Imagine being a highly motivated, ambitious engineer, working in upstate New York, right next to a highly successful quant fund. That quant fund consumes a ton of energy; they run their machines on-prem, and through a combination of hiring brilliant PhD’s, acquiring tons of data, many other things (if I knew the exact recipe, I would be starting a similar quant fund and not writing this blog post), but among the many things they do, they consume a lot of power, and for the sake of illustration, let’s pretend that you are the DRI for their power.

If you’re an ambitious individual, what would it feel like?

You’re ambitious, so you go above and beyond in your job. You make sure the dashboards are always nominal, and you spend weekends making sure that no matter what, they do not run out of electricity. Even if the entire upstate New York grid has downtime, you work your magic to make sure that they will not. One day you even go to a Coldplay concert and decide to put up some exercise bikes to use as a backup power generation source to get your eighth nine of SLA (this only makes sense if you’ve been to a cold play concert recently).

So you’re doing your job well, upper management notices you. They give you a promotion and a retention bonus.

You go home that night, and you think about it.

The next day, you put on your best suit, walk into your meeting where your bosses expect you’re going to accept the most generous retention bonus ever offered in the history of power plant retention bonuses.

And you respectfully decline. You’re never supercilious or disrespectful, but you know it’s not the right thing for you.

Why? Because you don’t want to leave risk on the table.

The next day, you go to the public library and renew your library card.

You have a lot to learn, but the minute you find a desk in the quiet section of your public library and crack open “Calculus for Dummies in 24 hours” and pull out your favorite pen, and you get to work. You’re surprisingly focused, which is strange because you have more conscious stress today than you did yesterday. You’re out of a job and you have to fill out some COBRA paperwork later. But you still feel 30 pounds lighter, because you bet on yourself. You study with purpose . This might amount to something, this might not. But you’re now an equity-holder in yourself instead of a debt-holder of the payroll system of your previous employer.

From now on, it’s 0 xor 2 yachts. Now get studying.