Learning to Dabble
This read will be significantly shorter than the last, partially because I’m certain I overwhelmed you with Beetle biology two weeks ago and also because I’ve been quite busy moving to Philadelphia for law school.
Pretty recently, my cousin invited me to go to the casino with him to play fixed-limit Texas Hold’em, a variation of poker. While I consider myself a pretty good no-limit Texas Hold’em player, I had never delved too deeply into what fixed-limit even was. Foolishly thinking there’s no way it could be all that different, I took my cousin up on his offer.
I might as well have set $200 on fire that night.
No-limit poker is quite mathematical – understanding the range of your opponents’ hands based on their betting patterns and the range of hands you’re representing takes years of practice, losing money, and enduring more heartache than a Knicks fan. While a good amount of variance is involved, no-limit Texas Hold’em is a game of extremely high skill, and the most proficient players come out in the green in the long-run (that might change though, as a MIT designed poker AI actually demolished some pros recently).
In contrast, I realized quite quickly that fixed-limit poker is straight-up gambling. Circumventing the highly technical mathematical explanation for why this is true, the game incentivizes several players to remain in hands they would have no business continuing in a no-limit setting. Variance explodes, and a player that might be ahead after three rounds of betting will lose everything in round four. In short, you can’t ever bet enough (this is where the “fixed” comes from) to get another player to fold, and consequently, you can’t ever make a play that has positive expected-value.
What I found so nefarious about fixed-limit poker is that it felt so similar to its no-limit counterpart. Like no-limit professionals, patrons of the Bike Casino wore sunglasses, talked trash to get reads of their opponents, and agonized over their next move. The motions of checking, calling, and raising were the same as well. It made sense to me why so many people were deluded into thinking they could come out on top in this game – this illogical transposition is also found in lucky 2017 cryptocurrency holders who call themselves investing savants. At the end of the day it didn’t matter if I could literally read the mind of every single player at my table – all of us were mathematically destined to lose in the long-run at this casino.
My cousin is convinced his winnings at the casino can be accounted to skill and not just a good run of favorable variance. Certainly, some level of skill is required to minimize your losses, but that can be said of Blackjack or Roulette as well. Fixed-limit poker oozes with the smell of petrichor but yields famine far more times than it does feast. Unfortunately, because my cousin has had a hot few months playing the game, he’s reluctant to dip his toes in the no-limit variation as he simply fears a change of scenery.
In many ways, my brutal experience with The Bike a microcosm of many career trajectories. We fail to recognize the track we are on will lead us towards an unprofitable destination we never intended. Even worse, we’re sometimes completely cognizant that we do things just to signal aptitude in a specific field when we find no intrinsic value in that field to begin with. Do you really want to work in VC/consulting/investment banking/etc. or are you doing it because that’s what the intelligent, ambitious kids at your Ivy League school do?
Like my cousin, we never escape a layout where winning only goes as far as minimizing losing. We don’t even entertain the thought of pursuing other roads because we’re so accustomed to our comfortable seat at the table and the familiar colleagues sitting alongside us.
This isn’t me telling you to quit your job and do something meaningful. After all, there are people I met at the Bike who knew the game they were playing amounted to gambling, and they found joy in that. But what I am saying is that it’s overrated to pursue a certain career just because you’ve been indoctrinated to believe your short-term success in that career track is tantamount to complete personal fulfillment.
Stop to evaluate what your long-term goals are and if they even make sense to have as goals to begin with. A specific career track might feel right because many other intelligent people are on it and you’re reaching the proper benchmarks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you specifically will be happy with where it leads.
I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein, and I recommend it to anyone who has particular uncertainty about their career path. The book doesn’t provide answers for what job is right for you, but it instead reassures you that your uncertainty is valuable in of itself. A heaping amount of research demonstrates that for the world’s top performers across various disciplines, success from early specialization is surprisingly uncommon.
Sure, you have your Tiger Woods of the world. They pick up a hobby at age 3, love the activity, train dozens of hours a week, and eventually became the best in their area of practice. However, this is the exception, not the rule. Those who dabble in various fields before settling in a final one excel at a much higher frequency.
Roger Federer didn’t take tennis seriously until he was a teenager. Ester Ledecká was quite invested in school during her teenage years and dabbled in quite a few sports. She eventually went on to become the first athlete to win a gold in two different Olympic sports. One of my best friends from college went from an ugly finance-bro to an augmented reality nerd to now being the Head of Design at one of the hottest startups in LA. More broadly, a tech founder who is fifty is twice as likely to start a blockbuster company than a thirty-year-old, and the thirty-year-old has much better odds than a twenty-year-old. The point is, breadth of portable skills is arguably more important than one’s depth of skills in a particular field.
In a society where meritocracy necessitates that you find your “true passion” early to edge out others, we sometimes cave and put the cart before the horse. We stumble across something we happen to be better than others at, label it “passion”, and don’t ever look back. Sadly, even when we do find something that gets us genuinely excited, we either get discouraged when we’re not immediately good at it or we don’t chase it because we fear it will confirm that the past few years have been a waste of time.
As of now, I’m currently enrolled in law school. It’s honestly unclear if I can see myself at a firm for a long time with my classmates who, for some reason, love neurotically spamming the GroupMe asking if anyone has done the reading. Either way, I like to think that the portable skills of argumentation, reading, and logical reasoning will translate in other fields I dabble in later.
Who knows, maybe in a few years I’ll open an ice cream shop or a sake bar.
If you go to the University of Pennsylvania or happen to be in Philadelphia hit my line @ christian_rome_lansang@alumni.brown.edu I’d love to chat!