Jay Matthews

It’s the builder, not the drill sergeant, who genuinely cares about excellence; for the builder’s excellence is in service of the particular life she wants to build , whereas the drill sergeant threatens you with “excellence” as a vague, arbitrary dictate you have to appease before being allowed to build and enjoy your own life in the first place.

I believe the best way to describe this shift is as a shift from legible ambition to illegible ambition. The reason so many people cling to default metrics of success is that other people understand them. Legible ambition is a story that your parents can tell their friends. We fear that not having such legible ambition means we will be cast out of ... See more

Grief is love. How can we hold this grief without holding each other? To bear witness to this moment of undoing is to find the strength and spiritual will to meet the dark and smoldering landscapes where we live. We can cry.

And I think that’s the essence of complementarity, that you have to view the world in different ways to do it justice, and the different ways can each be very rich, can each be internally consistent, can each have its own language and rules, but they may be mutually incompatible. And to do full justice to reality, you have to take both of them into... See more

We are entering a blissful new Middle Ages, where you simply soak in a static world until the waters finally close in over your head.

Definition: Quantitative investing proceeds by assembling, cleaning, and pooling vast amounts of data on prices, deals, valuations, etc. Advanced techniques are applied to study patterns of growth, failure, value evolution, and performance. Deep statistical insights can be teased out of data. The best systems learn and adjust their accuracy over ti... See more

On Hiring: look for these 4 qualities, the rest can be taught

1. Very deep love for learning: love learning and will do it for free, being intellectually curious


2. Incredible work ethic: can test for this


3. Investing is an EQ business not an IQ business, about mental flexibility: persistence and grit: beaten down and pucked in the face, seen hardship, come

... See more

Steve Jobs once said, “ The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller . The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

We seek intimacy to protect ourselves from feeling alone; and yet creating the distance essential to eroticism means stepping back from the comfort of our partner and feeling more alone.