Quit Your Job
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Highlights
- Itâs surprising how many more resources you have than you might think, especially when you have a good purpose and you bother to actually call them in.
- There are investments you canât make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. This is actually a consequence of a fairly general theorem about how to find treasure in complex search spaces: The best search strategies for complex problems like life generally donât seek out particular homogeneous objectives, but interesting novelty. The search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.
- The key implication is that while you have not yet found the unique opportunity that will be the engine and purpose of your empire, you have to adjust your sense of value. Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting noveltyâthings that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubtâby chasing along known direct value gradients. But thatâs where the treasure is. Thatâs how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
- But if we are to solve the bigger structural, spiritual, and intellectual problems which arenât addressed by existing institutions, someone needs to be exploring off of the established road, where there is a high probability of failing to accomplish anything at all, and a significant probability of discovering and exploiting the next big breakthroughs.
- If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so. It is a grave sin to neglect that kind of cosmic duty. But many more people have the means and privilege to quit their tracked careers than ever realize it and act on it. You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration. What this means in practice is that at some point far before you are or feel ready, you need to quit your job.
- To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world. Ruin is largely an illusion in the modern world anyway. If you lose everything you own, you generally still have your network and skills. Even a nominally risk-loving financial utility function is overly conservative in practice because itâs hard to lose these intangible assets.
- Haul yourself back out and take your appointed sentence of years of hard leisure while you search for inspiring purposes that are truly worth your life and for the skills and secret knowledge you will need to fulfill them. You will find them only in the strange and unjustifiable curiosities you have when youâve been freely following informed instinct for months.
- The other reason is that to actually accomplish at your full potential, you have to start doubling down on particular bets long before you know that you can follow through. You wonât see the whole path when you begin. You will have no way of knowing whether it exists, or whether what you are pursuing is even possible. If you have more certainty than that, you arenât aiming high enough. You have to bet your life on faith that the universe will provide if your vision is good enough.
- There is a surplus wealth endowed in the universe to those with the virtue to win it. This is not just resources won in competition, but more importantly also the random providence that falls on you simply for thriving in novel ways. The general availability of this providence is due to the difficulty and incompleteness of the project of life. If you are going to have some faith, have faith in this: the universe finds ways to appreciate novel exploration.
- Adaptive systems only grow by the application of intense will against intense but surmountable resistance. This is why you learn best on the job, especially in existential situations when your head is in the crusher and you must improve to survive. A comfortable, certain, and tracked-out existence is necessarily one of little vitality and low growth. This is a key reason to quit especially âgoodâ jobs where you have become comfortable.
- Life at its highest is playful, free, and leisurely as it explores a rich land of bountiful surplus. It puts most of its time into rest, training, exploration, and curiosity. But winning that land and taking full advantage of opportunity when it is found requires periods of intense struggle. Sometimes this is adversarial competition against rivals, other times itâs the exertion of building something great. Either way, a background of leisure is properly punctuated by intense high-impact projects and crises.
- Quitting your job, in the full sense I have described here, is a bit like quitting that agricultural life to return to a life of adventure on the wild frontier. It is a much less certain existence and a more violent one. But the combination of leisurely surplus, mortal intensity, and demand for novel virtue is where you will find life at its healthiest and highest. It is where we will find the most important destinies.
- To get back on track, we must quit our comfortably lazy routines and leap back into the unknown wilderness. We must first set our curiosity and then our fatal determination on the biggest problems of our collective existence and functional justice, without assurance that we will get it right. So quit your job and become the wild and ambitious elites you wish to see in the world. Live by instinct in the untracked frontier, shoot your shot, and live or die by your intuitive visions of what must be done. You can carry out your cosmic duty and win glory only in the bold attempt.