David Senra: preference

Transcript context

…This is a good personal pivot. It's something I've never asked you in all the hours we spent. This is crazy. This is the first time we've met in person. We spent hours and hours and hours on Zoom. How did you decide that this is what you were going to do with your time on this planet? What led to this? Our mutual friend Jeremy from forming Tiny, I just spent a bunch of hours with him. He was in town. In one sentence, he psychoanalyzes me better than anybody else ever has. He goes, you didn't have any mentors growing up, and then you took it to this extreme. He said it much more eloquently than I am. He's like, you don't have any mentors, so I view your career as the psychopathic search for mentors that can help you. To answer your question, I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I've only had one habit in my whole life and that was reading. I was reading for as long as I can remember. My mom passed away from breast cancer a couple of years ago. We didn't have a lot of money. Long story, but I was the first person not even graduated in college, but high school in my family. I came from a family that's unfortunately, both sides of the family with no education, a lot of just bad habits. I identify a lot with what Charlie Munger says because he essentially observes by behavior and then tries to do the opposite. Let me give you an example. I was just up in Canada. Actually, at an event, Andrew Wilkinson was hosting for a bunch of entrepreneurs. Me, Shane Parrish from The Knowledge Project, Farnam Street was up there, Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World, and we were doing this panel together. Shane's the moderator, and we don't know what we're going to talk about beforehand. Shane asked the question, he's like, oh, what did you learn most from your upbringing or something like that? I go, I learned not to do cocaine and to graduate high school, that kind of thing. There's just a bunch of anti models. I thought about this as I was walking through the tenderloin this morning in San Francisco. I was like, I should do this walk with my daughter as the best. Like, hey, this way you don't do drugs. This is the perfect example. You observe bad behavior, and then you do the opposite. Long story short, I've always been obsessed with reading. One of the best things my mom ever did was, even if we didn't have money for books, she would take me to the bookstore and just sit there. Bookstores are so cool because they just let you read. No one comes there and like, hey, you've been reading for an hour, you got to get out of here. Just read and read and read. Was there anybody who introduced you to reading books or there was just something about you?…

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