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> No, no, no. It’s got to be one company at a time, one job at a time. Right? Only investors can do that. [that= have a multi-career path] Investors have a sin

by IMTDb 6y ago

> No, no, no. It’s got to be one company at a time, one job at a time. Right? Only investors can do that. [that= have a multi-career path] Investors have a single career path: being investors. And you have a diverse portfolio you invest in: company A in AI/ML, company B in B2C, company C in biotech, ... Similarly, as a C-level, you have a single career path: being C-level at [company]. And you have a diverse portfolio of project you invest in: geo-expansion, new line of products, internal reorganisation, raising money, ... As an investor, to job is to find projects and teams to invest in, then let them do their stuff. By definition, the amount of time you will spend working inside projects you have invested on should be pretty limited. As an executive, your job is to execute. And that takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. If you believe you are going to be able to execute well on multiple companies at the same time, dividing your focus and energy, all companies will suffer. AT some point, each company is going to need someone with 100% focus on that company. And person should be the one in charge.

WJW 6y ago
The article goes off the rails right at the start when he compares having multiple career tracks to having a diversified portfolio. Diversified portfolios tend to have better risk-adjusted returns because their returns of individual investments are (supposed to be) relatively uncorrelated. Financial risk managers are always on the lookout for previously unidentified correlations between investments in their portfolio since that might increase the risks beyond what what has been agreed upon as acceptable with the clients. The payoffs of multiple career tracks on the other hand are almost never uncorrelated. First off there is the obvious case that it is the same person doing all of them. This makes all labor-intensive careers very correlated in matters when a single event touches their health. Also, investment success of one stock usually means nothing (neither negtive nor positive) for other stocks in your portfolio. In most careers though, the payout of many careers is heavily tilted towards the higher end of the achievement spectrum and that may not be attainable without a full-time investment into that career. I don't think anyone would argue that an athlete dividing their time between three or more sports has a really good chance of becoming a professional in any of those, for example, because to be a professional athlete you need to be at the very top of the game and can't afford to spend 66% of your available practice time on other things. The correlation of these activities is actually very far from zero and therefore diversifying careers does not make sense from the start from an risk-management perspective. The rest of the article builds on that flawed premise.

by IMTDb 6y ago

WJW 6y ago

The article goes off the rails right at the start when he compares having multiple career tracks to having a diversified portfolio. Diversified portfolios tend to have better risk-adjusted returns because their returns of individual investments are (supposed to be) relatively uncorrelated. Financial risk managers are always on the lookout for previously unidentified correlations between investments in their portfolio since that might increase the risks beyond what what has been agreed upon as acceptable with the clients. The payoffs of multiple career tracks on the other hand are almost never uncorrelated. First off there is the obvious case that it is the same person doing all of them. This makes all labor-intensive careers very correlated in matters when a single event touches their health. Also, investment success of one stock usually means nothing (neither negtive nor positive) for other stocks in your portfolio. In most careers though, the payout of many careers is heavily tilted towards the higher end of the achievement spectrum and that may not be attainable without a full-time investment into that career. I don't think anyone would argue that an athlete dividing their time between three or more sports has a really good chance of becoming a professional in any of those, for example, because to be a professional athlete you need to be at the very top of the game and can't afford to spend 66% of your available practice time on other things. The correlation of these activities is actually very far from zero and therefore diversifying careers does not make sense from the start from an risk-management perspective. The rest of the article builds on that flawed premise.