The Asymmetric Economy*
An excerpt of my upcoming book
Nassim Taleb and Naval seem to agree on many things, Naval oftentimes recommending Taleb’s books and ideas. But there’s one thing they definitely agree on: if there’s something we must maximize in life, it is serendipity. They also seem to be aligned with the idea that we should pursue activities that have no ceiling in terms of upside, but offer a limited downside.
In other words, we must expand as much as possible our range field, our fishing net, if you will, to attract — to catch — as many asymmetrical opportunities as possible, ones that allow life to reveal its hidden treasures to us. There are plenty of ways to amplify our serendipitous field, but Naval offers several interesting venues that can allow us to tap into the power of leverage and get us a way into the Asymmetric Economy:
Asymmetric opportunities, by Naval:
- Invest in startups
- Start a company
- Create a book, podcast, video
- Create a (software) product
- Go on many first dates
- Go to a cocktail party
- Read a Lindy book
- Move to a big city
- Buy Bitcoin
- Tweet
This is a comprehensive list of activities we should pursue in life to lure into our lives the goddess of opportunity. Going on many first dates might seem emotionally tolling, but the upside is you potentially find a life partner while the downside is investing an hour getting to know a stranger and finding a keen interest in them, while navigating the butterflies we feel in our stomach each encounter.
Best of all worlds.
Going to a cocktail party is also a great way to expand our fishing net, as we allow ourselves an opportunity to interact with individuals from all cuts of life given that they are all clustered into one party. As Nassim Taleb puts it in Black Swan, “You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.”
I love that — you’ll never know what you’ll find on the envelope of serendipity.
Investing in a startup or starting your own company is also a powerful asymmetrical opportunity to embark on. Given that our true nature as human beings is to create, to build, and to be a force of creativity, there’s no bigger statement we can make to the universe that we are ready to receive its gifts than to start our own project.
Scratch that, there’s a bigger statement than this, but it is exclusive to women: to create a life. That is the ultimate asymmetrical opportunity, and we should let women know they hold the most powerful superpower on Earth. But I have to cut this idea short, as it is a whole book in itself.
When we start our own company, we create an offering to the canvas of the world that has embedded in it our creative powers. And when we invest in a startup or in someone else’s “moonshot vision,” we are empowering the founders to build their own castle — hoping that in return we reap the rewards alongside them of their creative efforts.
This is true also of writing a book, starting a podcast, or tweeting. As we’ll explore in the “Serendipity Machine” we are but one click away from connecting with like-minded individuals.
These asymmetric opportunities offer us a way to leverage leverage. That is, they are a unique ticket into harnessing the power of the universe to create magic in our lives. They are the closest we have to a magic wand but are even better because they must include your efforts, your passion, and your creativity.
In other words, you are the main character that creates the magic. You are the key piece of the puzzle that makes it all happen. That makes it all connect. These asymmetric opportunities enable us to become individuals with unlimited sense of agency while also giving space to the “luck factor” to enter the room. But, as with all meaningful things in life, it must start with us.
While your efforts will certainly not always pay off, and some of these asymmetric opportunities won’t always come to fruition, they also allow you, as Taleb puts it, to “wear your best for your execution.” They allow us to show our best colors and stand dignified with our efforts. It is less about the outcome and more about our commitment to exploring these asymmetric opportunities.
It is no secret that we live in a chaotic, random world. But if we subscribe to the Asymmetric Economy, we stand a great chance to harness the power of randomness — while giving it its merited respect — and make it work in our favor. Given that we cannot control outcomes, we can always remember that it is how we act that is in our control.
As Taleb puts it, “Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behavior. You will always have the last word.”
It is also important to note that within the Asymmetric Economy, we must be cautious when it comes to the energy we put into it. You can’t just say, “I want luck to follow my efforts” while having a loser attitude. Further, when we punch our ticket into this new economy, we must also be wary of who joins the ride with us. In other words, optimism, positivity, and effort are in while cynicism, negativity, and slothiness are out. While it is true that our actions are the best signal of our efforts, our attitude is a pretense to everything.
They always come together, like when we used to play pick up soccer when we were kids and we were picking our teams and two players demanded to be chosen together, you can’t have one without the other. As Taleb puts it, “Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).”
Drop the losers, bring in the winners.
It is also essential to understand that hard work will only get you so far. While we must always give it our all, we must remain unattached to the outcome.
As Victor Levy writes in “Life is Setting Me Up For Success,” We must always be “Fully Committed, Completely Unattached.” We have to do our best to send a strong signal to the serendipitous goddess that we are worthy of what’s inside her envelope, but it will remain true forever that our efforts won’t always bear gifts. We need luck in our lives, but we can only control our commitment to our craft, not the outcomes of it.
As much as I want to believe that hard work is the secret recipe to solve all of our problems, we need luck in our lives. But it remains true that the more we strike two rocks together, the greater the likelihood of igniting a spark that lights up a fire — but let us not remain attached to whether or not the fire lights up or how it lights up.
