Stay Alive in Case You Get Lucky

If you’ve felt a shift in people’s priorities recently, you’re not imagining it. This graphic from the Wall Street Journal is shocking. Patriotism, religion, community, starting a family, every traditional marker of meaning is collapsing at the same time. What’s replaced these categories?

Money. Pure economic survival.

Look, I can’t blame people for this shift. Prices exploded after Covid. Housing is inaccessible. America becomes a third-world country very quickly if you don’t have money. No one is coming to save you. And because this is still a wealthy country with pockets of opportunity, the logic becomes simple, it’s a race. Win, or fall out of the system.

This probably won’t last forever. Societies eventually rebuild meaning structures, new communities, new organizing principles. But we’re not there yet. We're in the transitional period. And in that gap, you still have to make choices about how to live.

Right now the incentive is money, so people compete for money. That means everyone is chasing the same target, taking the same risks, pushing for the same positions. Peter Thiel saw the same pattern at elite law firms, people competing viciously for the same narrow prize

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Peter Thiel’s personal anecdote on why competition is for losers. Original Video: Chicago Ideas. #founder #founderadvice #founderfront #st... See more

The more people converge on the same economic strategy, the more fragile the system becomes, and the more power accrues to whoever simply survives its collapse.

Most people don't realize there's an alternative to the race. Instead of competing, you can survive, avoid terminal risks, and wait for the system to break

History is full of cases where survival beats competition. One of the clearest happened just last year.

The Syrian President

One year ago Syria's government collapsed in less than a week. Do you know the story of how this happened?

How did Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander known as Golani, stand in the White House shaking hands with Donald Trump. A man who once led an al-Qaeda faction in Syria. A man who was on the most wanted list of top terrorists in the US. A man who used to sleep in a suicide vest because he couldn’t trust his own inner circle.

For more than a decade he controlled a single province in northwest Syria while Assad, backed by Russia, Iran, and Iraq, held the rest. Al-Sharaa wasn’t winning. But he also wasn’t losing. Turkey and other enemies of Assad backed him just enough to prevent his collapse, but never enough to let him march on Damascus. He wasn’t winning. But he wasn’t dying. And in a world this volatile, not dying is often the strongest position you can hold.

Then everything changed.

In less than a week, Assad’s forces laid down their weapons. Al-Sharaa’s fighters walked into Damascus unopposed. Assad fled to Russia. A man trapped in one province for ten years was suddenly the President of Syria and shaking hands with an American president.

Why did it happen? The truth is no one knows. The world had been violently rearranging itself since October 7. The war in Gaza. Israel’s strikes widening into conflict with Iran. Russia bogged down in Ukraine. The U.S. recalibrating alliances. Every major actor in the region was under pressure. And somewhere inside that chaos, quietly, implicitly, the powers that be decided to let al-Sharaa rule. Syrian soldiers didn’t fight back. Not a single serious shot was fired as al-Sharaa walked into the capital while Assad fled to Russia.

He held territory. When the geopolitical winds shifted, he was the only figure left with any plausible claim to authority. The same way Tiberius inherited Rome after every rival destroyed himself, or how the Arab armies advanced when the Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted each other.

This is how America expanded. France sold the Louisiana Territory in 1803, an enormous stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, because Napoleon needed money for his coming wars in Europe and had just lost Haiti. Russia sold Alaska in 1867 because the Crimean War had drained its treasury and it couldn’t afford to defend the distant colony.

A lot of American expansion was driven by staying stable until older empires were desperate enough to offload land.

Survival in Ordinary Life

We’ve all seen a softer version of this in relationships. A man stays in a woman’s life as a friend while she cycles through breakups, one boyfriend flames out, another disappoints, another implodes. He doesn’t compete. He simply hangs around. And when the churn ends and she finally wants stability, he becomes the obvious choice. Married women guard their husbands for the same structural reason. They know marriages have weak periods, dry spells, arguments, long plateaus. And in those windows, the woman who’s already nearby and already trusted becomes the most dangerous person in the system.

I’ve seen the same pattern professionally. A coworker survived an acquisition that wiped out management simply because he didn’t cost much and he knew the legacy systems. When the new owners needed someone who could explain how everything actually worked, he was the only person left. Six months later he was a director. A year after that, a VP.

Look at Office Space. The company is falling apart, so the Bobs are brought in to diagnose the failure. Everyone else is lying, bluffing, pretending. Peter is the only reliable signal in a collapsing structure. He’s honest. And in a collapse, the reliable signal sometimes gets rewarded. He gets promoted, his bosses get fired.

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Bobs Interview Peter - Office Space #funnyvideos😂 #office #90s #interview

Money works the same way. In investing, survival is often the strongest position you can take. The people who avoid catastrophic losses and preserve optionality end up inheriting opportunities no one else can reach. Volatility does the work. Some people today are waiting for the next crash. Although, no one knows when it’s going to happen.

Heroic Intervention vs. Survival

Every strategy in life reduces to two paths, force the world to change, or endure until it changes on its own.

The first path can be risky. A lot of the most succesful people we know almost went broke going down this path.

@everythingfinance1_

Elon Musk nearly went bankrupt with SpaceX and Tesla #elonmusk #tesla #spacex #business #bankrupt

The survival path does something different. It doesn't try to force anything. It positions for environmental change that's already happening or will happen eventually. You're not the agent - the world is. Your job is to be standing in the right place when it moves.

One path requires you to correctly assess both your force and the obstacle's resistance. The other requires you to correctly assess which positions might become valuable and whether you can hold them long enough. Different skills. Different failure modes.

In This Newsletter

1) Survival & Positioning
Most success starts by not getting eliminated. Stay alive and stay in a place where the world’s eventual shift could benefit you.

2) Patience
Endure the years where nothing happens. The world moves on its own schedule, not yours.

3) Luck & Ascent
The world moves on its own schedule, if you’re positioned when it does, you rise.

4) The Waiting That Never Ends
Sometimes the world never turns in your favor.

Survival & Positioning

Survival comes first. You need to avoid the mistakes that remove you from the game. That can mean different things depending on what domain you are in.

If you’re working a job for a living. If you work a job, survival means being reliably good good enough that no one even thinks about firing you.

• Be the most reliable people in the room.

• If your mistakes are bunched up too close together you may get in trouble. But if they're spaced out over time you'll be fine

• Recognize that you don’t work for your company’s CEO or the head of your group. You work for the person who sits directly above you in rank.

• Never fix anything quietly at work, let everyone know what you did. Be shameless in self-promotion.

If you’re an investor, survival means not blowing up. Keeping a hedge. Holding enough liquidity that one bad decision doesn’t erase your future.

If you’re a business owner, survival means feeding the pipeline. Keeping churn under control. Making sure no single failure can take you down.

Survival is domain-specific. But the principle is the same everywhere,
don’t take the risk that ends you.

Positioning is arrangement. It’s placing yourself where opportunity could appear, even if nothing is happening right now. It’s about increasing your surface area to luck, being in fields where volatility creates upside, staying in companies where collapse might create vacancies, building skills and relationships that only become valuable when the environment shifts.

Consider engines versus horses. Steam engines improved steadily for a century. Then between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses disappeared. In 1850, building engine companies looked pointless. The tech was worse and the economics didn’t work. But the direction of travel was obvious even if the timing wasn’t. Survive long enough and you inherited transportation.

Patience: The Temporal Art

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