Happy MDW Life Examiners,
After finishing the 6 week Write of Passage course, I’m excited to say I’m wrapping up my most thorough piece yet. I’m on the 1-yard line so bear with me but in the meantime, I wanted to leave you with another short story in the progression of how I got here.
It’s one of my favorites to tell so I hope you enjoy!
It was 2018 and I was a junior analyst at a big bank who had enough of walking into cubicle purgatory that reeked of conformity, shallow ambition, and cheap coffee. I had no interest in the corporate life which began feeling like a daily root canal without anesthesia.
Over the last year, I’d immersed myself in this new world of crypto, researching every day, publishing thoughts online, and finally felt like I was getting close to my lucky break. I had several rounds of interviews at an upstart research firm that went well and for the final round, they wanted me to write an in-depth investment thesis and get it to them in 10 days.
This was my golden ticket. The only problem was I had an upcoming vacation to Vancouver to stay with a close friend and fully planned on touching as much grass as I could. When I returned I wouldn’t be able to put in as much time as I wanted to if I was pent up in my 6x6 cell wall.
But I was willing to do anything. I was Andy Dufresne ready to crawl through a mile-long tunnel of shit to escape Shawshank if that’s what it took.
While getting my Canadian grass touching in 3000 ft above sea level, I lamented this situation to my friend, someone I confided greatly in as he always seemed to have useful, unorthodox advice.
I’ll never forget the mischievous look in his eye as he proposed
“What if you tell your company you lost your passport and can’t make it back? You can then use the rest of the week when you’re back to write the report.”
At first, I audibly chuckled, dismissing the seemingly preposterous idea. As the echo of laughter faded off into the empty air of the mountain, I realized it was just mine and that he maintained a stern face.
I instinctively rebutted that I couldn’t, that’s insane. No way I could pull that off.
But when he candidly asked why no, I didn’t have an answer.
On the surface, it seemed reckless, irresponsible, morally wrong. But the more I thought about it, the more it felt like nothing more than a vestigial sense of propriety I owed to The Default Path.1
The reality was I didn’t give one single, solitary, iota of a fuck about this job. I ended up there by not questioning the societal influences steering me in that direction but once I saw where it led and how far it was from where I wanted to be, I knew I had to make a drastic change.
To spend a career in finance let alone another year in a corporate office was a fate for me worse than death. And this was my chance to evade the grim reaper’s grasp.
The second I got back from the hike, I opened my laptop and began crafting an elaborate tale about leaving my backpack in my friend's car that got broken into leaving me passportless in Canada and how it would take a week for me to get a new one from the embassy until I can come back to NYC.
Shortly thereafter I got a response with condolences and understanding, assuring me they’d manage in my absence.
I flew home and spent 12 hours days all week, working on this report before sending it in.
Crickets. Weeks passed and I never heard back from the company. The crushing disappointment was tempered by an indomitable resolve. I started sending that report with my resume to every job I applied to.
It took me another few months but eventually, this landed me an interview with Messari. The rest is history.
For a delicious twist of fate, as it turns out that company was going under which is why they never responded. A year later Messari ended up buying them.
Funny how that stuff works out.
So while I don’t condone lying,2 or taking reckless abandon with your job, I do think we should be bold. We should question instinctive reactions against a course of action if the sole rationale is a naive “that seems crazy”. We should take a cold hard look at what we want and size that up against the worst possible outcome from doing whatever gets us there because life’s too damn short to not take risks.
I try to take JBP’s rule to never lie seriously these days as I think even the smallest lie avoids facing reality and robs you of the opportunity to grow from it.