You Can Do Anything

It’s been a while since those Extreme Makeover shows were on. Where they’d take an objectively ugly human being, get them clothes, hair, makeup, teeth—and turn them into a completely new person. Everyone would be amazed by the transformation. I had a lot of thoughts about those shows. Most people thought they were exploitative. I didn’t. I thought they were cool.

Probably the greatest fallacy that persists into the 21st century is that good looks is a function of genetics, and nothing else. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know how many models you follow on Instagram, but sometimes they will do reels of makeup tutorials, and when you see them without makeup, you’re consistently unimpressed. They are really, really good at putting on makeup. And clothes, and hair. They are fucking experts at personal appearance. Now, that may not be your goal in life, to take pretty pictures and put them on the internet, but you should realize that it is a job, it is a lot of work, and some people are pretty good at it. Same for the male models, but for them it’s abs, not makeup. Both take a lot of effort, not DNA.

Comeliness is probably less than 50% genetics. It’s all the things that I described, but it’s also self-esteem and confidence. If you work at it, you can be beautiful. That goes for men as well as women. Does genetics help? Yes—but it is all a matter of priorities. Let me put it this way:  I am a 48-year-old fat guy. If it was really a priority of mine to become an Instagram model, if I spent a year of my life working on it, I could do it. And so could you. If you spent as much time as Brad Pitt does thinking about being cool, you would probably be pretty cool.

Now, in economics, there is something known as comparative advantage, which basically says that we should do the things that we are good at, comparatively speaking, and not waste time on other things. I am good at writing, so it makes sense that I should spend more time on that than doing sit-ups. And someone who is objectively beautiful should be a model. But it doesn’t change the fact that we are capable of doing any fucking thing that we want. I played racquetball for ten years and got pretty great at it, which culminated in coming in 3rd in the city-wide tournament in Myrtle Beach. I had to play a lot to get that good. It was somewhat rewarding.

Not to get too explicit, but another fallacy is that people think that we are stuck with the bodies that we are given. Absolutely not: we can transform them, and I’m not just talking about surgery, though I have nothing against plastic surgery. At various periods of my life, I’ve been in shape and out of shape. I’m currently out of shape. But when I was in my 20s, I was bench-pressing 325 pounds and running sub-4 hour marathons. I looked like a Greek god. And then I went to Wall Street and things got hard and I didn’t really have the emotional space in my life to work out and be a trader at the same time. Comparative advantage, again: it made more sense for me to be spending time on finance than in the gym. So I got really good at that, instead.

I’ll go further. If you want to be a rock star, you can be a rock star. You have to obsessively play guitar and shop at John Varvatos. If you want to be a CEO, you can be a CEO. In the old days people used to say that you could work your way up from the mailroom. That is still possible. I found out recently that 95% of Domino’s franchisees started out working as cooks or drivers. I like to tell people that if I got a job as a line cook at Waffle House, I’d be a Waffle House executive within five years.

If you are working in back office at a bank, and you want to move to a trading desk, you can do that, too. You basically have to make a nuisance of yourself. You have to do some serious butt snorkeling. If you’ve ever worked on Wall Street, you know this: people are self-interested, and if someone is asking for a favor that will not help them get a bigger bonus at the end of the year, that email is not going to get returned. One thing that helps is knowledge. Knowledge is power on a trading floor, and if you’re the only person in equities who knows how a bond auction works, you suddenly become very valuable when one goes tapioca. For a period of about ten years, I read every finance book imaginable. Old ones, new ones. I became an expert on a lot of things. Those people are valuable to hire. They are indispensable. I read a book every weekend on the couch with my cat Otto on my lap. We read a lot of books together. And here I am.

I was talking with a friend in Myrtle Beach the other day. He’s a contractor, a fix-and-flip guy, and he is getting a bit old to be getting on his hands and knees and putting in flooring. He makes a good living doing flips, in spite of not being the most driven guy in the world. He told me that he’s thinking about taking a white-collar job. I was like, my friend, what we have in this country is a mismatch of supply and demand for white-collar jobs. You might make $35,000 as a receptionist, but $110,000 as a truck driver. At which point he lit up like a Christmas tree. “I’ve always wanted to drive a truck!” “So, drive a truck,” I said. He continued: “Maybe I could start out with a tow truck and do salvage and make some money and buy 5 or 6 tow trucks and have a towing company.” I was getting excited for him—it was the most enthusiastic I had seen him in a while.

“But I don’t understand the accounting,” he said. “I don’t know how to use Quickbooks.” I said, “It’s the easiest thing in the world—I’ll teach you.” But then his enthusiasm began to wane, faced with the prospect of doing something new and unfamiliar, which is shorthand for saying it was outside his comfort zone. He is probably reading this newsletter, so I will speak directly to him: success finds us when we spend as much time outside our comfort zone as possible. I also use Quickbooks. I taught myself. It’s not the most intuitive software in the world, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a piece of cake. I had to do a lot of new and unfamiliar things when I started my business. You just figure it out.

The point is that we can do anything we want. And we can be whoever we want to be. One thing that gives me hope is looking at early pictures of Depeche Mode. They were just teenagers—and the biggest freaks and geeks of all time. They were absolute losers. 40 years later, they’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You can Google those pictures. The absolute last people you would have expected to be international rock stars. And the amazing thing is that they did it their way. Nobody ever knew they wanted to listen to darkwave techno until they heard it from Depeche Mode. Combine it with some great songwriting and fantastic hooks, and it doesn’t matter what they look like. You might say there are limitations on this, but there really aren’t. Work and effort will get you 90% of the way there.

Some of the world’s great traders and investors had unlikely backgrounds. Mark Minervini has an 8th grade education. Paul Tudor Jones is from Memphis. Most people don’t come tumbling out of the womb looking like an investment banker. It is a lot of work, and a lot of risk. That’s why people love watching the World Series of Poker main event so much—any asshole can walk in off the street and win $10 million. Any asshole often does. But it’s not luck—these guys are very smart, and have put in a lot of hours. There was a point in my life where I thought about playing poker semi-professionally. I simply don’t have the emotional makeup for it, and it is good that I know that about myself. And I don’t want to put in the time. But you know what? I could try.

I don’t like it when I hear people say they can’t do things. As Generation Xers, our parents used to tell us this when we were kids: you can do anything you want. I took it to heart. Aaron Judge is genetically superior to all of us. We can’t all be him. But we can all succeed without those physical and intellectual gifts. There are numerous examples of it.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: Damabiah – Irminsul, Le Pilier Du Monde (Andrew Bayer Remix). The most badass track ever made. I played this live one time and when the bass dropped, this guy jumps out of his shoes and yells, “Holy shit!”

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.