Assorted Company Leaving links
Warning: Just staying somewhere also might work. It is too hard to predict things. Just holding $AVGO for 20 years would've outperformed every traditional fund manager.
Below are all the things I have sent to a friend who doesn't want to work at the company they are at. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of information supporting staying at a company but you can get that from inverting the reasons why to leave a company. The structure is a few points and selected evidence and thoughts linking them together. The original form was various text messages. Not all advice is fully applicable, everyone's situation is different. But, like in working out, usually the optimal advice is simpler and you know what you should do anyways.
Startup vs Regular Work
"You don’t have to work at a startup to get insanely rich but instead just invest relatively smaller amounts of capital (30k vs 5 high stress years) in startups to get a similar outcome." Depends on what you want to make your day be. Remember that making your environment better is the single best way to get to where you want to be. A lot harder to force outcomes than cultivate an environment Startup Tradeoffs by Dan Luu
I have come to think that I’m bad at predicting things and one year is an insane amount of time, also if you really do pluck every opportunity your experience will be very different from what I could imagine. I do think a startup would be more exhilarating but, generally, thinking in long terms kind of sucks. If you go on a daily bread type of mentality it’s more on a shorter term and the startup > bc of environment/people. More people with more life imo. Also think about how much money you really need since most high status items are useless and the highest ROI is travel and the best traveling experiences are cheap ones. Make more friends and go visit them.
The 10 year part of a startup:
"Why do you believe you’ll want to work on this for the next 10+ years?" I've also gotten this question from a former boss (and all around nice guy) and I had no good answer at the time. Honestly maybe the vagabond/traveling lifestyle is just more appealing. The thing about this decision is that everyone's been making decisions their whole lives and naturally this will fit into however you are. I have an open debate whether or not people change right now and please email me with your thoughts. If this is true then your lifestyle should generally be indicative of your risk tolerance and should help with the decision.
Stating unsaid things helps ease all tensions
“The prospect of losing your job, for example, may seem a lot more scary when you can’t even bear to think about it than after you have calculated exactly how long your savings will last, and checked the job market in your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess the probability of keeping your job in the planned layoffs next month. Be a true coward, and plan out your retreat in detail—visualize every step—preferably before you first come to the battlefield.” From a Rational standpoint
It's hard to visualize a chess board a few moves in the future and another person's input could flip the situation a lot (especially if they are leveraged to directly impact the course of your career or life).
Importance of Fast and Hard Decisions
"Another situation where people often procrastinate on staring into the abyss is when they take a job that turns out not to be very good. It’s common for people stay in these jobs for a surprisingly long time, even when the job market in their field is very hot and they could easily find a better position somewhere else. Thinking about whether to leave your job is uncomfortable in a few different ways: it involves acknowledging that you made a poor decision in the past (taking your current job) that wasted a bunch of time; it involves signing up for a bunch more difficult, stressful work to interview at new jobs; and it saps your motivation to invest in getting better at your current job if you think it’s likely that you’ll leave soon. So it’s understandable that people procrastinate on staring into that abyss. But that procrastination leads to a lot of avoidable suffering." From Abyss by Ben Kuhn
“Repeatedly confront hard decisions” so this is in line with actioning things fast and not being lazy. Its easy to goon and be mindless the whole day which I've wrote about here but the best resource is this substack post.
Instincts are usually the whole thought
The first reaction from people usually details how their future responses will be. It's very easy to see this when you invite people to a party.
”If you’re not feeling “hell yeah!” then say no" By Sivers. This mentality also helps in figuring out what you want in life. You don't feel a schism with everything (I've used this recently to order and eat really good food at new restaurants). Usually I know what I want or would enjoy but I compromise. I stopped compromising on food and am working on moving that mentality in other decision making parts of my life. Usually things work out.
A supporting corollary to the above point is 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze (this initially helped me lose weight when I was 15 and gave up deep fried/sugary foods).