Pain and Suffering in Kauai
And my quick review of Poor Charlie's Almanack
On a remote beach in Kauai, I noticed a sign on the side of the entrance to the caves -Danger: Rocks may fall from cliff at any time.
We had just hiked 11 miles into Kalalau beach the day before. Was I going to stop myself from entering this massive beach cave given the risk of falling rocks?
I ventured on through. But I jogged past the section where the small rocks formed a line in the sand.
Last week Cindy and I backpacked the Napali Coast. It’s a grueling 22 miles out and back under the heat and humidity of the tropical sun. But to do it in any other season besides summer and you risk getting rained on, and even worse, slipping on "crawlers ledge" and hitting the rocks where hikers unfortunately die every year.
And this was our very first backpacking trip. Car camping with a cooler of beer and sausages always felt like the right amount of comfort for an overnight stay in nature. But everyone raved about Kalalau so we packed a backpack full of dehydrated meals, hydration powder, and water straws and woke up at 4am for an early start.
The hike is no joke. The humidity is killer and it starts getting hot by 8am. Six miles in the hike, we faced Crawlers ledge and 30 mph gusts threatening to blow off our hats (and ourselves if we fumbled to grab it). Our training regime consisted of walking around San Francisco the week before. We had no fear of heights, but I was constantly visualizing the slip, the fall, and my body strewn across rocks while waves lapped my bones. It helped focus my attention on making it through the shady sections slowly.
What is the utility function of a person after 3 days without the modern comforts of society? On the last day hiking back with two miles and another thousand feet of elevation to go, I was 100% convinced that if someone offered me a cold Spindrift for $100, I would pay for it without thinking.
That’s not to say the beach doesn’t have it’s own comforts. At the end of the most remote tropical beach, Kalalau features a gorgeous hundred foot waterfall which acted as a natural shower every night for us after a nice ocean swim. Fruit trees littered the depths of the valley that you could hike to filled with mangos, guavas, and papayas. But for most of the second day, we laid around on the hammock and recovered our bodies to get ready for the hike back in to civilization.
When we woke up at 4am to hike back and the sunrise soon turned into a blazing overhead heat that wouldn’t stop. Sweat would drip down faster than I could drink the warm water from my camelbak. I was hunched over my hiking poles with my legs in pain. And what comes to mind but Jensen Huang’s talk I listened to a few days before on the plane.
People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. I was fortunate that I grew up with my parents providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering. To this day, I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee. And I mean that—boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering—and I mean that in a happy way.
Because you want to train, you want to refine the character of your company, you want greatness out of them. Greatness is not intelligence, as you know. Greatness comes from character, and character isn't formed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered. And so, if I could wish upon you—I don't know how to do it—but for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.
It was, above all, a calculated risk. One where the vantage point makes it looks unnecessary and laughable. I was 99.99% sure we wouldn’t die. But I knew it would be really hard, uncomfortable, tiring, and painfully hot. But why do we choose to do these things with those expectations? Why do people run marathons, climb mountains, and swim across channels?
Maybe because at the end of the day, as long as you survive on the other side, the feeling of accomplishment is as enormous as the magnitude of the pain and suffering that took you through it all.
And to be honest, at the end of the hike, I felt somewhat hoodwinked. We hiked the trail back in 9 hours instead of the 10 it took to get us there, and this even included a 30 minute body surfing session at the beach on the 2 mile mark. How did this happen?
Our legs and body had seemingly strengthened. We were now adjusted to a new normal of being sustainable nomads, forced to trek many miles every day like in the Oregon Trail or the characters on Lost. An even harder hike was now possible in a few days with some rest. But instead we were flying back to the modern comforts of a lifestyle that valued us hunched deeply over a computer in thought, rather than living off of the land and foraging for our own food and water.
It saddened me a little. But then I got a taste of poke and beer at my friend’s wedding. And I forgot all about it.
Things I Read
Poor Charlie’s Almanack consists of a collection of Charlie Munger’s speeches and life lessons. If I had to summarize it - most money managers take too high of fees for bad performance and academics could probably benefit from some breadth of learning across all disciplines. But of course throughout it all, there’s lots of wisdom that you read and think “man, I hope I use this in the future when I actually need to make hard decisions and don’t just forget it after I put down this book”.
There was one piece that stood out to me towards the end of the book related to the topic of pain and suffering. I think about Charlie Munger, who at 31 was broke, divorced, and crying through the streets of Los Angeles because his son was dying of Leukemia. Directly quoted from the book from a speech much later on in his life around the age of 80+.
Every time you find you’re drifting into self-pity, whatever the cause, even if your child is dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to help. Self-pity is always counterproductive. It’s the wrong way to think. And when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, or almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard response. And you can train yourself out of it.
RIP Charlie Munger the GOAT.