In some respects, I'm quite normal... but in many ways, I'm very unusual.
I don't currently have health insurance. Nor a fixed address. For someone who studied computer science at MIT, I'm surprisingly non-technical. Few people blog or publish life content (outside of social media) like me.
I'm a late adopter for various things "normal" healthy people seem biased towards:
I don't currently have health insurance. Nor a fixed address. For someone who studied computer science at MIT, I'm surprisingly non-technical. Few people blog or publish life content (outside of social media) like me.
I'm a late adopter for various things "normal" healthy people seem biased towards:
- I didn't have any particular interest in dating, or even potentially having a relationship or family, until around age 23.
- I didn't start taking exercise seriously until age 26.
- I wasn't sure if America was a great place to live until age 27 (and in particular the last few months and days).
My tendency is to default reject the norm and much later come across a well-reasoned articulation of it, e.g. The Defining Decade. As I accept the arguments and pat myself on the back for being an independent thinker, I still struggle to shift my behavior. Then I totally capitulate and eventually start over from scratch, up to a decade behind the frontier.
But I'm also an early adopter for many other things:
- Played chess before Queen's Gambit.
- Started using this email service less than a year after the product launched.
- I bought bitcoins in the $70s, and will be going with BITB as spot ETFs open today (I've held Grayscale for years).
- I am recently considering Bryan Johnson as a contender with Seth Godin for the pole position as my new lord and savior. (I found Bryan's interview on Diary of a CEO and the sequel highly thought-provoking.)
One conclusion is obvious: base rates matter. It's hard to even make an argument for being late on something like fundraising hundreds of thousands of dollars in your twenties, but part of my problem is having had Alexandr as my boss's boss's boss—and just one among many brilliant younger peers.
(Also, I'm very neurotic. Why wasn't I following my friend Jeff more closely to discover Blueprint sooner? What even is "the frontier"? Blessing and a curse.)
Another is the VC perspective that false positives are OK, but false negatives mean missing out on unimaginable worlds. Your $70 today could be $50,000 tomorrow, if you're willing to leap. We'll see if I'm married by age 35, but for most of the things I'm calling myself "late" to, I feel I've managed to catch back up to a reasonable degree.
Today I'm 28. It's pretty interesting as I get older, more and more, to connect the dots!
In addition to starting my whoop regimen last night... I should probably get health insurance.