2 · Indian Gorillas

Allow the failures to be blunt screens that you see in. Zoom out, look at it from 10,000 feet, and you realise it is just an event cumulated from atoms. By Camusian absurdism — being in debt, everything — it is all technically meaningless. It's just an event, and we are the ones who choose to create or find meaning in it. And when you really tap into that depth of Zen, anything is possible. For me it was prayers, and going through mental suffering in the early phases of my life, that enabled it — I can't teach this. But when you have it, failure is just an event. You allow some level of temporary interference, then move on.

The world is not evenly distributed, and there is a lot of misallocation in the short term, just like any data distribution. But the longer time plays into it, usually what is correct happens. Because I was close to getting into Oxbridge, I was able to network with some of the people who end up in these institutions, and you get an insight into how they actually operate, what their day-to-day looks like. Frankly, there is a lot of partying, a lot of people who simply followed the academic route, and very few who have the blessing of suffering the anxiety and fear of uncertainty that manifests from deviating off the standard path.

So imagine the constructs of every titanic, intimidating firm, institution, entity — Stanford, Y Combinator, LVMH, Samsung, Apple. They are just random people, just like you, if not dumber and more introverted, who did something and it worked out. If that doesn't release all the bullshit, I don't know what will.

There is a reason why people's lives do not become completely different within a short time period: the input's quality and quantity are constant.

The poignant but true reality is that people don't get what they deserve. They get what they internally believe they deserve, and choose to act and live those expectations out.

Just like anything in life, know that you are taking a massive risk. Yes, lots of quants are filthy rich, but it's an unparalleled risk; most mathematicians are broke as fuck. Just look at Newton, who was a horrible investor. It takes a decade to get good at coding, trading, mathematics, economics, finance — each individually. But you have to be able to orchestrate everything better than professors, and that is still atomic compared to the skillset and knowledge necessitated to be a hedge fund manager, a quant firm founder and CEO. You need to do it several times over.

Every insight, or alpha, is a fruit that blossoms from the tree of research that we conduct. But it has two contingencies: it is context dependent, and it has a finite lifespan. There is no universal truth in derived insight. Revelations have alpha decay just like edge. You lose your edge if you do what everyone else does, and yes, your edge is most likely something other people can think of too — so "to what degree do I have edge" is the more honest question. Knowing alpha is one thing; being alpha-sensitive is another thing we can use as edge.