caring about things

I’m grateful my engineer parents taught me to think mathematically and develop nuanced views about the world. my whole life, throughout my childhood and MIT, I thought the goal of personal development was to become a fully rational being - equipped with all the knowledge of how the world works and endowed with the skills to execute on it. I’ve come to believe, though, that caring about things is more important than being a rational human being, and is becoming increasingly so.

my high school best friend was my complement - passionate and opinionated. she holds strong personal preferences for people, food, and places, and cares deeply about immigrant rights. her fiery passion and sharp intuition led her to Yale, the White House, and now the Senate. politics are hard, and the first question people ask you is - what do you care about? why are you here? because if you don’t care about anything, you have no reason to be climbing an uphill battle to pass new legislation or garner votes for elections.

I used to believe that once I became sharp, I would know everything I have to do to become successful, and would just will myself to do those things. but the rest of the world is not too different from federal politics; knowing what you have to do is not enough. you need to have a deep desire to do those things. in the tech startup world, similar to in politics, the path to outsized outcomes is extremely challenging and risky. there’s traits that help, like intelligence, charisma, etc., but those traits are learnable, meaning they’re just downstream of having the drive required to succeed.

one way to observe the correlation between passion and success is to notice the incidental false correlations that people draw. there’s this idea prevalent in the tech circles that college doesn’t matter, because so many successful people have rejected credentials and academia. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Dylan Field, and Patrick Collison all dropped out of college to build generational companies. I’ve always thought it was crazy to encourage students to drop out like they did - places like Harvard and MIT are once in a lifetime experiences to learn fundamentals from the great professors of our time, and there will always be opportunities to do great things. for successful founders who dropped out, they did so not because it was rational, but because they found something they cared so much to do that they couldn’t be happy without doing it. dropping out was an unfortunate consequence of a human condition correlated with success.

another way to think about the importance of this trait is to imagine a world without it. we genetically modify all humans to have optimal reasoning and social skills, but remove their ability to feel deeply compelled. what would they accomplish in their lifetimes? would they leave the world a better place? I think the world would fall apart. there’s a lot of problems with potentially emotion-less humans, but the main issue I see is that they would be unable to do hard things. we would have billions of people who can succeed at the average career but no one creating the breakthroughs and revolutions necessary to help society progress.

human evolution knows this concept better than anyone: the maternal instinct is more powerful than any amount of intelligence or rationality. women are able to overcome the challenges of being a mother because of how much they love their baby. it’s not only the general fear of a bad outcome, like losing their baby, but also a constant desire to nurture and protect their baby, that leads to success. if you were to program a machine like the one from I Am Mother, you’d be wasting compute if the model had to reason through every decision concerning the baby’s care and wellbeing. imagine if it was considering all possible paths at each moment, like if it should go send an email for work, or practice a hobby, or attend to friends. the robot mother would never get around to doing the small, simple things that on their own don’t mean much, but over time amount to a loving mother-child relationship.

if you look at people’s homes, you can understand what level of cleanliness they deeply care about. people who grew up with a certain level of cleanliness have a much easier time just noticing the work that needs to be done around the home. it’s no different in a work setting. there’s a myriad of distractions - things to do, fires to put out, stakeholders to satisfy, but the people who truly care about certain things will notice them and take full care of them. day after day, the people who endure hard challenges for the sake of doing good work, are the ones who quietly succeed.

with AI, it’s becoming easier to survive and contribute at an average level to society. kids can cheat on school, desk workers can automate their workflows, and highly educated professionals can 10x their output. however, the top 1% is still putting in the same amount of work as before, due to simply caring deeply about what they do. thankfully, we’ll continue to see the crazy kids chasing dreams and doing great things.