Hungry Like the Wolf

Close your eyes for me. Close your eyes and dream up a picture of the word ‘starving’. You are probably looking at an image of poverty, an image that tugs on your heartstrings. An image of injustice and pain.

Now close your eyes again and bring up a picture of ‘artist’. You might see a stylish young hipster holding court at a Soho fundraiser. You might see creativity, and you just might see indulgence in equal measure.

But let’s do this, because this is where the magic happens. Close your eyes and put these two words together. ‘Starving artist’. Now you see something entirely different.

The best art is born of pain and discontent. And pain can be channeled into art. The word starving became aspirational when we added artist, and the word artist became inspirational when we added starving.

In business, in startups, in markets, it is no different. You don’t hear about starving bankers, and you don’t hear about bankers living on the edge of creativity and innovation. And this is exactly why the bankers will be disrupted by starving artists in defi - but I’ll get to that in another post.

My friend

Jared Dillian

, fresh off writing a fantastic book about living a stress free financial life, posted something that made me stop in my tracks. The whole post is excellent - a letter with advice to his 22 year old self - and this one jumped out at me.

Letters to My 22-Year-Old Self

Hungry like the wolf. I have had about twelve interns over the years, all very bright, very capable people, but none of them were as hungry as I was. When I was getting started in my career, I read every single book on finance, over two hundred of them. I subscribed to Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal, and read them religiously. I learned absolutely everything there was to know about finance. Other people were not so hungry—they went home at night and watched their shows. I was going to outwork you, and I was going to outsmart you. I’ve never met anyone like me, who have that level of passion and intensity. I bring that level of intensity to writing, too, going to get my MFA and publishing four books and submitting to hundreds of journals. And here is the thing about being hungry—it can’t be taught. It absolutely cannot be taught. So if you are 22 and reading this, and think you might be slacking off, it is because you probably are. There will be time to relax—later.

Hungry like the wolf, I love that. I want to read this every morning, I want to shout it from rooftops, I want to program it into my kid’s brains. Get hungry like the wolf.

Some people ain’t got it in them. That’s a fact. But there’s another fact: hunger wanes.

You can be born hungry, you can grow hungry, and that hunger just may bring you success. But then, that very success eats away at hunger. Age eats away at hunger. Distractions and responsibilities eat away at hunger.

So you learn to feed it. You feed your hunger not to get satisfied, but to stay hungry.

Maybe Blackrock didn’t steal my reverse cap methodology to keep my first startup from succeeding. Maybe, if I’m being honest, nobody there ever looked at our research. Could be. But the story we told ourselves, that fueled our hunger for a solid two years, long enough to get the momentum we needed to break into the subadvisor business.

Maybe private REIT issuers haven’t colluded to silence our research on their appraisal-based NAVs? Could be. But the idea that they are out to get us is feeding my hunger again, so that’s the story we are telling ourselves.

We’re not here for friends, we’re not here for love. I get enough of that at home. We are here to win. We’ve burned the boats. I’ve done everything I can to make myself unemployable. We are here to win and there is no offramp. And we aren’t going to win without being hungry.

Armada is a three person team doing the work of ten, competing against teams of 10,000. And we are going to win. We are hungrier. We are the starving bankers. Our constraints are our competitive advantage, and our hunger is why we’ll win.