PALE BLUE DOT
A JERRY MAGUIRE MOMENT
This is my first blogpost, my Jerry Maguire moment.
I run a kickass fund and kickass team. I love that CEO speech from the movie Margin Call:
“Be first, be smarter or cheat – and I don’t cheat”.
Every success is hard won, every mistake a chance to learn.
I’ve sat in the room with greatness and been on the ground during great challenges — Ebola, Sierra Leone, 2014 / Covid, China, 2020.
If that stuff doesn’t change you, nothing will.
Regrets?
Being away, missing moments with my wife and children.
Wisdom?
The things that matter aren’t things. Success is non-zero sum or, as Martin Luther King said on his last night alive:
“Either we go up together, or we go down together.”
SKIN IN THE GAME
At some airport somewhere I can’t remember, I bought a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin In The Game, the fifth book in the masterful Incerto series (think Black Swan and Antifragile).
…It’s about symmetry, the balance of incentives against disincentives, the equipoise of having something to lose when taking risks.
So why am I doing this?
Zoom out and ESG isn’t much more than a bunch of business frameworks. For real skin in the game, we must think further upstream, to the source…
VALENTINE’S 1990
On 14th February 1990, Voyager 1 was about to leave our solar system.
The NASA astronomer, Carl Sagan, suggested Voyager’s cameras be turned back to Earth, to see what we look like from 4 billion miles away.
Earth looked like “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.
In an image 640,000 pixels big, there we were — small and blue, 12% of a single pixel.
Sagan named the picture Pale Blue Dot and described its significance:
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
“…There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
WHY?
My skin in the game? This slice of time on this fraction of a dot.
After a lifetime seeking alpha, it’s the triple bottom line that matters — people, planet, prosperity.
As a husband and a father, I want everything for my family you want for yours.
That's home.
That's us.
This is where we make our stand.
That’s why.
POSTSCRIPT: THE POEM
It’s true, I have a kickass team.
Up on the wall in our HQ there’s the poem at the end of Taleb’s Skin In The Game - it's our philosophy in a nutshell:
“No muscles without strength,
friendship without trust,
opinion without consequence,
change without aesthetics,
age without values,
life without effort,
water without thirst,
food without nourishment,
love without sacrifice,
power without fairness,
facts without rigor,
statistics without logic,
mathematics without proof,
teaching without experience,
politeness without warmth,
values without embodiment,
degrees without erudition,
militarism without fortitude,
progress without civilization,
friendship without investment,
virtue without risk,
probability without ergodicity,
wealth without exposure,
complication without depth,
fluency without content,
decision without asymmetry,
science without skepticism,
religion without tolerance,
and, most of all:
nothing without skin in the game.”
Dixon, CHAIRMAN