There's a version of this summer where I'm in an air-conditioned office somewhere off Bishopsgate, in a shirt I bought specifically for it, learning how to build a slide about a client's supply chain, and I'd be lying if I said I never think about that guy. He got his offer in November. He had all of Easter term to be quietly insufferable about it. By now he's four weeks in, with a lanyard and an onboarding buddy and a person whose actual job is to notice whether he turned up, and the thing I envy isn't the money. It's that somebody, somewhere, knows where he's meant to be on a Tuesday.
I applied to more than a hundred of those schemes last September and was rejected from every one, which is a sentence I can write now without much feeling, the way you can eventually say an ex's name in front of people. It took a while to get there. For most of the winter it sat in my chest like a swallowed coin.
Then, two days ago, I read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which I'd been avoiding for years on the grounds that almost everyone who recommended it also recommended cold showers. I read most of it in one sitting by the pool, and somewhere in the middle I hit the argument about selling your hours. That you only get so many. That you have no real idea what they're worth, and the person buying them has a much better idea and isn't going to tell you. I put the book face-down and sat there feeling like something had been explained to me.
And then, maybe a minute later I thought: well, of course you did.
Because look at the timing of it. An industry turns me down a hundred times, and eight months later during which I've been working on a startup idea, I read a book explaining that the industry was a trap, and I felt fantastic. That isn't insight arriving. That's consolation arriving, dressed up as insight, and from the inside the two are indistinguishable. If I'd taken an offer in November I'd have read the same pages on the train and thought, easy to say when you've already sold the company.
So I've been stuck on a question I can't get out of, and it's a more annoying one than whether Naval is right. It's what you're supposed to do when you find an argument that flatters you. You can't dismiss it for flattering you, because true things flatter people all the time, and it would be a strange rule that barred you from the one position that happens to suit your circumstances. You can't accept it on a feeling either, because the feeling is precisely what a good excuse produces. The only thing I could think to do was read it more carefully than I wanted to.
The version where I win
The first thing I found was my own mistake, not his. Naval isn't actually against employment, and never says he is. His argument is about equity. Own a piece of something, put your name against an outcome, so that when the outcome is good it has somewhere to land. That's a claim about ownership, and I had been quietly translating it into a claim about self-employment, which is a different thing and much more convenient for me. Early employees at good companies own equity. The partners at every firm that rejected me own their firms. Plenty of people I graduated with will end up owning more of something than I do, and they'll have done it while eating properly.
The second thing took longer to see. When someone asked why building appeals, I said what founders say, which is that I want a direct relationship between my effort and my outcome. I've now had ten months to realise that is utter bullshit. Startups have close to the worst relationship between effort and outcome available to a human being. Timing decides it, and distribution, and whether someone with money happens to like the idea in a week when they have money. I've worked harder since February than I've worked at almost anything, and the product still isn't live, and that isn't a discipline failure. That's just what a weak link between effort and reward looks like when you're standing inside it.
A job has the tight link. Work hard, get staffed well, get promoted on roughly the expected schedule, get paid on the first whether or not the week went badly. That's the appeal, and it's a good one.
So what I actually want isn't a tighter link between effort and outcome. It's a higher ceiling, and the attempt being mine. I'd rather have a small chance at something enormous that belongs to me than a strong chance at something solid that doesn't, and that's a preference, not a calculation, and I should stop running it through economics to make it sound like one. The honest version is what I've been saying out loud more recently to my closest friends, which was that I want to work like a dog, but for myself.
Which is roughly where the history degree brain starts making noise, because that complaint is very old and not remotely Silicon Valley's invention. Marx got there first. He and Naval agree on the diagnosis: the job is a bad deal because what you make ends up with somebody who isn't you. They disagree completely about the fix. Marx wants everyone to own the factory. Naval wants you, personally, to go and own yours.
I've obviously chosen the second. It's definitely a fire exit rather than a solution, and such fire exits are only wide enough for a few people at a time.
But both of those are arguments about the world, and I wasn't really asking a question about the world. I was asking one about a life, specifically mine, and there's one passage in the book that comes down to that level.
