✍🏼 On radically integrating life and work

Mission: radical integration of life and work. Time horizon: infinity

Mar 21, 2024

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Here, you and I ask the questions that matter.

Comma is a window into the story of one human’s pursuit of more aliveness and crafting a life of significance. It’s an offering of perspective, connection, and perhaps even some wisdom sprinkled in.

It’s where you and I are in the process - of seeking, and becoming - together.

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Devin

On radically integrating life and work

Last week, I hopped on down to Austin, Texas for a couple of days at a gathering hosted by David Senra (host of the Founders podcast) called Founders Only.

As the name implies, it was full of…well…founders. Just under 200 founders of all types descended on Lake Austin from all over the world.

I left energized and inspired, and, frankly, feeling a bit less crazy.

One of the most difficult parts of this season of my life - stepping off my previous path, out into untamed, undefined space to forge my own - perhaps surprisingly hasn’t really been the deep inner reflection and questioning. Nor has it been the unsettling uncertainty that comes with the exploration and experimentation of beginning to build anew.

Often, feeling different, strange, and possibly even crazy for doing things this way is the most challenging. Feeling chronically misunderstood, disconnected, and lonely takes its toll.

Then, I arrive in Austin.

Being surrounded by others similarly focused on building a life and a world of their own making cemented my resolve.

I felt a deep sense of connection and belonging - a feeling that these were my people. That I didn’t have to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing. They got me. I felt understood.

As Paul Graham says:

Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers.
When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.
Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.

I think he’s right, but I think it applies to more than just the ambitious. I also think founders, creators, seekers, leaders - anyone aspiring to discover more of who they are, and to build an aligned life - need others like them to bloom.

While in Austin, one idea really smacked me in the face, in the best way. In the “this feels really important” kind of way.

In truth, it’s the second time I got smacked. Both times, it was as if it revealed something so obvious that I couldn’t quite see it for myself - that is, until the smack in the face.

I have this feeling that this idea seeded something significant that is to come in my life. Like I was gifted a puzzle piece that just might fit into the overall picture of my life and work that I seek to create.

It came from Paul Buser and Rick Buhrman, both co-founders of “a permanent capital investor rooted in love.”

Sator Grove.

Love?

Yes. Love.

Why?

Because, as they told us in Austin, they seek “radical integration of life in work.”

As they spoke, it lit a fire in me that had been primed to burn. It felt like someone was finally speaking my language, just much more fluently.

Paul and Rick speak of life and work holistically.

They wax about the possibilities of what work can be.

Work can be an expression of and container for compounding and deepening relationships, trust, knowledge, and capital.

A “canopy” for partnership with people we want to “do life with.” For life-long learning. For a dynamic, multi-dimensional life.

But it doesn’t just end up this way. We have to make it this way.

What stands out to me, and just feels right, is that they don’t just say people they want to do work with. Their vision is bigger than that. Broader, and deeper. To me, it offers the possibility of a life that’s richer, more integrated, and more fulfilling.

Zeal

I mentioned that last week was the second time that I was smacked in the face by this idea. The first was when I heard the very same Rick and Paul on Invest Like the Best last October. (Please do me (and you) a favor, click that lil’ orange link, and spend an hour with them. Maybe you’ll feel this same fire that I do.)

The fire was lit the first time listening to that conversation, and their ideas were planted in my psyche. But, time moved on, and life moved on, and there these idea-seeds stayed, un-cultivated.

Until last week.

Sitting there, it suddenly seemed blatantly obvious that these ideas were great answers to some of the deeper questions I’ve been asking of life - the kind of stuff you and I have explored here with Comma.

I felt a rare, but familiar feeling that I didn’t have words to describe in all its texture.

Until last week.

Also at Founders Only, Ben Wilson (of the How to Take Over the World podcast) shared Aristotle’s uncommon definition of the concept of zeal:

The pain you feel when someone is both:
like you in nature
AND
has accomplished good and honorable things you have not

Here I was, listening to two seekers clearly on the track of their life’s work, speaking of “a permanent capital investor rooted in love.”

And here I was, struck with zeal.

Models are answers in motion

Answers matter, especially if they’re to questions that matter. But I realize that seeing a model for the life we envision may be even more important.

I believe that people need people.

That you and I need people alongside, or up ahead of us, to keep us going. To support us, but also to inspire us.

Life isn’t single-player, and it’s through our relationships with others and their stories (even if from a distance, like in my case with Paul and Rick) that we get our antidote to the difficulties - the pain, loneliness, sadness - we will inevitably encounter.

