Tragedy as a Source of Opportunity
Some readers may be interested in learning more about how we managed to convince ourselves there really may be some future God that guides us. We’ll gladly offer more detail on how personal experience created a confirmation bias cascade and how our habit of interpreting setbacks as important signs or sources of opportunity can yield significant advantages.
Take me, Malcolm, for example: I had to be born into a wealthy, privileged family, lose everything, and grow up alone in the system in order to develop the worldview and critical thinking skills that now stand among my primary sources of competitive advantage. At the time, it felt horrible to have a Judge send me to private prison alternatives for kids (like in the book: Holes). Being a pre-teen and struggling for basic safety, food, and shelter, sucked. But if this hadn’t happened, if I hadn’t ended up mostly raising myself, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become comfortable with suffering and self-reliance.
Without a first-hand understanding of the emptiness that accompanies opulent life, I might still desire one. The odds that someone so privileged, like me, in a Western society, could really understand starvation (being under 60 pounds and having to eat insects to not die) required an incredible confluence of events—a confluence that played a critical role in building my worldview. There is no reward behind the opulence, only hollowness, and the anticipation of suffering, the fear of it, can be more mentally crippling than the experience itself.
It should be obvious from this book how important kids are to us. When we found out Simone could not have children naturally, we were devastated. That said, had we not been forced to turn to IVF by this infertility—a product of Simone’s severe teenage depression, which led to self-imposed starvation as a coping mechanism—we would not be able to have half as many kids as we are now set up to have (thanks to embryo banking). In other words, without what most would consider to be a major fertility setback, many of our kids would not have had the chance to exist at all.
When I got my dream job as a manager at Google, I thought I had made it. Had they not delayed my ultimate departmental placement for six months—to a point at which I completely ran out of money—I never would have taken another job, but in hindsight a management job at a bureaucratic organization like Google would have retarded my career and eroded my independent spirit.
Had my next dream job as Director of Strategy at Korea’s top early-stage VC firm not ended after the arrest of many of my colleagues (for what were later proven to be trumped-up, politically motivated charges), I would have found myself once again destitute (I had sent all my savings to pay for Simone’s graduate degree). Had that not happened, I wouldn’t have spent time living with Simone’s parents and gotten to know her mom well just before she passed away—nor would I have been free right at the same time Simone was graduating from Cambridge, allowing us to raise a fund together.
Running a travel empire going into the pandemic would seem like a horrible turn of events, yet it turned out to be the most perfect development imaginable: It gave us an opportunity to demonstrate to our investors that we would do anything to protect their investment—plus working for two years without pay put us on the market for side gigs, enabling Simone to spend a year as the Managing Director of Dialog (a secret society founded by Peter Thiel), which connected us with a myriad of high-level people, put us in a position to build out another high-impact network for Schmidt Futures (the Act 2 Network), and made the founding of our education initiative, CollinsInstitute.org, possible.