John Mark Nickels: preference

Transcript context

…I love that. Okay, so I'm going to close with a question that is rooted in something that you shared with me when we were chatting about this podcast that I think is going to be helpful to a lot of people. What have you found to be keys to a successful, impactful, rich, fun life? It's a great question, and I think lots of people have different prescriptions for that, and I don't claim to have the one truth around that, but the first thing I would say as a meta observation is I spend a lot of time thinking about objective functions. We design algorithms to do matching and pricing and think about short-term effects and long-term effects. And so I really am ingrained in this idea of we have an objective function for our life. And then the problem is that a lot of us aren't conscious of it. It's just like an implied OF that you inherited values from your church or community or what your parents valued or what you learned to be good at, and I do this for work and blah, blah, blah, and I'm just kind of bobbing along. That's why I love Ray Dalio's principle thing where it's like, Hey, write down your values and your principles and get clear on what they are. Or Clayton Christensen wrote a great book that he's less known for, he's obviously known for Innovator's Dilemma, but he wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? And he was trying to answer this question of, he teaches whatever, MBA students at Harvard, and he's like, "Wow, all these executives are super successful. They're like Fortune 500 execs. They're most super successful, but they're all divorced and their kids hate them and their personal lives are a mess. What's happening?" And so one of the key insights he comes to is like, it's Sunday night and you have the choice of playing with your daughter, or you're reading a book or playing a game, and you have a presentation to Dara on Monday. And he's like, "Well, I could make those slides a little bit better and I could go practice or knock out some emails," or whatever it is you want to do. And so what he basically found was the type A exec, successful people are very short-term OF driven. They're like, "Well, presentation's tomorrow, and that can either go great or okay based on Sunday night." Whereas like, "My daughter will be here, I'll play with her next week." And the problem is that he's getting in this cycle where it's like, okay, you start working every Sunday night and then years and years go by and suddenly you don't have a relationship with your daughter who's now a teenager. But I think we're just not conscious of that. So to me, the first piece of advice would be get clear on your objective function. And one way that I've gotten clear on it is trying to think about it from future me. Because five years from now, I'm not going to give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better, but I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters. And that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, those will translate into the relationship with her. And I think a lot of us aren't just tuned into that. I love the stoic stuff, being mindful of death, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, all those great ones. those will translate into the relationship with her. And I think a lot of us aren't just tuned into that. I love the stoic stuff, being mindful of death, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, all those great ones. Not to be morbid, but just again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. And we try to avoid that and we try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it. And the horror of it is that we succeed. We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do. And that can lead us to doing things that ultimately don't matter in the long run, and focusing on the wrong things. And so to me, it's like an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities, stop wasting time on things that don't matter with people who matter. This relationship, this journey, it will come to an end. I'm actually tearing up and feeling tingly just saying that. It's like even right now, come back to it. How am I going to spend my afternoon? Am I going to hug my daughters? Am I going to spend time with them after work or am I going to do email all night? What would I wish I had done when I'm in my last breath?…

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