How to Live an Asymmetric Life 🎰

Today, I’d like to share a powerful piece of advice that I wish I had known when I graduated. Whether you are at the beginning of your career, feeling stuck, or simply unsure about your direction, I hope this wisdom can offer some guidance.

Graham Weaver, the Founder of Alpine Investors and lecturer at Stanford Business School, shared his insights on living an asymmetric life during the Stanford 2023 Last Lecture Series. According to Graham, there are four key ways to embrace an asymmetric life.

What does “asymmetric” mean?

No matter what you do in this life, there will always be a downside when it comes to investing. Everything you do is an investment. You’re never going to eliminate it entirely. You may reduce it a little bit but the “more valuable part and the magic is what you can achieve on the upside.”

In his 30 years of experience as a professional investor, Graham summarizes great investing in a single word: asymmetry.

We are all trying to maximize the good things and avoid the bad things in life.

What you are looking for is the biggest possible outcome relative to you risk. And that risk could be your time or money. On the other side, you’ll want to stack up criteria for success as much as possible so it becomes asymmetric.

And remember,

Source

They don’t stack linearly, they stack logarithmically (or asymmetrically) and you can have an almost infinite outcome.

Four principles

If you get one of these principles right, you will dramatically improve your life. If you get two or three right, you’ll have a magical and incredible life. But if you run the table on all four, you can have literally an infinite life, you can have almost anything that you want.

Principle 1: Do HARD Things

When I was a child, I used to enjoy watching TV a lot. As an adult, I crave for reading. I have been tempted to quit my job so that I can spend more time catching up on all the books I have wanted to read, relearn subjects that interest me, and engage in activities that I truly want to do. As a child, watching TV was the easier option, while reading was hard.

During my early school days, I worked hard in my studies to achieve good grades. As I gained more experience from work, I realized that true learning occurs outside the confines of the classroom, it’s through reading, doing, and making rather than simply passing exams. As a good student, passing tests was the easier, while genuine learning and critical thinking was hard.

Both times, I chose the easier path. But they did not offer me comfort or peace.

Since the revelation, I started new journeys, including writing this newsletter. It hasn’t been easy. But I realized that I could push myself harder than I thought. Half of the gain in this process was just reminding myself that I had a lot more than I thought I did. And, today, I’m learning and sharing something new every week. It has helped me finding jobs, making friends, and getting the best talents for my teams!

If you choose to get on this journey, your life is -

“almost always going to get worse first.”

Hard things are hard. For instance, when you have to have a hard conversation with your partner, “that particular night your life is going to get a little worse. But then you are going to come out the other end, and it’s going to get better.”

Similarly, if you want to pursue a side project, change career, or learn something new. You will hit a learning curve and enter a new state of life. You need to realize that -

the thing that’s keeping you there is the first move is always going to be worse. But eventually these downward curves are going to get a lot shallower.

Source: Life of Growth and Change

And the biggest factor for your curve is "fear". The more you put yourself in the situations where you do hard things, the shallower and shallower the divots are going to get.

If you want to live an asymmetric life, do the hard things. Because:

Everything you want in life is on the other side of “worse first”.

Principle 2 & 3: Do YOUR Things and Do It For Decades

When you graduate, a common path that many people take is to join a large company, where they can receive a salary, bonuses, and vacation benefits. The goal for many is to work their way up to becoming a vice president in a company as quickly as possible. And there are also paths less travelled, such as taking a gap year to travel the world or starting your own venture.

In my own experience, I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do or how to pursue something beyond finding a job. Like most people, I ended up choosing the more conventional path. I would start work early in the day, leave late at night, and work on weekends. I shortened my maternity leave to return to work, I missed out on precious playtime with my kids.

What struck me was what Graham said:

Either way, there’s going to be suffering. There’s no easy path, there’s no safe path, there’s no path of ease.

If life is suffering, then why not choose something worth suffering for?

When faced with choices about what we want to do, most of us miss one important piece of the equation. We factor in all the risks and tradeoffs, but we completely discount how differently we will show up when we’re truly energized about something. When our whole being is fully invested, we tap into a superpower, and we can sustain that for a long time. You won’t tap into this power as long as you’re living someone else’s dream. 

Further more, do your things for years.

The compounding effect of investment or life pays off when you have the patience. And you have patience when you do things you are passionate about.

10,000 hours rule. Ten thousand hours is roughly a decade.

There is NO obstacle that won’t yield to you at full power for a decade.

If you want to live an asymmetric life: Do hard things. Do your thing. Do it for decades.

Principle 4: Write Your Stories

If you find yourself feeling stuck, writing a story could help.

Here are three rules to follow when writing this story:

1. “It’s going to take place 5 years from now. Look past your immediate situation that’s been clouding your judgement.

2. Think of what would you do if you knew you would not fail? What would be your genie goal?

3. The “how” is the killer of all great dreams. Forget the “how”, just write about your dream.”

What then?

Ask one question to yourself,

So what’s the first step?

That’s your first step.

Don’t write a story about what happened, write your story, then make it happen.

Reflecting on my own journey, I can say I didn’t play small (or play not-to-lose). I come from an impoverished area in the remote mountains of Tibet, and I have always aspired to write my own stories. I will share more about my journey in a future post if there is interest. But for now, I am committed to continuing my writing journey.

No matter where you are in your life right now, you can write a new story. 

If you want to live an asymmetric life: Do hard things. Do your thing. Do it for decades. Write your story. 

Nothing’s better than Graham’s speech itself, check it out!