Boredom and Impatience

The greatest threat to results are boredom and impatience.

The only way to become good at something is to practice the ordinary basics for an uncommon length of time. Most people get bored. They want excitement. They want something to talk about and no one talks about the boring basics. For example, we know that dollar-cost averaging into an index fund is likely to generate wealth, but cryptocurrency will give us a bigger thrill. Boredom encourages you to stop doing what you know works and do something that might work.

Another way to mess up a good thing is to try and accelerate the natural pace of things into an unnatural one. A good idea taken to the extreme is always a bad idea. Working out for 15 hours a day won’t make you healthier, it will get you injured. Investing with a lot of leverage won’t make you rich faster, it will wipe you out. A lack of patience changes the outcome.

It’s hard to be above average if you can’t find a way to do the same thing over and over again. As Bruce Lee observed, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

In a world of social media, we glorify the results and not the process. We see the kick that knocked someone out but not the years of effort that went into perfecting it. We see the results, not the hard work.

The difference between good and great results is often found in consistently doing the boring things you know you should do exactly when you feel like doing them the least.

Source –

Boredom & Impatience - Farnam Street (fs.blog)

Patience Pays Off

This essay could be a long-winded way of saying “good things come to those who wait.” But the saying isn’t fool proof – waiting can easily lead to decay.

The difference is between active patience and passive patience, and we believe it’s active patience that pays off. Pulling back an arrow and holding that tension may not look like much in the moment, but you’re creating the circumstances for a powerful event to take place. Similarly, active patience is about moving (and not moving) with intention, consistently weighing resources and opportunity costs, and recognizing the compounding rewards of high trust and persistence so that you’re best positioned to act on an opportunity when it presents itself. 

Most people, including us, are not naturally inclined to wait, to be content building energy and potential. In fact, “progress anxiety” is a term regularly used around the office. We balk at the idea of passive, unproductive, non-strategic waiting and also believe that “good things take time.” The quality of restraint is downstream from purpose.

The long game requires a plan. It demands clear vision, helpful structure, and healthy incentives that promote active patience and curb tendencies towards frenetic action, short feedback loops, and quick wins (over sustainable ones) in the name of showing progress. 

Patience is a choice, and it’s one that must be made continuously and rigorously, through long-term commitment and persistent discipline. Put another way, it’s hard and we’re still learning.

What It Takes

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

— Leo Tolstoy

Patience requires determination. Exercising patience without losing confidence, humility, or sense of self is hard enough, but you will also need perseverance and diligence. Mary Oliver calls it the “patience of vegetables and saints.” Others call it “grit” – that determination and commitment that drive us to long-term goals without the guarantee of short-term payoffs. Small business owners know grit. They’re the definition of durability, establishing deep roots in their communities, building companies with strong foundations, bringing consistent excellence to what they do best, and grinding toward a vision that may not materialize for decades or generations. This is patience at work, through work.

Patience requires the ability to be patient. If you don’t have the financial, mental, or emotional discipline to withstand a decline or a period of extreme underperformance, you don’t have the ability to be patient. The flip side of that coin is that you can’t lose your mind during periods of success. Also, most people lose their minds during periods of success. Patience can be interrupted by failure and uncertainty, of course, but short-term success can be even more threatening to patience, especially since luck is always involved. Success breeds confidence, which creeps into overconfidence, which leads to arrogance, which divorces you from reality, which cometh before the fall – failing in obvious, foreseeable, and avoidable ways.

Patience requires a team. But no founder is an island. Patience requires not only personal fortitude, but a team that will ride out the storm and continue to row with you. Conviction isn’t enough, and individual grit quickly devolves into stubbornness. If your significant other, investors, colleagues, employees, kids, and friends won’t go for the ride, you’re not going either. Or, you choose a life of isolation. So patience in some ways requires persuasion.

Patience is infectious. Patience begets patience, which gives everyone time to align collective postures. 

Patience requires openness. However, extreme commitment to patience can come back to bite you. Smart owners, operators, and investors know the perils of doggedly following the original strategy over figuring out what it takes to survive. Patience can be confused with stubbornness or pride. No one wants to look wishy-washy or fickle. But surviving (and, eventually, thriving) requires an open posture. There’s always a gap between the stories we tell ourselves and reality. The smaller the gap, the better our judgment, and the more likely we can be appropriately patient.