My three decisions to make this year
Naval says three choices deserve most of your deliberation: where you live, who you're with, and what you do. It's the most concrete thing in the book. It's also the only part I can hold against the last few years and see whether it would have helped.
What I do is Weavv, which I've been at full time since graduating. It is a tool for getting a group of people to actually go and do something rather than generate two hundred messages and a poll nobody meant their answer to. I said on this blog that it would launch on the first of February. It's the third of August.
The story I tell about that is true and I've now told it a dozen times, which is the thing that's started to bother me. My co-founder and I sat finals in the same term, so for four months the company had nobody whose first priority it was. No argument, no fallout, just two people whose lives had the same shape at the same moment. It's an explanation with no villain in it and it exonerates me completely, and I've noticed how smoothly it comes out now, how practised it sounds, how I reach for it before anyone's really asked. Naval's advice on partners is to look for intelligence, energy and integrity, which is fine, but that's a test you run on a person, and I didn't have a person problem. I had a term-shaped problem that cost half a year. It's scary to me that the story doing the most work for me is the one I've rehearsed the most, meaning it is potentially (probably) masquerading as an excuse.
Where I live is at home in London, and I'm staying. This is the decision I've thought about least, and should probably have thought about most.
The flattering version is that I'm choosing my friends, and there's something in that. My closest ones aren't from university, they're from home, and they're here, and Weavv exists because I'm the one who wants to see them more and got tired of the logistics. The true version is that I also can't afford to be anywhere else, and if this thing needed me in another city I'd go and be sad about it in the taxi.
The part I've been avoiding is that the friend group I'm staying for is coming apart anyway. Some are moving. Two are married. Several are far enough into serious relationships that the centre of their week has quietly relocated, and the group chat has that thinning quality where plans take four days to make and then don't happen. I've spent my whole life being the one with a plan, the one who had his shit together, and this year I've watched people I've known since I was five get on with something recognisable while I answer questions about what I'm doing with a sentence that takes ninety seconds and doesn't land. That's new. I don't much like it.
So the honest description of where I live is that I've stayed in the city I'm from, in my parents' house, to be near a group of people who are dispersing, and built a product designed to hold together exactly the kind of friendship that stops happening by default. Which is either the most sentimental business decision ever made or the only one I was ever going to make.
The thing I never said
And then there's who you're with, and this is where my reading of the whole book fell over.
I've had two relationships, six months each, both before there was a startup. In the first we argued about time, about my not giving her enough of it, and every argument had the same architecture: she said I wasn't there, and I explained why I was. I had the defence loaded before she'd finished the sentence. What I never once said was that I was frightened about work and needed her to understand why it mattered so much to me. That relationship had other problems and I'd half checked out by then, so I'd love to file it under bad match.
Except the second one was long distance, and she found it hard, and said so constantly, and I played patient. I did try to be patient, which isn't the same as being it, and the moment my patience ran out we were over within days. What I should have done was sit with her in person and say that the pressure had become crippling and had started to make me feel like I was failing. I didn't get anywhere near it.
Two different people, two different problems, and the identical move from me both times. Someone tells me what they need and I produce a defence instead of a disclosure, so fluently that I only caught it years later whilst writing about a business book. Something happens to me inside relationships and I go quiet, and I've now done it enough times that it isn't circumstance.
Naval's instruction is to deliberate carefully over who you're with. But nothing about deliberation touches this. You could hand me a perfectly chosen person tomorrow and I'd still have the defence loaded. And the framing does something worse than miss, because a decision described as enormous and worth long consideration is a decision you can keep not making indefinitely and feel wise about it. I'm on Hinge. I pause it and unpause it and scroll, and I don't like anyone and I don't message anyone, and then I pause it again. That's deliberation, technically. It has the shape of being thoughtful. It produces the sensation of considering something with no risk of anything happening.
What I say when asked about my dating life is that "I don't have time" and there is truth to that. It's also the most respectable cover available for something I'd rather not say, which is that after a hundred rejections and a launch date I missed by six months I'm not enthusiastic about being assessed by anyone else at present.
