Matthew Mandel

At the end of his recent interview with Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh asked

… what really strikes out to me about you… is just how broadly you think of your job description. To the extent that you think of if science is slowing down and civilization is stagnating, that’ll be bad for the GDP of the internet, so you can better get on that. Or if COVID keeps going on, that’s not good for business. Maybe that’s not the way you thought about why you needed to do Fast Grants. But in some sense, the extended phenotype of what you think your job is just incredibly broad. And I just wonder, is that trainable? When did you get that? How do you think about that?

I thought this was an excellent question. I would be shocked to learn that Collison self-consciously decided to start Fast Grants because COVID was bad for the GDP of the internet. But it seems important for humans to able to tell these kinds of stories about ourselves.

It reminds me of Jeff Bezos’ take on “work-life balance”

My view is: I don’t even like the phrase “work-life balance”… I like the phrase “work-life harmony”… [the balance] metaphor is so dangerous because it implies there’s a strict trade-off

Bezos warns against seeing the different parts of one’s life as in tension. Instead, he encourages us to put them in harmony, to develop a unified theory of how they fit together into a coherent whole.

I think it’s healthy for us to have such unified theories of ourselves. Both as an ex post exercise in making the contingent facts of our existence add up to a satisfying story. But also as an ex ante tool for deciding how to operate under uncertainty.

In his essay “Existentialism is a Humanism”, Sartre tries to show the impossibility of general normative rules by describing the case of a Frenchman during WWII. In the example, the Frenchman is torn between fighting for his country and avenging his dead brother and staying with his mother, who would be left alone otherwise. Sartre contends that ethical systems like Christianity and Kantianism fail to help one choose between their duty to their country and brother and their duty to their mother. Perhaps if not Christianity or the categorical imperative, we should look to our self-mythologies to guide us in these situations, to try to figure out what’s most authentic to us.

This heuristic isn’t just useful for moralized choices: it has more instrumental/pragmatic benefits too. At USV, we talk a lot about “USV-style deals”. There’s a standard that’s emerged from USV’s history that simultaneously informs our decision-making today and is continuously reshaped by what we actually do (see Jared and my recent post on USV’s approach to deep tech investing). This approach might sound narcissistic or self-congratulatory, but I don’t think we’re so interested in “USV-style deals” merely because of the success such deals generated historically or because we think they’re objectively the best. Rather, people at USV seem to think that we‘ll find the greatest success making the investments most authentic to us.

There’s something instructive about that for life in general. When considering what career to pursue, it’s silly to ask which is the objectively best career. The more pressing question is what’s the best career for you.

We like mythologizing others, but I wonder if self-mythology isn’t underrated.