Welcome to Altera Vita, to which I usually follow with the motto ‘a place for curious minds bored of the status quo.’
'In Altera Vita' means 'in the other life.' It refers to a world outside of our immediate reality and routine activities, where our minds can wander free.
Who am I?
Nowadays, I would describe myself as a researcher (synthetic biology, neuroscience, immunology, policy), investor, entrepreneur (perhaps one day), and lifelong learner (definitely). But when I was a kid I would spend most of my time in a made-up world and live a dual existence between a universe of alien empires, black holes, and underground cities, and the boring life of a tween. Later on as a disillusioned high school student I would spend serious time reflecting philosophically and scientifically on what makes people happy, why our education system sucks, and whether God exists. You know, the usual stuff.
Now that I’m 21, I’ve realised how important that ‘other life’ has become. After moving from Sydney to Canberra for university, I’ve gained independence in every facet of my life and have had the opportunity to pursue my interests much more. I’ve always had a passion for science and now I get to do cool scientific research as an undergraduate student.
Every year since coming to uni, I’ve also acquired a new interest (or several) - in my first year I discovered the joys of cooking and table tennis, where I started with 3 recipes I got given so I wouldn’t starve, and terrible hand eye coordination. By the end of the year, I was making mouth-watering dishes (if I can say so humbly) and recently was made a table tennis coach for my college.
Duck with redwine glaze, carrots and fennel…
Tilapia on an assortment of vegetables…
In my second year during the pandemic lockdown and after one of the sharpest sell-offs in the capital markets, I decided to start learning about stock investing, inspired by a cousin of mine who’s done well in that field. I religiously read books about Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch, and followed top funds like Frazis Capital Partners, Ark Invest and Hayden Capital Partners. I learnt about value investing and intrinsic value, before moving onto growth investing. I invested in my share of multi-baggers like Tesla, Afterpay, BioNano Genomics and others, before getting reminded in March that ‘stocks don’t only go up’. During this time I acquired an interest and knowledge of entrepreneurship and leadership. At its core, any great company or organisation is just a bunch of people working together to make outputs (products, services) that have much more value to people than the inputs (raw materials, time). This is in fact a really tough thing to do, but the people who succeed end up richly rewarded.
Afterpay was a beneficiary of e-commerce during the pandemic. It has since been acquired by Square.
In my third year of university, I am working part time as an investment analyst focusing on the life sciences at Frazis Capital Partners, while delving into lots of fascinating research projects such as in synthetic biology. I had been wondering what this year’s main interest would be, but it looks like it might be blockchain and cryptocurrency - my close friends and acquaintances would probably know this all too well from my obsessed rantings. As cliched as this is, I think crypto is here to change the world - but most people (including most crypto holders) don’t understand how or why. It took me one year from saying ‘who uses crypto anyway?’ to several fundamental insights that changed my view (and my investing style) completely. And of course, blogging is a second interest.
Indulge your ‘other life’
I didn’t intend to tell my whole life story (I guess there’s only a few chapters anyway), but the point I’m trying to get across is that my life and your life can become so much richer when we lean into our curiosities and seek new experiences. Even better when we can align our interests with our work and routines - when the imagined life and the reality we sit in merge into one.
One of the insights that my philosophical teenage years taught me is that life is an open field with no intrinsic guard-rails (except I guess the laws of physics). Your parents and your peers will show you which parts of the field they like to walk. They’ll tell you where they picked a nice flower or where they tripped on a rock, but ultimately there’s so much to explore and it’s up to you what you want to see. And here’s the thing - it usually doesn’t cost you to run over to peek behind a bush.
The wonders of industrialisation and automation have freed up the vast majority of the population from manual subsistence labour, and put a greater emphasis on intellect and creativity. Many countries now have social security nets to ensure a basic standard of living and it’s not an unreasonable expectation that we might see Universal Basic Income some time in the future. Yet many people are studying degrees they have no interest in, or working in jobs they hate.
As AI and automation continue to transform our lives, and guarantee our needs are met, the issue of career fulfilment becomes starker. Life is too short to waste our working lives in careers that aren’t aligned with our passions.
Finding your other lives isn’t easy…it takes practice
As Ex-Ark Invest Analyst James Wang says, giving advice is a great industry, except it’s often useless because porting advice from my brain to your brain or vice versa doesn’t always work. Often people’s brains have different operating systems - the software doesn’t run.
