Page 14
The finishes were opulent—marble, glass, steel, wood, and leather in shades of beige and cream, tinseled
with cobalt—but that was not what got me. Most offices I had known had harsh fluorescent lighting
reminding you that you were hard at work. Here, the light raying from the seamless ceiling, softened
through distance and angles and filters, glowed. It mixed with nature, with its reflection off Central
Park, and caused whoever was in the room to feel alive with the same starry force that made the view—
the sky, the moon, heaven, and earth.
Page 16
This was the culture from which I was trying to escape, evinced by an offhand remark a coworker at
Fidelity made to me one night: “I basically sit on my ass and do nothing and make millions. What could
be better than that?”
Page 62
I was promoted, and a year later promoted again, to a co–portfolio manager, but I was not sure I
deserved any of this: workers around the world were losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings as
I watched my base and bonus and profit sharing go up and up and up with, honestly, very little effort on
my part—and this felt cosmically wrong. I did not feel like I was adding value to the world. I felt
insulated from harm, disconnected from humanity. I had to get out.
Page 62
An affair would be so inefficient.
Page 73
Jamie said he valued, in order of importance, family, humanity, country, then his company. J.P.
Morgan—last. I did not, for a second, doubt that he believed he held those values.
Page 91
But this kind of positive, helpful bias toward a subset of people (as opposed to a negative, harmful bias
toward those not in the set) nevertheless results in social hierarchy and tiered societies.
Page 92
I could not help but observe other people’s wrap jobs. We were efficient, until we were wasteful; we
were world-class until we weren’t. Without inflation I’d have to give Boone the same grade as I would
give his microwaving skills: B.
Page 97
I questioned my reality and doubted my doubt, unsure if I felt nothing or something or perhaps
everything.
Page 140
“Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will
be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me
that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise.
People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the
genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to
encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel
like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will,
followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here
could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your
experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a
lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest,
winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.
3
Page 159
He was unmoved by temptation, manias, fads; pinned behind his monitor was a quote from Steve Jobs:
“I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”
Page 162
The name of the game at Carbon, at least with Boone, was modesty, downplaying, understatement.
Acting like a start-up when you’re the clear incumbent because concealing your position—being
underestimated—lets you have a much bigger playbook.
Page 195
I spent every second reacting to the world, reacting as though a virus had infected my phone and
toggled all the switches to allow notifications to flash/buzz/sound all the time. If, as Boone believed,
how you spent your days was how you lived your life, then I was not in control of my life.
Page 195
I had urgency fatigue.
Page 195
Work felt like a series of nested em dashes, living inside a sentence that could never reach its period.
Page 237
I have never voted. Some of this is the result of an intentional deprioritization of politics; but most of it
is because some other part of me knows how much I feel compelled to identify with winners, which
scares me: I fear I might sympathize with the wrong team.
Page 269
No. There was only money. Everything else was a side effect.
Page 270
If you have the highest returns and the highest pay, nearly everything will solve itself because the
people—internal workers and external LPs—will convince themselves that they want to be a part of
your mission. Greed is good because it makes things predictable. No need to coerce or enforce or foist
any delusions when you have people volunteering to do the labor of self-persuasion.
Page 300
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 300
But the unconscious mind is an ocean where the conscious mind is a wave; I’m much more like her than
I’m not.
Page 306
Above all, I feared learning my mother had been correct when she said, “When you grow up, you’ll learn:
no one cares about you except your family.”
Page 323
In AIM, at Carbon, I saw a pattern hidden in plain sight: A small decision weighed down by repetition
becomes a massive habit. It becomes inertia.
Page 325
Companies used to go public at an earlier stage in their life cycles, making their hyper-growth phase
accessible to the average investor. But large and larger pools of capital came rushing in, which gave
start-ups an option to stay private longer, delaying their IPOs. This was often a win-win: a start-up
might not want (or be ready for) the pressure of public financial reporting; private investors might get
special access to the period of highest growth. Access is edge. Constraint is destiny. The loser, then, and
always, was the retail investor, who most likely did not have the privilege to invest in the start-up or in
the private fund. Carbon, in my view, was occupying a territory of the market to which all of the public
should have access.
