must have made them feel. It’s not how human society was ever structured and it’s not how it should be structured today.
I have my differences with my family members and things aren’t always sunshine and roses with them but I recognize and appreciate that I need them and they need me, and that they’re the only family I’ve got. With respect to raising children, I recognize (after 18 months of struggle) that the two of us aren’t equal to the task without family support. Sure, living in a big city far from family is exciting and fun and maybe good for our careers, but it’s not good for my son or for our family, and his needs are infinitely more important than mine.
Putting family first requires sacrifices and tradeoffs. It requires putting the needs of the family unit above one’s own selfish personal needs (which is a good exercise in its own right). It means considering others when making decisions, which should be trivial and a no brainer except that it’s not how the society that I grew up in works. It means accepting that you’ll be uncomfortable and you’ll have to swallow your pride from time to time in the name of the greater good, longer-term success, and comfort. And it requires bringing family together, not virtually but in person and for very long periods of time, which is one of the hardest things to do in this modern world that’s constantly trying to pull us apart from our loved ones and replace in person connection with the poor, mediated substitute of social media. Family cannot be functional or healthy at a distance.
Yes, my career is still very important to me and I derive a sense of pride and meaning from it, but it’s primarily important as a means of supporting my family and building a better world for my son. Everything else is secondary. And to be clear I don’t think that a successful career and a successful family life are mutually exclusive. If some of the world’s most successful people had learned this lesson I suspect they would’ve had better relationships with their families and they would’ve been a lot happier.
Thing #2: Community 🧑🤝🧑
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” - Proverb
Community is a critical concept that today isn’t well understood and isn’t appreciated. As I wrote recently, the term is misused and abused. But second only to family, nothing is more important. One definition of community is all of the people beyond family that we care about and that care about us.
This misunderstanding and abuse of the concept is due to the fact that, like traditional family structures, traditional community structures have also broken down in much of the developed world, especially in cosmopolitan cities. What does “community” mean when you’re surrounded by literally millions of people that you don’t know, have no reason to trust, and have no particular affinity for? This isn’t how humans lived for 99.99% of history. It’s not natural and it’s not healthy.
Since many of us no longer live surrounded by an actual community of people we know, care about, and trust, we instead interpret the term in a more abstract, broader sense. If you live in a big city your “community” may not be your actual neighbors or city-mates but instead your colleagues, your friends, or people you meet at school, activities, houses of worship, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this—we are all social creatures and we need a support network of people we share affinity and resources with, and can rely on in times of need—but I don’t think that such a scattered, ill-defined group takes the place of one that actually lives in close proximity and interacts on a daily basis. A real community pools its resources, takes care of the afflicted and the plain unlucky, and effectively governs itself. By contrast loose networks of friends and colleagues tend not to do these things, at least not to the same extent.
The term is even shakier when used to describe something like an online community, i.e., a group that, while they may share resources or common interests, never or only rarely meets face to face. You can call me old fashioned for saying so but I think the root of community is trust, and a group of people can’t develop true, deep trust without repeated face to face interactions. Yes, it’s absolutely possible to develop a degree of trust with people you know only virtually, but it’s not the same.
To be fair there is a spectrum of community. At one extreme are the loners who want little to no interaction and who don’t want to rely on the neighbors at all, so to speak. This is unappealing to me and it sounds quite lonely but such people exist and, hey, you do you. At the opposite extreme is the commune where all resources and responsibilities are pooled, such as the old-fashioned kibbutz where one doesn’t even raise one’s own children. Online communities and in-person communities fall somewhere in between. And there’s a sweet spot somewhere in between these extremes.
But the goalposts are also moving. The definition of community, and our understanding of the concept, need to evolve as technology and society evolve. The reality is that I don’t feel any particular affinity for most of the people I happen to be close to geographically; and the people I trust the most and for whom I feel the most affinity happen to be spread out all around the world. It’s nice to be welcomed by a close friend or colleague almost everywhere, but it’s also not very nice to not have friends or community members nearby that I can easily call on in times of need. I actually really wish I could find a geographical community of like-minded people with whom I share values but this is very hard for a variety of reasons including work and family. While I don’t think an “intentional community” like Próspera or Praxis is for me and my family, at least not at this early stage of the lifecycle, I do understand the appeal. My favorite modern interpretation of community is the one proposed in the Network State: a group of people who share resources and values, who may not all be in one geography but who nevertheless crowdfund non-contiguous territory and colocate.
We need to continue to build online, remote communities. But we also need to appreciate that frequent face to face interaction is critical for building trust, which underpins any community. Maybe someday technology will become good enough to allow this degree of trust to be built remotely, but I highly doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. In the meantime we need to be creative and intentional about how we conceive of and build modern communities.
And I wonder if the most successful people understood or appreciated the value of community. I have a gut feeling that many of them conflated things like colleagues or counterparties with community. These are not the same thing; while colleagues and even counterparties can become close friends, the relationships tend to be more transactional, something that community definitionally is not. I wonder if they wouldn’t have been happier if they had invested more in building and contributing to old-fashioned communities.
