Never Enough

How do you stay hungry, when you have everything you need?

This is a phenomenon: people will continue to grow and learn and get paid and promoted up until the point at which they are comfortable, at which point they will stop growing and rest on their laurels, sit on the couch and eat Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips. For some people, that happens when they make $100 million, for others, $1 million, and for still others, $100,000. Life is good. Instead of hustling, I’m going to watch football this weekend and zone out.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, in its place. It is always good to take a moment and enjoy your success. But if you don’t grow, you die. And I’ve seen a lot of people do well and then get complacent, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

Little-known fact about me: when I was at Lehman Brothers, in 2007, I tried to switch from trading ETFs to treasury bonds. Under a cloak of secrecy, I went upstairs and talked to the co-heads of rates trading and pitched them on the idea of me trading part of the yield curve. They entertained the idea seriously, but said that pretty much every seat was occupied at that point. They offered to make me a desk strategist instead, but that wasn’t what I wanted—I wanted to trade bonds. So I went back downstairs and continued to sling ETFs, back to the salt mines. But even at that point in my career, I was willing to try something new.

One of the reasons I did this was because I saw the increasing amounts of automation that was happening in the equity world, and one day, that automation would claim my job. It wasn’t happening in the bond market at that point, so I figured I could stay a few years ahead of technological advancement if I traded something else. Also, I would learn something new, which would be fantastic, and make me much more marketable. I’m really sorry it didn’t work out. I also liked the guys on the treasury desk personally, and thought it would be a good fit. I was 33 years old at the time.

But you see some people who are in a buggy whip runoff business, and their plan is just to try to stick around as long as possible and ride it to zero, hopefully somewhere close to retirement age. But that usually isn’t how it works out. You get to age 47, you get riffed, and you have no marketable skills. This is how most people become real estate agents, actually. A lot of people who become real estate agents are people who got spit out the bottom of something else. It wasn’t their lifelong ambition to become a real estate agent. And the world needs real estate agents, but even that business is going to be disintermediated, eventually. So the conclusion here is that you have to be adaptable, and constantly changing, and always learning to survive in a capitalist economy. Some people do this better than others.

But beyond trying to stay ahead of obsolescence, you should learn and grow…because it is good to learn and grow. And you should try to make more and more money…because it is good to make more and more money. You know what sounds like the worst thing in the world? Getting lucky at age 25, making $50 million, and having nothing to do for the rest of your life. I wouldn’t wish that fresh hell upon anyone. Of course, to a lot of people, that sounds pretty good. Make enough money so you don’t have to work, and then don’t work. I heard of a lottery winner one time who won $20 million. He used that as seed capital to start a business and turned $20 million into $200 million. Not many people are wired this way.

This is the point at which I bring up John Bogle, the inventor of the index fund and the founder of Vanguard. At his death, Bogle was only worth $20 million, like the lottery winner guy. His counterparts, like Ned and Abby Johnson at Fidelity, are worth tens of billions. Bogle simply didn’t want the money. In fact, he wrote a book about it in 2002, called Enough, which said that we should all be satisfied with what we have and not work for any more. It would be one thing if these were simply oddball rantings of a fuzzchin philosopher, but this was a real book published by a real publisher which told people not to make any money, and that we should be satisfied with enough.

I cannot even begin to describe the profound philosophical differences I had with Bogle. In fact, if I were to write a rebuttal to that book, it would be called Never Enough. It’s not simply about the money, but for God’s sake, if you don’t want the money, give it away. Really, what it’s about is growth and progress. With every action you take, you’re either moving towards death, or further away from death—but never standing still. To simply exist is to be moving towards death. What are you contributing to the world? Your contributions do not necessarily have to be financial. If you want to make a pile of money and do philanthropy for the rest of your life, then great! If you want to make a pile of money and then go down to the country club to drink at 11am, not great. I feel the Gordon Gekko speech coming on: Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. That index fund you own in your IRA was created by a guy who didn’t want any of it. And of course, the core philosophy behind indexing is that the average is better than the great. And maybe for a lot of people it is. Not for me. Just because it’s hard to beat the market, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Hard things are worth doing, you know.

Does anyone need a billion dollars? Well, in the case of Elon Musk, he actually does—he needs it to go to Mars. He will spend it all to get there. That’s pretty ambitious. Maybe there are billionaires who are not too ambitious. Maybe they will donate it to children’s hospitals. Maybe they will bequeath it to their shiftless offspring. It’s not up to us to tell them how to dispose of it. It is, after all, private property. About 5-6 years ago, John Paulson donated $250 million to Harvard. Malcolm Gladwell, who never goes on Twitter, went on Twitter and had a raging conniption about it. Now, don’t get me wrong, Harvard is a comically bad use of $250 million, especially knowing what we know now. But it’s Paulson’s money, he gets to decide how to dispose of it. He did not obtain it through force or fraud.

Greed for knowledge. I went back to grad school at age 46 to pursue a degree in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design. This, while I was running two businesses and doing a radio show at the same time. I finished my MFA three years later, and let me just say that there was really no reason for it, other than greed for knowledge. I’m not getting paid more because I got an MFA. It’s not really getting me published anywhere. All I got out of it was knowledge, which is good enough. And it was life changing—it turned me from an amateur writer into a professional writer, and my goal, now, for the rest of my life, is to publish a book a year. Writers write, you know—that is the one thing I learned from that program. And I would absolutely do it all over again.

There is never enough life, enough love, enough knowledge, enough money, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. That’s the leper’s bell of a second-rate intellect approaching. Don’t ever let anyone tell you should be satisfied with what you have, at any age or stage of your life. If you’re not going forward, if you’re not constantly challenging yourself, you’re going backwards. Never get comfortable. Never get complacent. And the most important decision you will ever make in your life is what to do with the next 24 hours.