Admissions Essay On Diversity

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I’m applying to head back to school in the Fall of 2013. They asked for 500 words on diversity.

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Growing up in Canada, I was exposed to prejudice against the french-speaking Quebecois. Notwithstanding this prejudice, I decided to attend McGill University, an English school in the middle of a French city. At McGill, I worked closely with Quebecois students. I was 21 when I graduated and began to notice that my friends didn’t align with my prejudices.

My next move was to the United Kingdom. I worked in the most diverse group of finance professionals in the City of London. There were six partners, one executive and myself. In the 90s, Private Equity was dominated by white men with accounting backgrounds. My boss, Jon Moulton, fit the profile of our peers, a 40-something accountant. However, he valued diversity and built a team that contained the only female partners in our sector. In addition to the Brits, the team was composed of a Singaporean, an American and myself, a Canadian.

My two-month internship was extended twice and I deferred Business School. At 25, I was given the opportunity to become a partner in the firm via a transfer to Asia. I still hadn’t put the pieces together on the role of diversity in my life. 

In 1993, I moved to Hong Kong and joined another unique team. Based in China, half the partners were Indian. We were responsible for a large geography and I worked in Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and India.

By the late-90s, I noticed that the prejudices, that I first heard as a child, had followed me around the world. Marked by language, skin color, investment sector and nationality, tribal rivalries endured. As an English-speaking white-man from Canada, I passed through these communities. I was never an insider but I was tolerated and exposed to what the locals really thought.

Sitting here today, at 44 years old, I’ve learned what my first boss, Jon, must have seen. If the goal is performance then diversity, by its very nature, gives advantages unavailable to tribal, or homogeneous, competition. 

Ultimately, the attraction of working in finance faded because the game is emotionally void. We made a lot of money for our investors but we didn’t improve people’s lives. So, in my 30s, I shifted toward athletics. Just like the beginning of my business career, I gave myself a two-month window to try life as an elite triathlete and started down a new path.

My two-month trial ended with a top performance at a race called Ironman Canada. I returned to my firm in Hong Kong and negotiated an extended leave of absence. I never looked back and started a life that mixed coaching with high-performance sport. 

Helping others through coaching brought far greater satisfaction. Hopefully, my letters of recommendation will confirm my ability to improve the lives of those around me. This trait is the greatest gift that I’ve been given. 

By being true to myself, and working with others, I find that the my community improves. I hope to have the opportunity to bring this virtue to your university.

 

Love and Hate

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The first time your kid tells you that she hates you can be traumatic. My wife will never forget when our oldest told her that she hated her. Not reacting is one of my strengths so, when it was my turn, my daughter’s hate flowed through me. As a father, I want to help my daughter accept her emotions and let them go. 

Quite often, people that are good with love (mothers, wives, daughter), close themselves to negative emotions, such as hate. That closure, between mothers and daughters especially, can lead to strange dynamics, especially when an unexpected trigger results in an outpouring of hate.

I have an ability to react slowly. Being slow to react makes me appear cold but has helped me deal with some very abrasive people (and challenging preschoolers).

A couple weeks after my non-reaction to my daughter’s hate, the conversation when like this:

Daddy, I love you

Daddy, I hate you

But, I love you more

There is a tension between the love and hate in our little girl. By acknowledging, and not suppressing, the hate, we helped her avoid making the hate her focus.

The other morning, we were walking into school and she saw a little buddy entering the classroom with his mom. 

Lex beamed and told me, “Daddy, that’s my friend.” 

The little guy immediately screamed, “I am NOT your friend!” Causing his mother to stop cold with a universal look of maternal horror. 

Lex shrugged and said, “it’s OK Dad, he’ll be my friend this afternoon.”

A home environment where we let go of hate is wonderful gift to pass to our children.

 

Identifying Corruption

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Taleb writes that to see fraud, yet remain silent, makes us a fraud. It’s a powerful argument but, before speaking up, I like to think things through.

What should you do when you realize that your spouse, your boss, your business partner or your peers might be corrupt? Before taking action, I have some questions that I ask myself:

Look around and ask… Am I sure? – this question has saved me from many mistakes. Most of what I see in others in generated by something inside of me.