Patience requires trust – trust the science, trust the system, trust your gut, or, if you’re the Philadelphia 76ers, trust the process. Patience is waiting in light of a desire and pressure to act. When faced with a problem, in order to not act you must trust that something better is coming. But that trust isn’t naive, nor is it idle. We might tweak the old “trust, but verify” in this case to “trust, but work.” 

Finally, patience requires gratitude, compassion, and humility. These qualities combat selfish desires to profit at the expense of others. It’s hard to act out when you’re self-aware and at peace. And that, in turn, promotes patience, reinvestment, perseverance, and an overall preference for future rewards of compounding value. In this case, humility means knowing what you bring to the table and the value of investing in the future. If you’ve assessed yourself with candor and fearlessness, you have already begun to cultivate resilience and patience. 

Patience is demanding. It requires these qualities and commitments because it only works if you work it again and again. 

Why It’s Hard

“Well, we must wait for the future to show.”

— Virginia Woolf

Not to be flippant, but patience is hard because it’s hard. Even when you

know the reward is going to be bigger in the end, delayed gratification feels like a loss. And, we all hate to lose.

Patience requires endurance against obstacles, both known and unanticipated. The longer your time horizon, the more disasters you’ll experience. Most people don't bear hardship well and quit. Depending on luck, periods of extreme hardship and under-performance may come before any success, leading to an expectation of failure. And even if you’ve experienced a bit of success, or even a lot of success, the naysayers will always come out against you. See the many, many hit pieces on Warren Buffett at various stages of his career. The man has been “washed up” more times than a three-year-old’s t-shirt. 

We think that a bias towards action (not action in itself – we all must act eventually – but prioritizing action above all else) is inherently prideful; it assumes superior knowledge, perspective, position, and predictability. However, patience is hard, and most people won’t do hard, so it's therefore differentiated and potentially extremely profitable. 

Or, as Navy SEALs will tell you, “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

Why It’s Worth It

“The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”

— Charles Munger

Our aim in employing patience is to adhere, as much as we can, to the missionary mindset over the mercenary mindset. John Doerr explains the difference like this: 

“Mercenaries are driven by paranoia; missionaries are driven by passion. Mercenaries think opportunistically; missionaries think strategically. Mercenaries go for the sprint; missionaries go for the marathon. Mercenaries focus on their competitors and financial statements; missionaries focus on their customers and value statements. Mercenaries are bosses of wolf packs; missionaries are mentors or coaches of teams. Mercenaries worry about entitlements; missionaries are obsessed with making a contribution. Mercenaries are motivated by the lust for making money; missionaries, while recognizing the importance of money, are fundamentally driven by the desire to make meaning.”

 

If you work very hard toward a goal you believe in, conclude that there is nothing worthwhile to do in the moment, and have the discipline to be patient while trusting that the time to act will come, you’re building energy and potential – the ingredients necessary to compound. Our experience and our mindset tell us that being good consistently for a long time is more valuable than being great for a short period of time, even if sprints of greatness get more attention.

Source –

https://www.permanentequity.com/writings/how-patience-pays-off

 

It's (already) Later Than You Think

You work and work for years and years, you're always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin' dough
Someday you say, you'll have your fun, when you're a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you'll have in your old rockin' chair

 

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

 

You're gonna take that ocean trip, no matter come what may
You've got your reservations made, but you just can't get away
Next year for sure, you'll see the world, you'll really get around
But how far can you travel when you're six feet underground?

 

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette
She's left you and she's now become somebody else's pet
Lay down that gun, don't try my friend to reach the great beyond
You'll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blond

 

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

 

You never go to night clubs and you just don't care to dance
You don't have time for silly things like moonlight and romance
You only think of dollar bills tied neatly in a stack
But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn't kiss you back

 

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

 

For the musically inclined, the link is below 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi1s6kBTkZU

Changing Your Mind

We humans are programmed to think we’re right at all costs. Fighting that instinct will set you free.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the psychologist Henry Murray asked a sample of college sophomores to participate in a seemingly innocuous experiment in which they would write their “personal philosophy of life,” including their core values and guiding principles, and then engage in a civil debate with a young lawyer about the merits of the philosophy. He did not tell the participants that the lawyer had been instructed to interrogate them and rip their philosophy to shreds in a “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” way. They used techniques Murray had developed in vetting intelligence agents during World War II.

