A Simple Edge: Help People Early

When I was 20 years old, I met a senior person in the investment industry who changed my life. I was an intern at the time, and that person picked up the phone and got me my first job in Silicon Valley. It all happened in a matter of days.

I’ve thought back to that moment many times since then, because the act itself seemed so profoundly altruistic.

Over time, I realized that helping others is a habit. And there are a few patterns that repeat again and again for people who make this a priority.

First, profound acts of kindness are usually really cheap. In my example, a simple phone call, in this case from a senior person lending their credibility to a young and unproven talent. There is an asymmetry here: Progressing your own career is very hard and requires a huge amount of energy input. As you get more senior, you need to squeeze a lot of lemons to get juice. By contrast, helping someone else progress in their career is nearly free. For a little bit of effort, you tend to get a lot of impact.

Second, the people who do profound acts of kindness are almost always repeat players in this game — the person who did that first profound act of kindness for me has done it dozens of times. He is not reinventing the wheel each morning. For example, when I think of the three people who have influenced my life most, I believe these three people have on average influenced a lot of people’s lives. They were not making an exception for me, it was simply part of a broader pattern of behavior.

Third, people who do these acts of kindness are intrinsically non-transactional. This is a definitional point. People who in the ordinary course of business help you are engaging in a value exchange. By contrast, people who commit acts of kindness explicitly expect nothing in return — which makes receiving their kindness even easier upon the recipient. Usually, these people take a very long-horizon in their lives, whether for religious reasons, as a business philosophy, or otherwise.

The market is efficient, and most of the time when there is an opportunity to get ahead, it’s been fully exploited by others. What’s amazed me is that helping others does so clearly benefit the giver over the fullness of time. Human beings have a natural tendency toward reciprocity — everyone remembers the people who believed in them when no one else did. And yet somehow, we’ve been so ingrained in short-term thinking by school (6-month performance cycle) and jobs (12-month performance cycle), that very few people fully take advantage of the incredible benefits that come from helping others.

Persistent alpha is rare in markets. This one seems to be embedded in the human psyche. So much better for those who choose the path of giving.