Some people know what they’re drawn to at an early age and kindle that fire over their whole lives, while others find it later in life and pursue that path with obsessive velocity. Others still, regrettably, may never find their passions, and end up living for the weekend (or retirement - which is like a perpetual weekend).
This is to be expected. When I’ve given advice to people feeling disillusioned with life, I’d often insinuate ‘look for something you love and make a career out of it.’ And then they reply, ‘how can I make a career out of playing video games?’ to which there’s no easy answer (although NFT games like Axie Infinity might change that).
There’s a saying I heard first from the VC guru Naval Ravikant:
“Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative.”
And of course finding hobbies that fulfil combinations of these is very powerful.
Finding hobbies that fulfil these roles takes some inner contemplation and some outward exploration. The cliched ‘hobby things’ are skills like learning a new language, learning to play guitar or going abseiling.
Notice when viewed in isolation, these hobbies are single track and can often be dead ends. After your 20th time learning new vocab on Duolingo you might decide you can take a break that quickly becomes permanent. Why? Because there’s not some other thing that you are wishing to accomplish with this new found skill. Why buy a hammer if you have no nails? Why collect cutlery if you have no food?
Alternatively, consider this. Simon decides he hates his job/studies and picks up some Chinese classes. Instead of just classes, he goes on an immersive experience to China, making new friends or business acquaintances there. He decides his dual mastery of English and Chinese makes him well-suited to start an English language school in China and he finds a fulfilling career as an educator and cross-cultural communicator. Ok, so the English school part is still a little bit cliche but it highlights the point of thinking outside the box - applying your hobbies rather than letting them become dead ends.
And notice how each experience opens more doors. After learning his skills in business, Simon applies to work as a consultant for Australian businesses (let’s say for the sake of argument he’s from Australia) with Chinese operations or Chinese businesses with Australian operations. He could realises China’s payment FinTech and payment platforms are much more advanced than Australia’s Big Four Banking system and decides to create a disruptive start-up back at home.
Can you see how Simon is going from zero to hero? How his new experiences and opportunities are compounding exponentially?
Or taking a personal example, I learnt violin for a decade (Asian parents - ha!) and I hated the relentless practising. But by the time I was 15, I decided to find two musically inclined friends to start a string trio called the Seraphim String Trio. We started busking and made on average $50/hr post-split, and for that age, it felt like we were rolling in money. But equally fun was all the exciting adventures we went on - we were hired for weddings, parties and even a concert for a Gnostic cult (no - I didn’t know they existed either). We did charity concerts for the Leukaemia Foundation and even played for Former PM Malcolm Turnbull at Government House (although unfortunately I was on exchange to China at the time, grrr). Had I not thought to create something fun with this skill I happened to have built up, I would most likely have seriously resented all the years I spent practising.
Invest in a creative mind and an adventurous spirit
I’ve always loved the culture of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, mainly because their entire careers are focussed on asking ‘what’s possible’ and inventing the answers.
It’s a culture where acid-dropping hippies like Steve Jobs can end up running multibillion dollar companies, where ‘first principles’ thinkers like Elon Musk can work out reusable rockets and take on NASA, and where people like Nathan Myhrvold go from quantum physicist to Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer to Modernist Chef.
If creativity is about connecting and synthesising ideas in your mind to generate new ideas, it’s paramount to draw from a wealth of experiences to provide the substrate for your ideas. Travelling is an obvious one, but so is discussing ideas with different people, listening to podcasts, and reading heaps. The last part cannot be stressed enough. Don’t just read fiction, and actively look for people who have something interesting to say. I love biographies of people I admire (like Elon Musk’s biography by Ashlee Vance, or the biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Nikola Tesla). The best part about biographies is that it teaches you about people’s lives (fun fact: you only get one - unless you believe in reincarnation - so don’t f*ck it up).
[I don’t know why people bother to replace the ‘u’ with a * - it’s not like we read it differently in our heads.]
