M&Ms: It's Scary

When I teach live or present in front of a large group, my heart rate pumps between 115 and 150 beats per minute.

All the parts of my body that sweat during exercise begin to sweat.

But some parts that never sweat during exercise, like my palms, become slippery, too. It's like my body is trying to sabotage me out of moving a mouse or hitting keyboard keys. Hoping, perhaps, that I'll end the misery if I am failing badly enough.

But to put the 115-150 BPM heart rate into context, "Zone 2" exercise is between 99-115 BPM.

Heart Zone Calculator

And by the way, "Zone 2" exercise (according to the first result on Google) "increases mitochondrial density as well as MCT-1 transporters. Training in Zone 2 improves fat utilization and preserves glycogen. And also increase lactate clearance capacity, which is key for athletic performance."

But when I speak publically, my heart rate is higher than "Zone 2" almost the entire time.

My heart rate during a Write of Passage live mentorship session.

The heart rate spike, the sweating, the stuttering, the awkwardness, the nerves, and the many other undesired effects of stress are most noticeable for me right before a live session with a large group of strangers starts. During that early part of the presentation, I am liable to say something awkward or crazy. This is exactly how I've become known, in some corners of the internet, as the "Awkward and introverted Engineer."

It is scary for me to present live. I might have a heart attack.

But I am no stranger to scary.

Two years ago, quitting my job, which would've paid me over a million bucks a year if I exceeded expectations, was scary. A job, might I add, in which I'd exceeded expectations in all the previous years. It was also frightening and stressful the first few months after I quit.

But that scare was preceded by another scare, which felt even bigger a few years earlier. I was afraid when I decided to take on close to 2 million dollars of real estate debt to buy some rental properties. And it was stressful to be a landlord while being an engineering leader for a little while, too.

But a few years before, I had prepared myself for that scare by quitting my cushy engineering job at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. I took a pay cut to join a startup in 2015. Back in 2015, that pay cut was scary to me because we had a baby on the way at the time, and we had just taken on our first mortgage.

My salary progression from 2010 to 2020 in tech from one of my first viral tweets.

Startup life was stressful at first, with a lot of work.

But before that, it was scary to get married young. And it was scary for us to live in The Bronx in a poor neighborhood, all so we could afford to save a few dollars. The Bronx kicked my ass good, believe me. It was pretty scary to get robbed at gunpoint in The Bx. The first time was the most stressful.

But before that, it was scary to pick up and move from a poor, small village in the third world and immigrate across an ocean to America. It was stressful at first, too; I didn't know the language or anything.

But while all that stuff sounds scary, it led to everything I have today.

All the growth in my life can be summed up as a series of scary moments that I was an active & willing participant in.

But every scare that I willingly took on has led to career & personal growth for me.

The truth about life is that it will stress you anyway, whether you want it to or not. And when it does, you don’t want to be fragile to it.

In the book Antifragile, Nicholas Nassim Taleb explains that a porcelain cup is fragile because shocks can harm it, even end it. A porcelain cup will shatter if you drop it even from a few feet.

But something like your heart is antifragile because it can benefit from occasional spikes. While the cup never benefits from any sort of drops. But the more you put the heart through spikes, the more antifragile it becomes to spikes. In fact, the condition athlete's heart happens when you exercise for an hour or more on most days of the week.

Taleb adds:

“How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble…

Naturally, there are classical thoughts on the subject, with a Latin saying that sophistication is born out of hunger (artificia docuit fames). The idea pervades classical literature: difficulty is what wakes up the genius (ingenium mala saepe movent)…

The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!“

This is the advantage of self-induced controlled stress. If it works, the excess energy will lead you into a much stronger position than if you'd waited for life to stress you untested. Look at what excess energy from the stress in 2015 did to my salary in the subsequent years.

So, my entire life can be summed up as a series of controlled stresses. And perhaps yours should be, too.

