Restraint

Back in 2011, I was tapping away at my desk at The Daily Dirtnap headquarters, when I got an email from one of my subscribers at a large hedge fund:

How do I get off this thing?

The name wasn’t familiar to me. Nonetheless, I told him that I was happy to unsubscribe him and took him off the list.

Then he sent me this:

Goodbye, and bad luck.

It was one of those emails where you sit there, stunned, staring at your computer for fifteen minutes. Bad luck? He could have called me a lot of things: dipshit, jerkoff, asswipe—no. Wishing somebody bad luck is about one of the most devastating burns in history. Savage.

I was like, who the fuck is this guy? So I googled him.

Oh.

The guy was former Vice-Chairman of the Fed.

So here’s what probably happened. In retirement, he was in some emeritus role at this hedge fund to pick up a couple of bucks. In comes me, 37-year-old newsletter writer, shitting on the Fed all the time in his publication. He probably got sick of me after a while, and put me in my place.

Except: now I will always remember him as a giant douche.

Before he sent that email, I had no idea he was a douche. Now I think he is a douche. He’s dead, now, and I still think he is a douche. You know what they say: better to remain silent and appear a douche, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

My man did not exercise a great deal of restraint that day. Let me tell you something. Every single time—every single time I have sent an email in anger, I have regretted it. Every time. Batting 1.000. And let me tell you something else. As a financial newsletter writer, there are lots of opportunities to lose your cool and send an email in anger. The vast majority of my subscribers are happy warriors, but I do have some malcontents. People will fire off insults at me from time to time. The challenge is to handle them with grace and dignity.

There is another saying: People don’t remember what you said. People remember the way you made them feel. I’m a writer, and also a funny writer, and my wit can be a neutron bomb. I’ve been told by many people that they thought it was hilarious when some rando would mess with me on Twitter and I’d hang ‘em high in a quote tweet. I don’t do that anymore. I have the ability to do that, but nuclear weapons aren’t meant to be used. They’re a deterrent. I’m also practicing restraint, which is an underappreciated virtue. Another thing people don’t realize: when you lose your cool, you lose the argument.

So I have lots of opportunities to practice the underappreciated virtue of restraint on a daily basis. Sometimes with my wife. Anyhow, we are building a house and the big dumb bank decides they’re going to withhold part of a draw to the general contractor. Basically, there were some cost overruns and they were withholding the amount of the cost overruns. Except there’s nothing about that in the loan agreement. That’s what I told them, in an email—we signed a contract. I was firm, but polite, and eventually they backed down. There’s an essay in here about not trusting banks, but the bigger point is that if I flamed on them, there probably would have been a different, unfavorable result.

Like in 2008, when I first started The Daily Dirtnap. I was wound pretty tight back then. I was in a hurry to get a professional liability insurance policy in place (to insure me in case of slander or libel), and the insurance agent wasn’t moving fast enough, so I flamed on him. He responded in a way that conveyed nothing but disappointment. I got what I wanted—but he was not cool to me after that. That guy still thinks I am an asshole. If anyone ever asked him, hey, do you know Jared Dillian? He would say: that guy is a flaming asshole. I really don’t want to go around leaving a trail of people who think I am an asshole. I did that enough when I was in college.

It's not just emails. We all have that filter that prevents us from saying what we really want to say. If you asked anyone who knows me, they would probably tell you that I don’t have much of a filter. I sure have been working on it. My best friend freshman year in college was a guy who had no filter whatsoever—he would say anything to anybody. That was a quality I admired—brutal, unvarnished honesty. Back then, for me to be nice to someone I didn’t like felt like I was telling a little lie. Me and my fucking principles. As an adult, you learn to go around to get around, and you’re polite and decent to everyone you come in contact with—even people you don’t particularly like.

One of the things about working on a trading floor pre-2010 is that there was a lot of yelling. Lots and lots of yelling. And I was the biggest yeller of them all. We’d all scream at each other all day and then go have a beer and laugh about it. Except one time, I unleashed my fury on a young analyst who was just trying to do his job. From my vantage point, he was fucking up. So I let him know about it. He never spoke to me again. At the time, I thought he was a cherry, but in hindsight, he was just a lot more civilized than I was. He is part of the long trail of people who think I am an asshole. In any event, a bank trading floor is like a wax museum today, to the point where people whisper. It’s bizarre.

When I first started the newsletter, I had rented a small, windowless office in an executive office suite on 3^rd Avenue. I rather liked the office manager. She was nice, and cute. One day I’m sitting in there doing my thing, and she abruptly opens the door and tells me that my rent is going up. That was the last thing I wanted to hear—money was tight in the early days. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I snapped at her. I bit her head off. And then I sat in my office, sulking, filled with regret.

Fuck. Now I have to go apologize. So I drag my ass down to her office, poke my head in, and apologize for being an asshole. And then something magical happened. She said, “You know, Jared, people around here really like you.” I will never forget it. The point here is that if you are an asshole to someone, and don’t practice restraint, you can unfuck the situation, if you make yourself vulnerable.

Restraint of pen and tongue. The key thing to do is pause, rather than react. If you get a provocative email, write a draft and stick it in your drafts folder. Go home and sleep on it. When you get to work the next morning, 99 times out of 100 you will decide not to send the email. If someone says something provocative to you in person, pause, and think about it before you react. I was a trader, and I will always have trader in my DNA. My instinct is to react—not think. It has taken 15 years of training to unlearn this behavior. Think. Be deliberative. These things don’t come easy to ex-traders.

Every interaction you have with someone is an opportunity to make their day better. I forget that, sometimes, being wound up in my own shit. And remember what they always say:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Everything is small stuff.