The results were fairly predictable. Murray found that the students were generally intensely uncomfortable at having their views attacked in this way. Most hated it and remembered the experiment negatively even years later. But not all of Murray’s participants recall the experiment as a horrible experience. In his book Think Again, Adam Grant, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that most of the students had a negative experience. But Grant’s research also showed that a few notable outliers said they liked it—at least one found it fun—likely because they were forced to rethink their beliefs.

This latter group might have been onto something important. Rethinking your opinions—and changing your views when your facts are proved wrong or someone makes a better argument—can make your life better. It can make you more successful, less anxious, and happier.

When it comes to the idea that we are wrong, or that we should change our opinions, we are incredibly adept at resisting. Grant writes that we possess an astonishing array of cognitive biases telling us, You are right—disregard all evidence to the contrary. These include confirmation bias (we focus on and preferentially remember information that reinforces our beliefs); anchoring bias (we over-rely on one key piece of information—usually the first one we received); the illusion of validity (we overestimate the accuracy of our own judgments and perceptions); and many other related tendencies. These biases are like a crocodile-filled moat around the fortress of our beliefs. They turn us into hermit kings, convinced that any counterarguments that break through our walls will bring us misery.

But as Grant argues, being closed off to being proved wrong or to having our beliefs challenged has huge costs. Leaders who surround themselves with yes-men have been shown to make costly—and sometimes catastrophic—mistakes. One classic example is the Bay of Pigs debacle, in which President John F. Kennedy’s insular cabinet failed to challenge his misguided instincts. Or consider the political punditocracy that assumed Donald Trump couldn’t possibly be a serious threat to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and never revised those assumptions. If your goal is to find the truth, admitting you are wrong and changing your beliefs based on new facts makes you better off in the end. This is a primary feature of what philosophers call “epistemic humility.”

And while it might not feel easy or fun at first, epistemic humility, like all humility, has clear happiness benefits. In one 2016 study in The Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers created a humility score by asking people about their openness to advice, their honesty about their own strengths and weaknesses, and whether they tended to be excited about a friend’s accomplishments. They found that humility was negatively associated with depression and anxiety, and positively associated with happiness and life satisfaction. Furthermore, they found that humility buffers the negative impact of stressful life events.

As is often the case with social science, the data on humility and happiness reinforce what philosophers have long taught. Around the turn of the fifth century, Saint Augustine gave a student three pieces of life advice: “The first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility: and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction.” About a thousand years earlier, the Buddha taught in the Dutthatthaka Sutta that attachment to one’s views and opinions is a particular source of human suffering. These ancient ideas could not be more relevant to modern life.

The humility to admit when we are wrong and to change our beliefs can lead us to greater success and happiness. But with our defenses arrayed against these virtues, we need a battle plan to alter our way of thinking and acting. Here are four strategies you might want to add to your arsenal:

1. Turn the hermit king against himself.

The hermit king walls himself in against admitting a mistake or changing his mind because he fears that doing so will make him look stupid or incompetent. Thus, left to your limbic tendencies, you will fight to the death for even doomed ideas. But this tendency is itself based on an error.

In a 2015 study in the scientific journal PLOS One, researchers compared scientists’ reactions to being informed that their findings “don’t replicate”—that is, they are probably not correct—a common problem in academia. It would be no surprise if scientists, like most people, got defensive when contradicted in this way, or even doubled down on their original results. But the researchers found that this sort of behavior was more harmful to the scientists’ reputation than simply admitting they were wrong. The message for the hermit king is this: If you are wrong, the best way to save face is to admit it.

2. Welcome contradiction.

One of the best ways to combat a destructive tendency is to adopt an “opposite signal” strategy. For example, when you are sad, often the last thing you want to do is see others, but this is precisely what you should do. When your ideas are threatened and you feel defensive, actively reject your instinct to defend yourself, and become more open instead. When someone says, “You are wrong,” respond with, “Tell me more.” Make friends who think differently than you and challenge your assumptions—and whose assumptions you challenge. Think of this as building your “team of rivals,” the phrase the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin used to describe Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, which, unlike Kennedy’s, challenged him relentlessly. If this sounds like torture, it is all the more urgent that you try it.

