- K
- Nov 21
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 23
I had crossed the mid-point of my economic life some months back. The term 'economic life' can be loosely defined as from the point of time one steps into the working world to the point at which one retires. The exact points of each varies by country, law and personal definition of course. According to the conventional wisdom of society and mainstream media, spending twenty years on the hamster wheel means that I am in the “prime” of my life.
From another and somewhat darker perspective, governments and organizations probably see an obedient, housebroken dog [1] who can be plugged into the system to make money on a tightly-controlled leash. Banks also love these people. It presents an opportunity to monetize another twenty years of revenue in the form of getting a fee from managing assets or receiving interest payments from these high income earners who live delicately under the weight of their mortgages.
A former co-worker in banking used to say of our jobs, “You are basically trading time for money”. And being a non-replenishing commodity, time increasingly becomes more important than money.
But after twenty years on the hamster wheel, I had realized we spend most of our time learning how to game the system, just so we can live the way we want. In fact, we had started to do this since our school days.
Let me explain.
The pathway to being an good student isn’t acquiring knowledge, but to excel at exams, and excellence is mostly marked on a bell curve. To get on the right end of the bell curve, one simply needs to be good at predicting which questions will come out so that you can maximize the probability of getting the highest grades. When I step into the exam hall, I am only concerned about my score relative to everyone else, and not whether I had enjoyed the learning process or could apply what I had learned.
I had friends who graduated with distinctions in the field of Computer Engineering, but clueless on how to troubleshoot their network router at home. On the other hand, I also have many friends out there who aren't credentialed with a CFA or an MBA, and who are great at what they do.
You can succeed at the workplace by gaming your way into getting employed. Just learn and exploit the dysfunctional aspects of an organization, give a false impression of capability and suck up to the right people.
One of the co-founders at Y Combinator, Paul Graham[2], once wrote:
"There will always be a certain amount of fakeness in the work you do when you're being taught something, and if you measure their performance it's inevitable that people will exploit the difference to the point where much of what you're measuring is artifacts of the fakeness."
That was how many of my former co-workers who were terrible at their jobs managed to stay hidden in the blind spots of their organizations every year.
You can also succeed at fundraising by trying to learn the techniques for convincing large celebrity-like investors to endorse the business and using fanciful slide decks to tell stories. In fact, some firms have gotten so lost in telling stories when playing the fundraising game that they fail to realize customers and revenue are fundamentally what attracts investors.
The underrated truth was to always solve for cash flow from operating activities first then address cash flow from financing. But knowing how to manufacture a good equity story has become the yardstick for measuring performance and too many companies out there do it the other way around.
We have spent nearly our whole lives learning how to game the system, just to beat the competition and look good.
When you have been brought up most of your life learning how to game the system, the metric for success becomes defined as beating someone rather than curating the life you actually want.
Incidentally, these people who succeed in the competition are often the same ones who are suffocating those who are succeeding by doing what they love at their own pace.
Some of us feel the pain of our own stagnation by looking outwards at everyone else progressing forward. But looking inwards, you realize all that resentment and envy stemmed from an unhealthy sense of competition.
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious, but the race for returns and big money has transformed most people into lifeless souls trying to step over each other at all costs.
Not all of us wants to outrun a ghost. Some of us just want to slow down and breathe.
“The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work. But there were aspects of the way of life that went with it that I had never come to terms with — from the day I started out to today. There was something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of it. I was well acquainted with it. I understood that it was all part of the process, and that there would be a regeneration eventually. And it was only really in the last experience [...] that I began to feel quite strongly that maybe there wouldn’t be that regeneration anymore. That I just probably should just keep away from it, because I didn’t have anything else to offer.” - Daniel Day Lewis (retired British actor) [3]
[1] To borrow a phrase from Nassim Taleb's book "Skin in the Game".
[2] Most of what I had written had been a personal reflection after reading Paul Graham's essay on "Before the Startup" (https://paulgraham.com)
[3] From an interview with Daniel Day Lewis on his retirement from film-making. (https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/daniel-day-lewis-son-ronan-anemone-interview-1235420815/)