Look around and invert by asking… What is the likelihood that all these people are not corrupt? This method brings me clarity when faced with white lies and circumstantial evidence.

Consider the implications of no-action… If they turn out to be crooks, and I stick around, then what’s likely to happen to me?

Consider the breadth of corruption: is it local; is it in the leadership; or is it through the entire organization?

When I’ve been faced with difficult decisions, these questions have been extremely useful. I’ll share case studies over the next few weeks.

Skin In The Game

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Sticking with the Antifragile theme, Taleb (and Gordon Livingston) write that honor flows from demonstrating courage when exposed to risk due to one’s beliefs. Taleb uses the example of enduring ridicule, and financial risk, for being true to his beliefs. 

Last summer, I listened to elites hammer on about the underclass not having skin in the game. This discussion seemed to lack justice but I wasn’t able to put my finger on an exact reason.

Having worked alongside the wealthy, I have experience with the problems of the rich. My move to the US gave me a chance to dig deeper into tax policy and I’ll be sharing some observations about that in future articles.

At the top of society, what does an honest person risk?

  • Size of main residence
  • Frequency, location and duration of vacations 
  • Number of years until retirement
  • Proportion of personal budget dedicated to luxury spending
  • Amount of capital passed to the next generation

Facing the above doesn’t require courage – no wonder extreme activities become popular in societies with wide income differentials.

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In Taleb’s worldview, meaning comes from exercising courage with regard to one’s beliefs. I tend to derive meaning from the pursuit of excellence, working on my goals and meeting my obligations to my family. There’s not much personal risk in the way I roll through life, but it seems to work for me.

I enjoyed the Antifragile book, so I’ve been considering how I might be fooling myself. I’ve come up with a few areas.

As a 4th generation, first born, white male… the world has been skewed in my favor since birth. Listening, to my peers complain about the burdens of sharing society with their fellow citizens, demonstrates an ignorance of my reality. Seeing older versions of myself complain offends something inside me – my time in Asia taught me that I rarely have anything to complain about.

There is a disconnect between my reality and what the public is told about people like me. My effective (US) tax rate is similar to what I paid in Hong Kong. Having lived in Europe, Oceania and Asia – America is a low-cost, and very attractive, place to live and work.

Taleb makes the point that seeking to change the human condition is folly and warns against seeking to remove greed. He advises regulation to protect our societies from the effects of greed. Examples would be getting rid of banks that are too big to fail and applying criminal sanctions for white collar criminals. There have been a lot of examples in the news recently. HSBC banking drug cartels and Barclays fixing global interest rates. If a small institution took these actions then their directors would be going to jail, or at least losing their banking license.

Remember that we only see a portion of the corruption in our societies.

  • What do the financial scandals tell us about that society?
  • What does the USADA report tell us about endurance sport?
  • What lessons can we learn from these real-life dramas to make better decisions in our own lives?
  • When faced with an ethical choice, do we take the money or remain true to ourselves? 
  • Is it possible to do both?

I’ve spent a lot of time considering the above and my latest book shared a road map for how I live.

Before we publish on Amazon, my editor asked me to include the human side of how I arrived at my framework. Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing the stories that created my way of living.

Two Virtues

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Last week a friend sent me an article about preparing heirs and I asked myself, ‘what virtues do I want to pass to my kids?’

Kindness and honesty immediately came to mind.

Why do these stand out and how does my life demonstrate these traits to my kids?

I have very few regrets in my life but those that stand out are due to a lack of kindness at the end of relationships. The other errors that I’ve made had to do with excess drinking.

I can’t teach my kids about how to treat ex-girlfriends nicely anymore. However, I have better avenues for leading by example. How do I treat the most important person in their life, their mother.

The other area, that’s often overlooked, is how I treat people that can be mistreated with little personal downside, service people and strangers. There’s no better prevention for entitlement than working on humility with strangers. This trait has brought goodness, and good business, to my life.

