The Right People

I’ve always been very selective with the people I talk to and even more selective with who I associate myself with. I always wanted to be around the "right people". Looking back I would define my old selection criteria as stereotypical and shortsighted. I would judge people based on four things. Intelligence, Wealth, Power and Interestingness.

I realized later that I was only looking for people who were already successful, instead of looking at great potential to grow with. I now see those are not the most important qualities a person can have because they are much more common than one would think. There are qualities that are much rarer. And they define the "right people" in much finer detail while opening up a broader spectrum.

In this context the right people are those who help you become great. Which assumes you are very ambitious.

One of the fundamental traits is courage. Because it takes a lot of it to be shameless, honest. It allows one to follow their curiosity and ambition fully. By fully I mean fatically and obsessively pursue an interest that is unproven. It takes a lot of it to develop a high tolerance for risk. Courage allows one to be independed minded and tolerate being lonely and misunderstood.

I also look for high rate of learning and iteration, they must be perseverant and determined enough to show results. To not go down the wrong direction one needs to continuously update. To do that one needs awareness and an open mind. High rate of learning means high rate of action. The ability to create or put themselves in advantageous positions to exploit the system and get lucky.

I look for high novelty people. People who change their minds a lot, if they are also good at idea generation then they could also be original. Originality of taste is very valuable and rare.

In the end I look for strong tolerance for cognitive dissonance. One needs to be uncompromising and flexible at the same time, bold and conservative, serious and playful, etc...

I also look for some kind of special, hard to get, insider knowledge. Accumulating accessible knowledge is great but less valuable.

These are the most fundamental traits I look for, which optimize for weird rational zealots. This frees them of shame, and the need to conform down to the average mediocrity, they don’t care. Once friends, these are the people who will most readily call bullshit to your face, while rooting for you behind your back. They don’t shy away from being rough and polarizing. These are the people you want in your life.

I don’t value people based just on these traits. But also on how much I learn from them. This is why it’s good to continuously meet new people, You never know.

How many friendships do we have where we are nice to our faces but talk shit behind our backs? If that’s the pattern then it’s not a useful friendship for either. In facts it is framed backwards. These are the people you don’t want.

Now the question is how to find the right people? Since we’re talking about people who are 3 to 4 standard deviations away from the mean on one or more of these traits it is hard to understate how rare they are. Which means they have few or no peers at the beginning of their journey.

They are starved of peers and when they meet someone who encourages them and gives them permission to be weird and fanatical it is like finding water in a desert. Everyone who has "it" recognizes others who have "it". But still we cannot form our identities in isolation because they must be confirmed by our peers in order for us to fully believe them.

To find them actively you follow the work and chase who made that work. Help them, be useful in any way, become their ally before becoming their friend. Analyze what they do, recognize what is lacking or what could be better or their problem and take the initiative to build it on your own, for free. Then send it to them without asking.

You must go out of your way to provide value and be useful. This is also how you create proof of work and publish it. Which is how you are found by other people who are following the work. To build referrals and get intros to who you want to work with in the future.

Accumulate enough of these and eventually someone will recognize what you did and give you credibility. It will spread the mindshare idea with the context of your reputation. Your reputation does the selling before you meet them. This is how you get network effects that open a lot of doors to anybody and any resource. It also allows for exposure to unknown and unexpected opportunities, which is how you get lucky.

To find them passively one should not conform in social, both digital and physical, interactions. Being normal is boring and attracts the wrong people. Instead advertise your weirdness. Continuously try new updated versions of yourself. That alienates who wants to fit in and attracts other weirdos. Some of them will be the right people. Build allies wherever you find them.

Conforming is dangerous because It creates an environment that limits the expression of your full behavior repertoir. It creates a lot of friction because you feel the need to explain yourself in order to minimize being misunderstood. In fact you should run towards people who are willing to be misunderstood.

maintaining the relationships with these people is hard work. Sending periodic written updates, followups, asking for feedback. Letting them know their advice was actually valuable. Quickly responding is good. Maintaining the relationships also means that winning an argument is less important than preserving the relationship.

This may sound transactional, while it is, this does not mean one can’t genuinely be friends with those people. In fact I think it is a kind of cynical puritanism that a friendship is not real if there are other interests involved. But people fail to recognize that everything is to some degree transactional because sometimes the goods of exchange are non-obvious.

MOst social interactions are about the experience, not the content. People don’t want to admit they associate themselves with people who have access to resources they don’t have access to. This is good. That’s life.

Notes