These 2 Feet

About once a week I meet someone who is looking for advice on what to do next. This ranges from recent college graduates (and even the occasional high school graduate) to experienced entrepreneurs thinking about their next startup. Often people come with relatively tactical questions, like how to best get a job at a startup or how to transition into a new field. I used to engage on just that level but now I start by asking people about their purpose.

“What is your purpose?” tends to throw off most people. Pretty much nobody seems to have thought about it. And I have to admit neither had I until relatively recently. Through my interest in basic income I have started to read a lot of books that deal with the question of how to live a good life, including How Much is Enough, The Right to be Lazy and A Guide to the Good Life. One of the key takeaways is the role of having a purpose in life. I am now convinced that you can’t live a good life without having a purpose.

Too often we confuse having a job (or a startup for that matter) with having a purpose. When people object to basic income by saying “but people need a job” what they really should be saying is “people need a purpose.” Helping people find a purpose has to be a key component of any basic income implementation. The range of possible purposes is very broad and of course one’s purpose doesn’t have to stay static over time. One way to think about it is like having a vision statement for oneself.

So what is my purpose? Right now it is contributing to a society based on and revolving around knowledge. I feel incredibly fortunate that my work lines up well with my purpose – many of the companies that we invest in at USV do exactly that.  I realize that’s a rare privilege. And it is one of the reasons I support basic income: it will hopefully put many more people in a similar position.

Yesterday was Fathers Day. Which is an awesome day to be a dad, especially in a house filled with kids. In general, they don’t want you to lift a finger. 

It’s their day to serve you. Or something like that.

That’s great and all, but I have a hard time with sitting back and letting people take care of me so I busied myself around the house in the morning instead of lying there and having breakfast served to me in bed.

As I was folding the laundry it hit me that I was, in fact, folding laundry on Fathers Day instead of letting someone else do it for me. So, I tweeted out “doing laundry on Fathers Day because I love my job”. That job on that day was raising my 5 kids, not being a VC. 

Someone shot back a tweet to the effect that if you don’t like folding laundry like Bryce does you should try these on demand services that will do it for you. 

Well played, I thought, as I saw their tweet hit my feed.

But the reality is I don’t like or enjoy folding laundry anymore than anyone else. What I do like is my kids to see me contributing to the work getting done around our house. It’s important for me, as their father, to see that folding laundry, taking out the trash, cooking a meal, or making beds is not beneath me. Or that I’m simply to busy to care. Or that I think their mom, who works full time in our house, should be doing those things instead of me.

I want them to see that their parents are partners in the truest sense. A partnership in which our work is real and tangible and shared. Because, that’s what I think they should be looking for in any partner they choose down the road.

Yes, we could outsource nearly every task in our home at this point. I’m sure any other chore I could have tweeted out yesterday would have a similarly long list of apps that would remove it from my life.

But, as backwards as it may sound today, I think there’s value in doing the work. I think there are lessons that can only be learned and examples that can only be set by doing some of the work we’d rather not do.

I had a conversation a few years back with a good friend who’d been in the right place at the right time with the right company. He doesn’t currently work and doesn’t need to work for the rest of hist life. After coming back from a bike ride and chatting while his maids cleaned as his personal shoppers restocked the fridge he said something that has always stuck with me.

Looking at his little boy playing nearby he said he was thinking of going back to work. Not because he needed the money or even because he was getting bored. His reason? 

“I don’t want my son to think Ferraris grow on trees”.

Yes, there was a Ferrari parked in the garage and, no, his son had never seen him have to do any actual work for it.

A phrase I often use to describe the way I think is … that I think like a waffle.

I am not trying to say my thoughts are a sticky mess of peanut butter and condensed milk.

A spaghetti thinker let various threads of their lives intertwine and tangle. One thing affects the other.