Thursday’s blog will focus on having skin in the game and touches on the decisions that have brought me the most enduring satisfaction. As you can tell from my most recent book, I’ve received psychic benefit from not “taking the money.” This trait runs deeper than finance and has been tested many different ways.

Rather than tell my kids “don’t lie” I’ve been implanting a mantra of “it’s better to tell the truth.”

Cycling gave me an opportunity to explain why and I’m waiting for when they ask me about my own life.

What am I teaching my family by the way I live my life?

The Antifragile Family

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My family owes a debt to Taleb as applying his books, Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, enabled me to avoid personal bankruptcy in the Great Recession of 2008/2009.

His latest book, Antifragile, extends his work beyond business and finance. I highly recommend this book – here’s a link to his Wikipedia page for a short-form intro to his thinking.

As a father, I have two heuristics that I apply to my kids:

  • Keep the kids alive
  • Don’t protect from failure

My wife and I have debates about the second point and she’s a good counterbalance to my approach. I’m willing to let my kids get dirty, hurt, sick, upset, cold, hot… especially when I think there’s a chance they will learn by doing. My goal being to teach personal responsibility and put ‘failure’ in perspective.

I’m willing to let my kids struggle because Taleb makes the point that we want to do as much nothing as possible. He makes the point with regard to medicine and I’ve heard Buffett make the same point about investing. Both authors note that “doing nothing” is very difficult to achieve and always open to criticism (because it is difficult to attribute the benefits of no-action).

The authors of Siblings Without Rivalry share that the wise parent acknowledges conflict then gives the kids an opportunity to learn how to resolve themselves. What’s the minimum intervention that will help my kids learn to get along in the world?

Recently, my daughter was having trouble playing with older kids. Lex is the first born and defaults to total domination in relationships – the older girl (also first born) yelled at her and Lex came to me to ask if I would intervene…

  • Lex – tell her to play with me
  • Dad – it made you feel sad when she yelled at you
  • Lex – yeah
  • Dad – you want to play with her and her brother
  • Lex – yeah
  • Dad – I could tell her to play with you but kids don’t like being told what to do – why don’t you act a bit more calm and see what happens

Total time investment – ten seconds – kids worked it out over the next ten minutes without any adult intervention. An intervention was required a little later when she nearly slammed a toddler’s fingers in a door (that was a chance to teach “do no harm“)

The message that tinkering leads to adverse outcomes is repeated in many fields. So what to do? I think Taleb would advise:

  • Remove fragility – child-proof the home
  • Limit the effects of asymmetric negative outcomes – seat belts, health insurance, long term care insurance
  • Gain exposure to positive asymmetric outcomes – have children, change careers, meet new people
  • Then stand back, let it ride, avoid noise and spend your time learning

Asymmetric means that the outcome is much greater in one direction than the other. For example, my friends tease me because I always drive the speed limit, or less. I drive slow because the cost (time) is tiny compared to the benefit of less fatalities. An avoidance of negative Black Swans is why I wear seat belts, helmets and don’t run lights & stop signs. It’s also why I don’t yell at strangers, especially in America.

Because Taleb shares stories of multi-million dollar investment profits from applying his knowledge, it’s tempting to consider how we can make a lot of money from his advice. For example, a reader sent in a question about “barbelling” a small portfolio. My advice would be to barbell your life. There is far more upside for a young person to focus on asymmetric outcomes with their human capital, than their financial capital.

I’ve been thinking about my family’s exposure to positive Black Swans and my children keep coming back to me. Little people require a lot of change in the lives of parents but their lives provide the opportunity for positive events to enter the family system. 

How can I help my family benefit from positive asymmetric outcomes?

Readings To Strengthen Your Family

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With three kids, I needed some expert input on family dynamics and management. These titles have been quite useful for me to consider the life we want to lead.

While it’s tempting to manipulate my kids via parental approval – I wrote them a how-to–manual with my last book – these books reinforce the reality that success comes from respecting differences and working towards the goals of each individual.

While the books are geared at the wealthy, the tactics and challenges faced by families are universal. Seeing financial wealth rise, fall and disappear between generations becomes a metaphor, rather than metric, for family success.