3. Don’t document all your beliefs.

Sociopolitical forces today can make humility feel especially dangerous, and even foolish. Social media has stunted our ability to reinvent our thinking, because our ideas are increasingly cumulative: Every opinion we’ve ever posted online is memorialized. With such a well-documented history of beliefs, changing your mind on something important or controversial can feel like weakness and open you up to public criticism.

The solution to this is to take most of your opinions off the electronic grid. Share your views with people you know and trust, but not with strangers on Twitter and Facebook. Sharing your views with total strangers on social media is a weird conceit to begin with—that people you don’t know should care about your opinions. And realistically, there’s no opinion you can preserve in internet amber right now that will benefit you in five years.

4. Start small.

Let’s suppose that you want the benefits of changing your mind. Getting started is hard, especially if the view you want to change is something huge, like your religious beliefs or your political ideology. It’s better to start with smaller ideas such as your fashion choices, or even your sports allegiances. Reconsider the things you have long taken for granted, and assess them as dispassionately as you can. Then, with these low stakes, change.

The point is not to deal in trivialities. Research on goal setting clearly shows that starting small teaches you how to change and break habits. Then, you can scale this self-knowledge up to the bigger areas of your life in which, you secretly suspect, you might just be wrong. At that point, with your new skills in hand, the adventure of finding truth starts.

If you master these techniques, there might be critics who say you are a flip-flopper, or wishy-washy. To deal with this, take a lesson from the great economist Paul Samuelson. In 1948, Samuelson published what might be the most celebrated economics textbook of all time. As the years went by and he updated the book, he changed his estimate of the inflation level that was tolerable for the health of the macroeconomy: First, he said 5 percent was acceptable; then, in later editions, 3 percent and 2 percent, prompting the Associated Press to run an article titled “Author Should Make Up His Mind.” In a television interview after Samuelson was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he gave his answer to the charge: “When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

In pursuit of happiness, you can do this too. When events change, you acquire new information, or someone simply makes a great argument, go ahead and change your mind, and do it openly. It might seem like a tough ask at first. But trust me: It will go from hard to fun. You have nothing to lose but your moat.

Source –

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/to-get-happier-admit-when-youre-wrong/618245/

The Status Game

When I was a kid I didn’t really understand status. I didn’t understand why some people would grant more social value to others based on their wealth, fame, or talents. I grew up in the middle class and everyone I knew was in the middle class (or close to it) as well. Therefore, the only time I saw status was on television. Musicians. Athletes. Actors and Actresses. You were either a celebrity or a normal person and there was nothing in between. 

In high school I furthered my ignorance by becoming anti-status. I grew my hair long and started playing electric guitar. It was heavy metal or bust and I didn’t care what anyone else thought. Status among my friends was determined not by how popular you were, but by your music abilities or how much you could drink. Nevertheless, I kept my grades up and my parents never asked any questions. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I finally had my first encounter with status. After getting into a good university I noticed how people outside of my friend group started treating me very differently. No longer was I seen as this random “metalhead,” but as the kid who was going places. For the first time in my life I had some status. And I’m not going to lie, it felt great. 

But as soon as I entered college, everything changed. Those things that had once given me status were gone. No longer was I one of the smartest kids in my school, I was just average. Now status was determined based on what fraternity you joined and where you were going to work after you graduated. But this wasn’t the last time that I had to learn a different status game. Following college I worked at a litigation consulting firm where status was based on prestige, pay, and performance (like most corporate environments). And today, as a content creator, status is mostly determined by the size of your audience and how much you can keep their attention. No matter which environment I was in, I noticed that there was always a status game being played. 

Status in the Eye of the Beholder My story illustrates how different communities value different things when it comes to conferring status. For example, if you are a competitive powerlifter, your status is determined by how much you can lift (strength) and how many competitions you have won (competitiveness). If you are a VC, your status is determined by what companies you have invested in (network) and how well those companies have performed (money). I could go on, but you get my point. Status is relative to the context in which it is being evaluated. In other words, VCs don’t care how much you can bench and weightlifters don’t care about your investment returns. Both groups have their own standards for judging members of their community and they care much less about everything else. 