As Morgan Housel says in his new book “Same as Ever”:

Stress focuses your attention in ways good times can’t. It kills procrastination and indecision, taking what you need to get done and shoving it so close to your face that you have no choice but to pursue it, right now and to the best of your ability.

During World War II an unnamed U.S. soldier was interviewed by a newspaper. Asked what he was thinking during combat, the soldier replied: “I was hoping to remember to stay afraid because that is the best way to stay alive and not make careless mistakes.”

Scary is good. Scary is what you need in your life. So many other smaller, controlled, scary moments I didn’t mention prepared me for the bigger ones, too. For example, it was scary to start writing online and promote this newsletter, yet here we are, you and I, over two years into the journey. (Thank you for being a part of it!)

It was scary to quit that cushy high paying job in 2021; the first few months, I didn't make shit. The first full year, last year, I made $100k in "Internet Money." Ok, not too bad. This year, I'll at least double that. Still, not a million a year. I might never make a million a year again. But I'm making money in a way I'm proud of while chasing my dreams and spending lots of time with my kids.

The real estate debt that initially scared me now produces enough of a surplus that my family can have a roof over their heads even if I don't make a penny from this internet stuff.

That scary startup I took a pay cut to join in 2015 led to crazy exponential growth in my career. I went from a senior engineer to a senior director in 5 years. Then, the startup was bought by Walmart.

Scary is what you need, trust me.

The Bronx scared me straight. And it beat the hell out of me. But it also pushed me like crazy if I wanted a better life; it pushed me to work over 40 hours a week in a restaurant while going full-time to college to finish a Computer Science degree. How badly do you want that better life? A scary life will help you have an instant answer.

Getting married young scared me, but my wife and I have a wonderful life with two beautiful daughters. And hopefully, God willing, more will be coming. By far, the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life was starting a family, especially when we had nothing, because we grew together and built it together, my wife and I. Scary is good.

As my business partner, Daniel Vassallo says:

So what are you waiting for?

Do that thing that scares you. Take that job you're not fully qualified for, you'll grow into it, everyone else did. Or quit that other job to chase your dreams; you'll learn a bunch and worst case, you can always get a job again. Marry that girl if she's worth it. Speak publically in front of a large crowd, teach live even if your heart is pumping out of your chest.

Do whatever the next thing that scares you is that won't wipe you out.

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A Promo From Me:

Scary is why you'll still catch me presenting in front of a large group of strangers now because it still scares me.

That's why I am teaching the newsletter launchpad live (free for Small Bets members! It starts on December 4th), and I'll teach it repeatedly until it stops scaring me.

And if you are not a member of Small Bets, the membership includes everything. The classes, the recordings, the community. And we have a Black Friday/Cyber Week sale going on right now that is half the price it will normally be.

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Three Things: On Google, A Scary Path, AI Not So Scary?

I recently came across this article by Small Bets member Suket Karnawat, and I loved it.

It is scary to quit something as great as Google, the original golden handcuffs.

But if you don’t do it, life will do it to you anyway.

As this other viral article on Google explained this week, the place isn’t what it used to be. But most places aren’t after a while.

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A fascinating concept that Ben, whom I had the pleasure of meeting through Write of Passage, experienced firsthand.

This is all about offering your Children a sort of controlled “scary” path in life.

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A wonderful video by Yann LeCun, who is a world-class AI researcher at Meta. (And who recently started following my brother, who is also on a self-inflicted but controlled scary path just like me).

In the Video, LeCun offers us an alternate path for AI. One that I personally believe is more likely than the path many of the AI Doomers seem to think we are on.

And by the way, LeCun made this list of top immigrants in the U.S. working on AI.

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One Meme: Explaining Binary Search to the Cops

This excerpt is from a Tweet about a Computer Scientist who tried to explain Binary Search to the cops.

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-Louie

P.S. You can reply to this email; it will get to me, and I will read it.