Random Stuff - Chapter 281

I saw a story on Facebook the other day. Like most stories that get passed around Facebook, it’s probably only 38% true and written by a 16-year-old. But regardless, I found it cool, and at the very least, thought-provoking.

It was about a man named Mohammed El-Erian. Mohammed was the CEO of an uber $2 trillion bond fund called PIMCO and earned upwards of $100 million per year. In January, he unexpectedly resigned in order to spend more time with his 10-year-old daughter.

Now here’s the bad news: A decision like this is apparently a big deal in our society. Totally unexpected and against the cultural grain of “make billions or die trying” that we’re all used to. The article has been making the usual rounds on social media, getting shared and talked about quite a bit.

Apparently, El-Erian’s decision came after a fight with said daughter. He was yelling at her to brush her teeth. She refused. He pulled the classic “I’m your father and you will do what I say” routine, to which she said, “Hold, please.” The girl retreated to her bedroom and proceeded to write down 22 important moments of her life that her father had missed because of work — birthday parties, school performances, hare Krishna conventions, and so on. Presumably, this crayon-scrawled list gave El-Erian a bad case of what the internet has dubbed “the feelz” and the next day Mohammed was hanging up his hedge fund hat for good — Mohammed “Wow, That’s A Lot of F.u.c.k.i.n.g Zeroes” El-Erian was now a full-time dad.

If you’ve ever taken an economics class, one of the first things you learn is a concept called “opportunity cost,” an idea often ill.u.s.trated with the quote, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Opportunity cost means that essentially everything you do, no matter what it is, costs something, even if indirectly. The classic example is when someone takes you out for a free, hour-long lunch. Despite gaining the value of the lunch during that hour, you are still giving up all of the other productive activities you could have potentially been doing.

So you give up doing an extra hour of work. An extra hour of sleep. An extra hour of sales calls that could net you a new client. Or, as in the case with El-Erian, an extra hour with your 10-year-old daughter.

In our culture, we regularly celebrate people who become rich by doing exceptional things. But the nature of those “exceptional things” often requires extremely high opportunity costs. Bill Gates famously slept in his office five days a week and remained single well into his 30s. Steve Jobs was a deadbeat father to his first daughter. Brad Pitt can’t leave his house without being bukkaked by flashbulbs and cameras. The man has stated that he’s gone through periods of depression due to the social isolation caused by his extreme fame.

The point is that doing anything truly great requires some sort of inherent sacrifice that may or may not be immediately obvious. You know, like missing a series of your daughter’s birthdays.

(If you’ve read a lot of my stuff, you’ve seen this idea in other forms before, particularly here and here.)