This is why you have to choose your status game wisely. Because whatever status game you choose in life ultimately determines what you optimize for. Choose money and you’ll end up working all the time. Choose beauty and you’ll always want to look better. Choose fame and you’ll constantly be seeking attention. Each of these choices has consequences too. Your pursuit of wealth could leave your personal relationships in shambles. Your pursuit of beauty could impact your mental and physical health. Your pursuit of fame could end up ruining your reputation. Whatever status game you decide to play, you have to ask yourself: are the benefits worth the costs? 

Get Status or Die Trying When it comes to the pursuit of status, the juice is usually worth the squeeze. Research on primates has shown that those at the top of a status hierarchy have a higher quality of life and experience far less stress than those near the bottom. It’s good to be at the top. Well, at least most of the time. When a status hierarchy is stable, being at the top is great. But when it isn’t, watch out. As Robert Sapolsky explained in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, instability is hell for high status individuals: Suppose you keep the dominance system unstable by shifting the monkeys into new groups every month, so that all the animals are perpetually in the tense, uncertain stage of figuring out where they stand with respect to everyone else. Under those circumstances, it is generally the animals precariously holding on to their places at the top of the shifting dominance hierarchy who do the most fighting and show the most behavioral and hormonal indices of stress. 

This research suggests that, even after making it to the top, it’s not always smooth sailing. So ask yourself: Is it worth the time and effort to chase status only to face increased anxiety about losing that status in the future? I’m not so sure. What makes this issue even worse is that there is some research suggesting that those with higher status crave increased status even more than those with lower status. In other words, once you start to attain some status, you won’t want to stop. I’ve noticed this in myself despite not caring about the traditional markets of status (i.e. wealth, career success, popularity, etc.) for most of my life. But, I have found a way to fight back. 

Outsmarting the Status Game Though the pursuit of status is a hard temptation to fight off, there is a simple way to prevent it from controlling you—play multiple status games at once. Instead of linking your entire identity to a single status game (i.e. richest, smartest, etc.), have multiple things going for you. In other words, diversify what brings you status. Robert Sapolsky touched on this idea in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers when discussing how low status individuals can feel high status from other avenues: So, the lowly subordinate in the mailroom of the big corporation may, after hours, be deriving tremendous prestige and self-esteem from being the deacon of his church, or the captain of her weekend softball team, or may be the top of the class at adult-extension school. There is no rule that states that you have to judge yourself by a singular dimension, even if society suggests otherwise. For example, I know I’m not the best computer programmer and I’m not the best financial writer either. But if you take the combination of those two skills and I have a bit of an edge. 

It reminds me of what Scott Adams said about what it takes to have a great career: If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The same is true with status. You don’t have to be the best at any one thing. But if you can get pretty good at a few things, you can avoid the pitfalls of trying to be #1 and the status battles that can go along with it. I know some of you will say “Just ignore the status game altogether,” but this is easier said than done. Like many other animals, we are biologically wired to respond to status. Ignorance is not the way out. 

The way out is building a solid foundation of status in multiple things. It’s about becoming diversified in your life, not just your portfolio. 

Source – https://ofdollarsanddata.com/choose-your-status-game-wisely/

Our Universe

In 2003 NASA pointed the Hubble Telescope at a region of seemingly empty sky and left it there. Over the course of two months, imperceptible drips of light collected in the basin of its 8 foot wide mirror. When they finally combined the 800 exposures of nearly perfectly black sky, a total of 11 days worth of light, they revealed an image speckled with 10,000 galaxies. The oldest of the photons that ended their life in the electronics of the Hubble had traveled from their birth star across the universe for 13.2 billion years. These photons had already completed half of their journey when the earth coalesced. 10,000 galaxies. Our own galaxy, not exceptional in any way, contains around 100 billion stars. In the patch that the Hubble photographed, the size of a millimeter held a meter away, there are on the order of a quadrillion stars. And yet it would take 12 million of such patches to tile the sphere of the sky. How can we understand the scale of this? A quadrillion is a ridiculous number. It’s the kind of number that young boys make up at recess to say how much stupider their friends are, combining syllables at random, not even sure if it’s real.

Consider the leaves of a forest.

A mature tree has somewhere around 50,000 leaves.

The state of Pennsylvania has 16 billion trees.

There are as many stars in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field as there are leaves on all the trees in the state of Pennsylvania.

Consider grass in a meadow.