With all the titles, what I found most helpful was thinking about human, rather than financial, capital. Secondly, considering the goals of each individual, as an individual, within the family unit. One can apply these principles into any organization.

Family Fortunes – Bonner/Bonner – interesting ideas, many contrarian to my own views. Caused me to think through, then revise, my own thinking.

Wealth In Families – Collier – practical in approach, filled with excellent questions, timelines for education and checklists.

Preparing Heirs – Williams/Preisser – results from studying generational transitions. Considering this book in light of my family history had unintended consequences that I’ll be sharing.

Family Wealth – Hughes – the deepest study (out of what I’ve read so far) on the concept of human capital. If you enjoy this title then you can go further with his follow up book, Family: The compact among generations.

In studying my own family, I realized that success between generations doesn’t require wealth, or its preservation. Education (in terms of practical skills) and opportunity to apply those skills proved most useful across the last five generations.

Secret Lives

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This past year has been a tough one for confidence in my peers. Historically, I’ve had some form of ethical event about every five years and 2012 will stand out. The developments in cycling, and their implication to my sport of triathlon, have impacted me quite deeply.

My wife thinks that I’ve been focusing on Lance but it’s the implications for my athletic life, combined with local scandals, that have been most difficult for me. 2012 saw the discovery of many secret lives in my peers.

If you read Charlie Munger then you’ll find examples of the corrosive effects of creating incentives for people to lie. What starts as an individual tragedy flows into society when a class of people starts lying to themselves (sports figures, politicians, financiers). Living in a society that is filled with secret lives damages everyone. I prefer wide latitude for personal freedom with clear, and certain, punishments for crossing the line.

Secret lives come in many forms – drug use, alcoholism, theft, marital infidelity, disordered eating, overeating, sexual preference, sexual deviance, financial fraud, agency risk…

Coming out of cycling, the best confession (for personal ethics) that I read was Floyd saying (and I paraphrase) that he did it and he’d probably do it again. Pretty much everybody else has fallen back on the “I had a dream” defense and/or “I was only following orders.”

This hits me hard because I’ve left a marriage, a partnership and put companies into bankrupcy because I felt it was necessary to remain true to myself. The short-term costs to me have been material but far outweighed by the long-term benefits (and I can sleep at night without presciption medication).

Everybody doesn’t do it.

Perhaps Floyd’s honesty is mirrored behind closed doors – it’s better in the long run to be honest with yourself. As Gordon Livingston tweeted this week – it’s easier to tell the truth to others when we’re not lying to ourselves!

In Boulder, we’re highly indignant of doping cheats (that get caught). However, we’re surprisingly lax about other forms of cheating that have a much greater impact on families. I wonder if the haters would be as venomous if they knew the moral ambiguity pervasive in elite segments of society. Perhaps they’d share my 2012 crisis of confidence.

Would helping you connect the dots increase, or decrease, suffering? I’m mulling that over. Suffice to say, the public only knows a faction of what happens in sport, in finance and in business. I keep changing fields and it keeps following me.

Anyhow, I have come up with an idea to be part of the solution with respect to elite sport and will be sharing my biological passport over at Endurance Corner.

A very smart friend advised me to stay positive and stay on message. Reading all the hate is wearing me out – no need to add to that, or bring down my pals.

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Back to my original point about secret lives – if you read about cycling (The Secret Race, Racing Through the Dark), you’ll see what kills (non-sociopathic) people is knowing they are living a lie. Forcing good people underground weakens society.

We might think that raging against the dopers is just but do we want to train an anger response in our lives?

Consider eating disorders – I have a number of pals that have confided that they can’t come forward and tell everyone what it’s really like because ‘everyone will think I’m a headcase.’ Truth is most top athletes are headcases – there aren’t too many ‘normal’ people that want to exercise themselves towards their maximum genetic potential.

Or sexual preference – imagine being born a certain way and living in secret, often from your own parents. Even with tolerance and compassion, it isn’t easy rolling through life as a visible minority. Collectively forcing these men and women to live a lie is unjust and sets up a corrosive internal rationalization that can take years to unwind.