Anyhow, the point of this section is to say, if you feel like you don’t have any insights on how to align a fulfilling interest with your work life, then it’s time you work on your creativity - namely by doing, reading and listening to random + intelligent stuff to provide the fuel of novel experiences. Respond to things with a ‘f*ck yes’ (I did it again), and you’ll quickly realise some ideas just suck, but your creative brain will be tinkering away and helping you better find your insights.
Hobby to passion to career
When you find your insights, you will start to feel the symptoms coming on:
Spending time learning/doing it feels enjoyable and fulfilling
You find your spend an increasing amount of time thinking about it
You can think of a roadmap for how your hobby can scale - things that you want to do to feel satisfied. The roadmap is not clear yet, but you feel there is something there, like the insistent ticking of a geiger counter as you look for something radioactive (sorry, weird analogy).
At this point you’re probably onto something. The next challenge is scaling your idea to become a major part of your life, part of your identity. You know it’s part of your identity when you feel inclined to put as a label on your imaginary business card.
Creation is silent…and sometimes painful
Now that you’ve found a career idea that makes meaningful sense to you, and you’re trying to make it happen, you are basically diverting 90% of your time and thoughts to it.
Because you theoretically love what you’re doing, you will be able to bear the brunt of any challenges you encounter much better than the majority of the people out there who don’t see it as fun, and are out to ‘make a career’. Because they’re here for the money and you’re here for fun (and also the money), you will beat the crap out of them in terms of finding creative solutions and coming up with something interesting.
That being said, if you’ve been the least bit ambitious, you will encounter challenges and you will make mistakes. You will find things that are misaligned. The key is iteration.
I started out my research degree with environmental policy (I’ve always been a greenie), but I realised a lot of government policy is just FUBAR (look up that acronym) and ‘analysing’ it was just going to make me depressed. I went into neuroscience thinking it would help me solve dementia, but I realised that the key insights for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s probably don’t lie in many of the aspects focussed on by traditional neuroscience. I’ve made at least three significant mistakes when learning to invest that lost me annoying sums of money, but I understood each one after reflection and my investing paradigm now is almost unrecognisable with the one I started with. I had to learn how to deal with people in the right way - I sent out my fair share of stupid emails and misjudged or mismanaged people on several occasions. The relationships at my last share house basically imploded. Still, it’s all a learning curve. It all contributes to the ‘substrate of creativity’.
Once you have borne blow after blow of mistakes, each new challenge or mistake feels less daunting, and you will reap the rewards of long term value creation.
“A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is silent. Grow silently.” - Confucius.
I really like this quote because it emphasises patience, humility and long term thinking.
The most successful people and businesses take the care to build foundations for long term success. For example, while I will be a lifelong investor, I see it primarily as way to understand the world, and build up perspectives that will be beneficial many years into the future, in addition to compounding my wealth early. If I couldn’t learn while I earned, I would lose interest very quickly.
In fact, there’s something to be said about finding generalised solutions. This concept really comes from maths, physics and computer science - the idea that if I can supply you with an equation or formula that can be used to calculate the answer in any situation given some basic properties, that’s much more useful than giving you the answer for one specific instance.
That’s why companies like Moderna and Tesla build platforms. Stephane Bancel talks about the importance of AI and data analysis in Moderna’s development because with mRNA technology, you can basically print out any number of different drugs using the same process. Drug companies have historically had to contribute sizeable resources for each drug individually. With Tesla, they invested enormous amounts of effort into creating the Dojo - a neural network training ASIC (a computer that trains AIs) that has more computational power than the next 5 supercomputers combined. With this they can train their Full Self Driving (FSD) fleet or teach humanoid robots to do useful things or apply it to many other problems. These companies focus on building generalised tools rather than tackling their problems one at a time.
Apply the same in your personal life. Find experiences and develop skills that can be useful in multifaceted ways because it gives you more optionality down the track. Fun fact: ‘learning’ and ‘thinking’ are very generalised skills, and so is programming, people skills, design ideation etc.
In Summary
Indulge in your ‘other life’.
New experiences are the substrate for creativity.
Creative problem solving is key to creating an interesting career.
Don’t be surprised when you fuck up. Learn humbly and iterate quickly.
Build platforms and seek generalised solutions.
Matthew McConaughey in his Oscar speech for Dallas Buyer’s Club answered the question of ‘who’s your hero?’ very eloquently - ‘it’s me in 10 years’ he said.
Pursue evolution.
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