There are around 50 blades of grass in a square inch of meadow.

The Willamette Valley is 5700 square miles.

If the Willamette valley were all grassland, it would contain as many blades of grass as there are stars in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Consider the rain in a thunderstorm.

A raindrop in a large storm weighs around a tenth of a gram.

A convective storm system can drop 100 million tons of rain.

There are as many raindrops in a large storm system as there are stars in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Consider sand on a beach.

There are about 1 billion grains of sand in a cubic foot.

Ocean beach in San Francisco has around 4,500,000 square feet of sand above water.

The top 3 inches of sand of the whole surface of Ocean Beach contain as many grains of sand as there are stars in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Consider the ocean.

A milliliter of ocean water can contain a million plankton.

An olympic swimming pool contains 2.5 million liters of water.

A pool filled with sea water can contain as many plankton as there are stars in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. One quadrillion stars, in a tiny slice of the sky. If we photographed the entire sky this way, we would have to multiply all of these numbers by twelve million. This is our universe as far as we can see, twelve million Pennsylvania’s leaves, twelve million Willamette Valley’s blades of grass, twelve million storm systems of rain, twelve million Ocean Beaches of sand, twelve million swimming pools of plankton.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field The James Webb Space Telescope is currently on its way to its destination far from the earth where it will look into the early universe without the glare of the sun and the earth to interfere. On March 16th, it produced an image of a star that it was using to calibrate its mirrors. A distant star is a point source of light, and so by making fine adjustments to the mirrors to resolve that point more clearly, it can tune them to make clear images. In the process, it captured an image full of distant galaxies by accident.

The James Webb Telescope is expected to begin taking its first real images in June. Just imagine the scale of what we’ll see. Source – https://moultano.wordpress.com/2022/03/24/depth-of-field/

Take It Easy

Historically, there is something quite curious about the all-encompassing work ethic of many of today’s masters of the universe. For Andrew Carnegie, at one point the world’s richest man, and many of his robber baron colleagues of the Gilded Age a century ago, diligence, perseverance, and industry were virtues to be preached—not practiced. The successful man of business was not a wage slave, paid by the hour or the day or the task, and he should not behave as if he were. Manually laboring drudges might work long hours without sacrificing productivity, but businessman could not. Their work required imagination, thought, calculation.

“Your always-busy man accomplishes little;” Carnegie wrote in 1883, “the great doer is he who has plenty of leisure. Moral: Don’t worry yourself over work, hold yourself in reserve, and sure as fate, ‘it will all come right in the wash.’” The American penchant for delaying gratification, for putting off retirement, for working ceaselessly, for refusing or canceling or postponing or cutting short vacations was, the Scottish-born Carnegie believed, monstrously self-defeating. It sapped the creativity the man of business required to move forward. Americans, he remarked to his cousin, “were the saddest-looking race … Life is so terribly earnest here. Ambition spurs us all on, from him who handles the spade to him who employs thousands. We know no rest. … I hope Americans will find some day more time for play, like their wiser brethren upon the other side.”

Carnegie was not alone in preaching a gospel of leisure. In his autobiography, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, John D. Rockefeller—who accumulated a fortune estimated at $1 trillion in today’s dollars—admitted almost as a point of pride that he too “was not what might be called a diligent business man.” Though he had, as a young executive, punctually arrived at the Standard Oil offices in Cleveland at 9:15 every morning, he usually spent no more than “three hours a day” there. “He worked at a more leisurely pace than many other executives, napping daily after lunch and often dozing in a lounge chair after dinner,” writes his biographer, Ron Chernow. “By his mid-thirties, he had installed a telegraph wire between home and office so that he could spend three or four afternoons each week at home, planting trees, gardening, and enjoying the sunshine.” At age 50, complaining of fatigue, he withdrew from work for several months. A few years later, he retired completely. “I’m here,” he told an interviewer who asked about his remarkable longevity, “because I shirked: did less work, lived more in the open air, enjoyed the open air, sunshine and exercise.” Even during his working years, “which lasted from the time I was sixteen years old until I retired from active business when I was fifty-five,” Rockefeller admitted that he had “managed to get a good many vacations of one kind or another.”