Answers can be one-dimensional. Black and white.

Models bring answers to life. They put answers in motion, writing a story of another person living in the direction we desire.

Answers can bring clarity, but in my experience, it’s through people and their stories that I feel connected and draw inspiration that I can turn into energy to propel me forward on my own path of working to create an authentic, meaningful, aligned life.

A model for a new way of working

Why does the way we operate at work have to be misaligned with how we operate outside of work?

It can feel like a radical question.

I don’t think it has to be that way, and Rick and Paul show us how.

Life is long-term, and work should be, too

When I think about my life, I think about my whole life. Sure, it has chapters and seasons, but they all add up to make me.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
….A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
— Annie Dillard

So, why limit my time horizon to the typical investment fund life of 5 or 10 years? Or the length of a typical startup from founding to exit? Or the length of a university degree?

Implicit in the idea of Life’s Work is the full arc of a life and a mission. This is how I desire to build - perhaps even beyond my lifetime. I aim to build for lasting impact, however long it can last.

To be clear, I am not shunning a considered focus on the days, weeks, months, and years that weave together to form our lives. It’s just that focus on goal-setting has plenty written about it. I’m not going to opine here, except to say that I believe that planning does indeed have a role in aiming and living long-term - I’m simply drawn to the idea of stretching it beyond just the short- or intermediate-term.

Structure as a design tool

I’m inspired to think of structure as a tool to enable this alignment, rather than a limitation. The aim is to design an elegant and intentional structure with clear principles to create alignment.

Greater alignment unlocks greater simplicity - less dissonance between how life is lived, and how work is done. Less structural and psychic overhead, more freedom.

Here, I’m taking a look at what that might look like for The Comma Project. My idea would be that it serves as an extension of my life, the lives of any partners, and our shared vision for the world we aspire to build.

I’ll also ask: what would it look like for you?

Some ideas inspired by Sator Grove:

Personal “family office”
- Invest all of my personal net worth. Instead of investing for and in life separately from work, why not integrate both?
- Why would family offices only be for the ultra-rich?
Flexibility to do what matters
- Define Comma’s reason for being, its “why” and “how,” based on mission, vision, and values in life and work
- Provides flexibility to invest, build, or create - whatever best serves Comma’s purpose
- Allows integration of non-profit philanthropic activity along the journey, rather than at the end (as is typical)
Equal partners
- Fewer, deeper partnerships with people I want to “do life with” and have an aligned worldview and ambition
- All partners invest in equity at the same terms, myself included
No management fees
- I (and any other full-time team) would earn a salary to support life along the way, paid pro rata by all equity holders (me included)
- Removes any misalignment between the team and investors, where the team can be incentivized to raise more to earn more from management fees (which is negative sum), rather than from investing well, where everyone wins together (which is positive sum)
- Perhaps there’s some incentive component for any full-time team, earned over time or with performance
Permanent capital
- Investors can’t redeem their investment like other investment vehicle structures offer
- Investors still could receive liquidity by selling shares
- Enables continued ownership of winners beyond when most funds are forced or incentivized to sell their winners because of fund life, to return capital, etc. Winners keep winning and compounding well beyond the typical 5-10 year time horizon
Run like a company, not a fund
- Investments sit on the balance sheet as assets (cash or investments made)
- Revenue comes from how cash is deployed (not management fees), expenses support investment or building activities
- More Berkshire Hathaway, less Blackstone

World-building

Ultimately, what I’m talking about here is world-building.

World-building is this process of seeking and becoming that you and I talk about come to life.

It’s building our world, first and foremost. Building a life of our own design - of alignment, freedom, and meaning.

But it’s also building a world for others. Where our life and work send out a signal into the world that serves as an invitation to those who believe what we believe and seek what we seek. It’s an invitation that says “you’re not alone - come join us.”

As I continue to seek, I’m seeing more invitations that inspire me.

I endeavor to RSVP yes, extend invitations of my own, and return the favor.

As you get older, the thing you can’t unsee is quality.
Quality is at the bedrock of our philosophy, both in terms of the kinds of investments we make and with whom we make them. Indeed, quality is that enduring and differentiating attribute that always places time on one’s side, both in life and investing.
We exist to serve the greater good. The essence of Sator Grove is first a flourishing community that seeks to do good together and second an investment company. Whether through the capital we provide or the people with whom we collaborate, our aim is to ‘sow good seeds’ that grow into win-win outcomes for all of our constituents, including society and future generations.
— Sator Grove

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