What I actually want is simple enough to embarrass me. I want us both obsessed with making the other one better. I want to take weight off her plate as much as I want somebody to take it off mine, because I'm stressed most of the time and I know it. And I want someone who can get me to open up, which is the line that gives the whole thing away, because I'm asking to be handed the one thing I keep failing to do. I want, at some point, to be slow-dancing in a kitchen at one in the morning for no particular reason.
That took me ninety seconds to write down the first time somebody made me. So it was never that I couldn't say what I wanted. It's that I've only ever managed to say it to people who weren't in the room.
Why the good sentences keep missing
Three decisions, and the advice was aimed at the wrong target in all three. Screen your co-founder for integrity, when the problem was timing. Deliberate over where you live, assuming you can afford to move. Choose your partner carefully, when what needs fixing is what I do once I'm in one.
That's a pattern, and I don't think it's carelessness on Naval's part. I think it's the form. An aphorism can only ever address the chooser. It has no grammar for the situation the chooser is standing in, because the moment you specify the situation the sentence stops being portable, and portability is the entire point. "Pick partners with high integrity" survives being carried into any life. "Pick partners with high integrity, unless you're both twenty-one and sitting finals in the same term, in which case integrity was never the variable" is not wisdom, it's a footnote.
Which is why these books have always looked the same. The title is a clue I missed on the first pass: Almanack, with the k, is Franklin, straight out of Poor Richard's, written in a persona and packed with maxims on industry and thrift. Behind Franklin, Marcus Aurelius. Alongside him, Samuel Smiles, whose Self-Help came out in 1859 and sold enormously to a Britain that badly needed a story about why some men rose and others didn't. Smiles wrote about character because character travels. He could not have written about the conditions his readers were actually standing in without saying something about class, and the moment he said that, the book stops being for everyone.
The genre keeps returning, and it returns when a new economic order needs an account of individual striving to explain the shape of its winners. Naval's arrived in 2020, into a tech industry under serious political pressure about where the money had gone. I don't think that's a coincidence and I don't think it's a scandal either.
And it buys something with the cost. A book made of portable sentences can't be wrong about anything, which is why "specific knowledge," the thing you can't be trained in that feels like play to you and work to everyone else, has never once been identified in advance. Succeed and you had it. Fail and you hadn't found it yet. But the thing it does instead is real, and it's what happened to me as I read it by the pool: it made my own situation legible. Here's why the last year was hard. Here's a name for what you're doing. Three hundred years of people have needed that, and I needed it this week, and it just isn't the same as being told something true about what happens next. The pleasure of the first is almost impossible to distinguish from the second.
The thing I've never tested
Except all of that still puts the problem in the book, which is convenient, and I've already caught myself once this essay preferring the explanation with no villain in it.
Because if the trouble were only ever that the advice ignores conditions, why does the constraint keep turning out to be me? I missed a launch date by six months and filed it under circumstance, and I've watched myself rehearse that excuse repeatedly. I've caught myself thinking, more than once, that I outwork my co-founder, which is a sentence that appears shortly before founders stop working together. My shortfall gets filed as a situation: exams, timing. His gets filed as character. An entirely different standard.
It's the same trait on both sides of my life. The relentlessness I've decided a girlfriend would have to accommodate is the relentlessness I've decided my co-founder lacks. In both cases, I've put the difficulty in the other person and left it sitting there, and the reason I've never revised it is that I've never had to say it out loud to anyone who could check.
Which is the only thing I've got, in the end. There's no boss, no term dates, nobody whose job it is to notice whether I turned up, and I've been slightly jealous all summer of a version of myself who has all three. What I have instead is this, written down where people can see it and hold me to it later. Not as a promise about how often. As the only way I know of finding out whether the things I believe about myself survive contact with anyone else.
I said in February that Weavv would launch in February. I'm not going to tell you when it launches now (but it will be soon).
Ask me in ten years if the guy with the lanyard would've been better off. I bet you he won't be.