Thing #3: Connection 🔗
“In the city of Manila there are many young prostitutes; some are only fourteen or fifteen years old. They are very unhappy. They did not want to be prostitutes, but … After only a few weeks in the city, a vulnerable girl can be persuaded by a clever person to work for him and earn perhaps one hundred times more money than she could as a street vendor… if she could look deeply at herself and at the whole situation, she would see that she is the way she is because other people are the way they are. How can a “good girl,” belonging to a good family, be proud? Because the “good family’s” way of life is the way it is, the prostitute has to live as a prostitute. No one among us has clean hands. No one of us can claim that it is not our responsibility. The girl in Manila is that way because of the way we are. Looking into the life of that young prostitute, we see the lives of all the “non-prostitutes.” And looking at the non-prostitutes and the way we live our lives, we see the prostitute. Each thing helps to create the other…
The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible for everything that happens around us.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh, Flowers and Garbage, from Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
Of this week’s three things connection is definitely the most vague. We obviously have a connection to our family members and to our community. What other kinds of people and what other things are we connected to? And why is connection so important for success?
Meaningful connection isn’t and shouldn’t be limited to family and immediate community. Some of the most powerful connections I’ve formed with people have been made on the road, far from home, and sometimes in spite of great cultural and linguistic barriers. It’s possible to foster connection with almost anyone, and it’s absolutely essential that we practice doing so at every opportunity.
A lot of modern society is structured around transactional, “single serving” forms of interaction. Think about how you interact with your banker or insurance broker, your cashier at the grocery store, the postal clerk, your hairdresser or barber, the server at a restaurant, your barista, a customer service agent, etc. Most people put little to no thought or effort into these sorts of interactions. It’s all too easy to forget that the person on the other end of the line, the person standing in front of you, your counterparty, is a fully fledged human being just like you are, with their own set of hopes and fears. This is a good starting point for fostering connection.
I’m a curious person—I’m curious about absolutely everyone—and I always try to empathize and recognize the humanity of the people across the table from me. Sometimes this just means smiling. Sometimes it means asking them how they’re doing, not in passing in the obligatory social fashion, but really, patiently asking the question and showing that you care about the answer. Sometimes it means giving a generous tip, or just taking a moment to chit chat.
Take my word for it, this makes all the difference in the world. Most people in these sorts of roles tend to become a bit numb as they get very little love, respect, empathy, and compassion from others in the course of business. If you go out of your way and demonstrate these things it endears you to people and you can get almost anything you want! I’d say that rule number one of business and negotiation is to find and respect the humanity in your counterparty. As important as this is for one-off interactions, it’s even more important for the people you see and interact with regularly: your colleagues and neighbors, your morning barista, the people you pass every day on your morning jog.
It’s much harder to demonstrate these traits over virtual connections and over a great distance—again, maybe, hopefully someday that will change—but it is possible. There’s a lot less bandwidth, but a smile or a genuine “How are you?” will still go a long way and will have the same effect remotely as it does in person. I personally find it quite easy to find some form of shared connection with just about anyone, even if it’s something fairly generic like sports, the weather, or complaining about your mother in law. Everyone has a story to tell and if you give them the opportunity most people are very happy to share theirs and grateful to have someone who will listen. And you might even learn something.
If there’s an underlying reason why it’s possible to form a connection with anyone, it’s simply the fact that we’re all already connected in a cosmic sense. Without going too deeply into metaphysics, this is one of the central tenets of Buddhism (as expressed in the beautiful metaphor of Indra’s Net) and I find the idea very compelling. We share a common substrate with every other person, every other being, every blade of grass and every drop of rain. We all breathe the same air, we’re composed of the same elements, and we’re all connected in intricate, infinitely complex chains of cause and effect (what Buddhists call dependent origination). In other words, the entire universe is really a single, gigantic butterfly effect and it’s not possible to cleanly isolate anything from anything else. Everything is connected, truly.
Reflecting daily on this connection is extremely calming and supremely grounding. You are connected to everything and everyone else around you, even the things and the people that you hate. Buddhists go so far as to say that, due to eons of reincarnations, we’ve also been in every possible arrangement of relationship with every other being in existence.
Of course, a simpler and more mundane definition of connection is what we mean when we talk about connection and sharing in terms of modern technology: we’re connected to other people that we can communicate and share information with quickly and conveniently. In this respect the world is far more connected than it’s ever been in human history, and I think this is a force for good. This is one of the biggest reasons I work on blockchain technology: we need a common substrate where we can exchange both information and value that’s not mediated by a big, unaccountable company.
Connection is in many ways the lifeblood of community and society. We may never totally end conflict and war but more connection, of all the types described above, is a step in the right direction.
As for why connection is important to success, there are many reasons, among them the fact captured so eloquently in the second quote above: what we can achieve alone is limited; what we can achieve together is more or less unlimited. We need the love and support of those around us when times get tough, which they inevitably do. For those of us who are building things like products and services, we need a meaningful connection with our customers and users in order to serve their needs. There’s also the fact that living inside our own head for too long is unhealthy and dangerous. It’s essential to have people around us that we love and trust because they keep us honest, including with ourselves. Success absolutely depends upon the ability to be honest about the world and honest with oneself.
Love this!