Carnegie too balanced his adult years carefully between work and leisure. At age 27, while still an employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, he wrangled a special leave of absence so that he could spend three months on vacation in Scotland and Europe. Three years later, at age 30, he left his business interests in the hands of Tom, his younger brother, and toured Europe for a year. In 1878, he took another year off to travel round the world. “Carnegie was never a hard worker,” observed his authorized biographer. “Not a hard worker, that is, in the grindstone sense; he spent at least half his time in play, and let other men pile up his millions for him.”

For Carnegie and Rockefeller, part of the magic of twentieth-century capitalism was the disconnect between work and riches. Capital invested wisely in plant, properties, and securities grew and paid dividends, and did so, almost by itself. For Carnegie, the child of a self-employed artisan, this was a revelation. “I shall remember that check as long as I live,” Carnegie wrote in his autobiography, describing his first dividend from the Adams Express Company, a freight-delivery service he held stock in. “It gave me the first penny of revenue from capital—something that I had not worked for with the sweat of my brow. ‘Eureka!’ I cried. ‘Here’s the goose that lays the golden eggs.’”

Carnegie was so excited by the check that before cashing it, he showed it to his friends at their Sunday afternoon gathering. “The effect produced … was overwhelming. None of them had imagined such an investment possibility. … How money could make money, how, without any attention from me, this mysterious golden visitor should come, led to much speculation upon the part of the young fellows, and I was for the first time hailed as a ‘capitalist.’” There was something magical about a poor boy receiving money without having to work for it. Carnegie had not “earned” his dividend check. Yet here it was, in a white envelope lying on his desk, and no one was going to take it away.

Watching over one’s investments and one’s company’s investments took time and effort, Carnegie would learn—just not a whole lot of it. At age 34, he moved away from Pittsburgh, the center of his business enterprise, to New York, the center of his leisure interests. He would, for the rest of his life, carry on his business from New York and his various homes in Scotland, where he spent at least three or four months every summer—and this at a time when the fastest form of communication was the telegraph. He did not attend board or management meetings or visit his mills or communicate on a daily or regular basis with associates, subordinates, business colleagues. He had detailed cost sheets delivered monthly by U.S. mail to his home in New York City, where he marked them up and sent them back to Pittsburgh, with lengthy memos attached. He set long-term strategies for his companies, chose his associates wisely, secured political and business alliances, as needed for expansion, and never took his eye over the profit-and-loss statements.

When A.B. Farquhar, a Pennsylvania businessman, boasted that he was in his office every morning “by seven in the morning” and was the last one to leave in the evening, Carnegie laughed at him. “You must be a lazy man if it takes you ten hours to do a day’s work. … What I do … is to get good men, and I never give them orders. My directions seldom go beyond suggestions. Here in the morning I get reports from them. Within an hour I have disposed of everything, sent out all of my suggestions, the day’s work is done, and I am ready to go out and enjoy myself.”

Andrew Carnegie had learned, early in his business career, that no individual was indispensable nor irreplaceable. The corporate model was a wondrous creation. Its successful operation required a firm division of labors. Success depended on the effective delegation and coordination of leadership functions and responsibilities.

Carnegie never apologized for his success as a businessman nor for the millions upon millions he had made. Business was not for him the highest calling a man might answer. Carnegie loathed being referred to or honored as primarily a businessman. He had left Pittsburgh, a city that was too intent on business, for New York City, the cultural and literary capital of the nation. He intended to use his leisure to educate himself, to make the acquaintance and learn from the premier intellects of his day: from Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and Matthew Arnold; to attend lectures; to become an intellectual, a wise man, and an author.

His gospel of leisure enjoined him—and others outside the realm of wage slavery—to behave as free men ought to. The wage slave had no choice but to dedicate his life to work and hope that there might be time left over for leisure. But Carnegie—and Rockefeller—chose to order their lives such that large portions of their waking hours might be dedicated to leisure, not as an escape or alternative to work, but as an end in itself. The rich man could afford to depart from the everyday world of work and business for something far more exalted, the world of leisure.

The irony of ironies was that, instead of moving forward into this brave new world of leisure, as Carnegie had, too many businesspeople, in Carnegie’s day and in our own, have voluntarily imprisoned themselves in the work world as if they too were wage slaves with no alternative but to work their lives away.

 

Source –

Take it Easy: David Nasaw on the Work Habits of Andrew Carnegie (substack.com)