Closest to home is sexual abuse. I graduated from a Catholic high school, where I won a student-of-the-year scholarship. Ironically, my award was named after a priest that abused my friends. The boys have become men and continue to carry a pain from being victims of a very ill man.

Far better to release the past than carry the pain forward.

Live an open life.

More Recommended Reading

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You’ll find a list of reading at the back of my most recent book. Over the last few months, I’ve been able to get through some excellent titles. In order of importance to me:

Siblings Without Rivalry – Faber/Mazlish

Absolutely outstanding with practical tips for parents as well as case studies to better understand existing (adult) family dynamics. They gave this book to us when we left the hospital with our second child – it took me a year and a half to read it and I’m glad I did. Essential reading to understand yourself and others.

 

Antifragile – Taleb

Taleb shares his thoughts on a life well lived. He uses a wide range of examples to help us consider asymmetric outcomes in our lives. I will share a series of articles considering its lessons for my family. I highly recommend this read.

 

The Thing You Think You Cannot Do – Livingston

Livingston shares thoughts on honor, virtue and courage as components of a life with meaning. He combines stories of personal courage with examples of errors of misjudgment. I admire Livingston’s honesty with himself and his courage to share his opinions about living well. As I look forward from middle age, Livingston provides me with examples of what I’m likely to face in old age.

 

What Money Can’t Buy – Sandel

I enjoyed the Harvard Justice lectures so picked up this title as a way of saying thanks to the professor. An enjoyable read that encouraged me to consider the larger impact of my career in finance and my family’s tendency to isolate ourselves within our bubble. The book is a well-reasoned account of the benefits of civic virtue and the price we pay for crowding out non-market norms.

 

The Social Conquest of Earth – Wilson

I started this book because I enjoyed Wilson’s award winning title, Consilience. I figured, rightly, that he would have something interesting to say. The book challenged my thinking about free will at an individual, and a collective, level. As a specific example, I wonder if I am exercising an illusion of individual free will within a community that is highly predictable.

 

Trust – Fukuyama

Fukuyama takes the reader on an exploration of community, family and business structures around the world. I enjoyed the author’s hypothesis about business organizations being driven by cultural factors. A useful read if you’re curious about cultures outside your own or work internationally. He also spends considerable time exploring the role of family in different cultures.

 

 

Sport In The Context Of A Just Society

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A friend asked my opinion – this is an edited version of my reply.

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This essay might help you place your feelings: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/

I was introduced to Rawls by the Harvard Justice course.

For me, “just” success comes from an honorable path. It’s a fundamental error to let the pursuit of winning get in front of the pursuit of honor. The value of athletics to society comes from the virtuous pursuit of honor. It sounds like a quaint concept but that’s what athletics is about.

Early in my finance career, my Dad passed along advice that he received from the owner of the bank where we worked – always be willing to make a little less money to maintain your ethics. I’ve taken that further to “always be willing to be a little less successful.” The ability to leave a little on the table greatly reduces the chance that we’ll end up in jail or disgraced.

Livestrong is a powerful shield for Lance because it gives the appearance of a large benefit to the masses from one man’s success. That is an extremely powerful concept in terms of social justice (see Rawls). Based on the public facts, Livestrong may be an illusion. The clearest example is the splitting of the .com and the .org to personally benefit the founder – the fact that the millions of dollars from Nike, Trek and Oakley weren’t enough is telling. 

The joy we felt was real and you should feel lucky to have the capacity to feel joy from sports. I’ve lost most the joy I felt with elite sport. I know what lies beneath the surface and the illusions held by the masses bother me at some level.  I’m surrounded by constant reminders of athletic cheating.

Hold on to joy, release the hate and focus on being a good guy within your family. You’ll get the best return for your own life by emotional investment in those that are near to you. They know who we are and like us anyway!

The elites in society have a duty to hold themselves to a higher standard – most (many? some?) top athletes fail that test. Criminal violations by elites should be punished.

By “elites” I mean the top 1% of our society, not some poor guy making $35k a year with a pro triathlon card!