Capital Gains will be off for the next two weeks, and back in early January, which means that now is an excellent time to make a point most immediately applicable to New Years Resolutions, but relevant basically any time you're judging whether or not a plan is feasible based on who has or hasn't successfully executed something similar in the past: it's hard to give and receive life advice because of the fundamental incommensurability of effort. Or, put more plainly: you simply have no idea how much harder or easier it is for other people to behave in a certain way, and it's reasonable to bet that outlier performers have fairly alien preferences compared to the rest of the population, but that they aren't fully aware of them.

Part of this is a pure selection bias problem: agreeable extroverts will probably tell you that the best thing you can do for your career is to meet as many people as possible, so you have lots of second-degree connections through which you can hear about opportunities. This is probably true for them, but someone who naturally loves nerding out about esoteric programming languages would dismiss this advice out of hand—meeting people is hard, getting them to like you is harder, so you should focus on simple, achievable goals like getting a thousand stars on your Github repo.

Another piece of that selection bias is luck. If you're comparing yourself to a cohort of successful people, you're mostly looking at a group of people who didn't: have some medical condition that kept them from working; develop such a condition; get addicted to drugs (or video games, or TV, or sports betting, any number of behaviors that provide a jolt of dopamine that's predictably almost enough, every time); they haven't had to spend a few years caring for an ill family member, or dealing with the aftermath of such a family member dying. None of these are 100% generalizable, and some of them are inverted; Steve Wynn made some valuable early connections in the gambling world when his father died while he was young and turned out to have many gambling debts to many different people who were apparently impressed with Wynn's insistence that he couldn't pay back the debt but would absolutely find a way to do so. But in general, these kinds of problems do crop up in plenty of people's lives, and mean that anyone who doesn't have them is starting out ahead. None of which justifies setting low standards, but all of which is a reminder to set realistic ones.

Some of these traits cut both ways. A compulsion to acquire information and argue about it is desirable in a tax lawyer, but if that same compulsion means that they spend forty hours a week in Wikipedia edit wars over Star Wars trivia, it's a liability. Extroverts meet a lot of interesting people, some of whom are very valuable to know, but they're a lot worse at sitting still for extended periods and absorbing challenging material, so some doors are shut to them, or aren't worth prying open. Even mostly negative traits like depressive tendencies and disagreeability can have upside when used correctly; usually markets peak when the last bear gives up, but if you're temperamentally cranky and think other people are unbelievably stupid, you'll probably be short equities at the peak (and may well flip to the long side in disgust when you decide that other investors are once again engaged in ridiculous herding behavior).

The outputs of these traits are visible, but the process behind them isn't. It's a generally good rule of thumb to assume that anyone who achieved something extraordinary in a complicated field worked a lot harder than the average person is willing to admit. But if they had some internal motivation to work that hard, it's tough to operationalize that insight for two reasons. First, they didn't think of it as "working ridiculously hard," they just found that the most fun thing to do after writing one program was to start writing the next one, or that each 10-K was more thrilling than the last. So they might say things like "I had a relaxing vacation" when they mean that they found totally different surroundings in which to work a relaxing, laid-back sixty-hour week. And that difference in preferences makes it harder to copy them, because the thing they do naturally is something that other people force themselves to do. (Scott Alexander has a funny story about this, where he and his little brother took piano class at the same time, and his brother turned out to be both far more talented and obsessed with practice. There are similar stories about other high achievers, who are basically immune to any excuse to take a break from writing novels, or lifting weights, or making new friends, or whatever. It's good to be strong, and good to work out, but if you're on vacation with a group of friends, they can't find you, and the hotel gym isn't the first place they look, you're probably not as obsessed as the people whose new PR videos you've seen.¹

So, as holiday debauchery shades into Considering-New-Years-Resolution time, it's a good idea to frame expectations in two ways:

1. Extraordinary outcomes have a combination of temperamental/skill luck and path-of-life luck that can't be reliably replicated, so if you're calibrating on outcomes based on people you've heard of but never interacted with in person, prepare to be disappointed. (Some of the best-adjusted people I know are good-but-not-world-beating in fields where they had early encounters with other people who were so visibly better that they knew they'd never be the best.)

2. It's a lot easier to manage inputs rather than outputs, and if you get the inputs roughly right the outputs will take care of themselves. Trying to engineer a new set of preferences is a losing battle, though you can shift things a little bit—it takes a few days of effort to be an early riser, and maybe a week or two of struggle to be an early riser who always gets in a morning workout or puts in an hour on their novel before everyone else wakes up. But in the scope of inputs, you can probably find specific things where your interest flags much more slowly than other people's. And even if those inputs don't seem directly valuable, they can lead to interesting places—it's better to be 99.9th percentile at something than to be 95th percentile at a legible and competitive skill.

Life advice is hard to give and hard to follow because we're all least aware of our biggest advantages. "Be yourself" is really great dating advice if you're attractive and easy to get along with, and annoying jerks should mostly focus on being less annoying even if it's not true to their nature. "Do what you love" is absolutely phenomenal career advice if what you love is writing code for high-performance distributed systems, but not so great if you like writing poetry. The good news is that if people you admire have advantages that are invisible to them, you probably have some kind of edge that's invisible to you.

Thanks for reading Capital Gains, and I hope you have an enjoyable holiday. As always, if you’ve enjoyed these pieces I highly recommend checking out our sister newsletter, The Diff.

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1  You can object here and say that lifting is a special case because the extreme achievers are on dangerous doses of performance-enhancing drugs, and that's true. But there are a lot of things that start breaking down as they add muscle mass and subtract body fat, such that any well-adjusted person will decide that the next half-inch on the biceps isn't worth it, and a handful of people will basically decide that they're going to look amazing for their entire life because their heart will give out before they turn 50.