No Scoreboard
Relationships are the most mispriced asset in the world — on why they compound, and how to build the few that matter
Investing is about finding mis-priced assets and this essay is about an asset that is both large and yet mis-priced for centuries.
Whether you are into living longer, making money, finding edge or just being happier this asset is the answer!
Ok enough of the hyperbole….
Let’s Start With Health and Happiness
In 1938, researchers at Harvard began following 268 sophomores to see what makes lives go well. The project later absorbed a second cohort of 456 young men from Boston’s poorest neighbourhoods, then the wives, then some 1,300 of the children, and it is still running — through a depression, a world war, and every fashion in psychology since. And across all of it, the people who stayed healthiest and lived longest were the ones most satisfied with their relationships, an effect that beat wealth, fame and class. How satisfied participants were with their relationships at fifty predicted their physical health at eighty better than their cholesterol levels did.
Robert Waldinger, the study’s fourth director, compresses the finding into a warning: loneliness kills, as powerfully as smoking or alcoholism. George Vaillant, who ran the study for three decades before him, put eighty years of data into one sentence: the key to healthy ageing is relationships, relationships, relationships.
Robin Dunbar’s work gives the signal a structure. Human social worlds, he found, arrange themselves in layers of roughly five, fifteen, fifty and a hundred and fifty, and the layers are not interchangeable. The inner five — the ones needing weekly contact — carry nearly all of the health and longevity effect on their own. Relationships behave less like a pile and more like a portfolio, with almost the entire return concentrated in a handful of positions.
That’s why picking a life partner or spouse is probably the most important decision you can make. I know cause I messed it up the first time.
Now the other side of the ledger. In 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a formal advisory declaring an epidemic of loneliness, and its headline number reads like a pack warning: disconnection raises the risk of premature death by an amount comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. In 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2021 it was 12% — one person in eight. And the fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds coming up behind them spend roughly 70% less in-person time with friends than the same age group did twenty years ago.
Screens and AI will make this number worse.
Ok so hopefully I’ve proven that relationships, and the right ones are pretty good for your health. Now let’s talk about jobs and career.
Getting A Job In This Market
Of the eight jobs I held across twenty-seven years, only the first came from sending in a CV. Every other seat I heard about, and was interviewed for, because of people willing to help me. I’d have got nowhere without them, and I say that as someone who was reasonably good at the work.
I also watched promotion rounds inside big banks for two decades, and the pattern became obvious. The people who rose were rarely the best modellers or even the biggest producers. They were the ones other people wanted to succeed — not the flatterers, who everyone can smell, but the genuinely liked. It spoke for them in rooms they weren’t in, and every consequential decision about your career happens in a room you’re not in, decided partly on small interactions you assumed didn’t count, years earlier, when nothing was at stake. I traced the mechanism back through Machiavelli in 2500 Years of Strategic Wisdom, but you don’t need Machiavelli. You need to have watched one promotion round from the inside.
If people know you, like you and trust you, they will do a lot for you. Not anything, but a lot.
The problem is that the job market is getting really bad for those graduating and has been bad for probably almost a decade. All job applications are online, interviews are about sending a video for an AI to review. Writing an essay that a machine will grade.
This is a horrible way to get a job, yes in many ways it is the one filled with least friction - you press a button and you have uploaded your CV and application and it feels like the job is done.
But the thing is that this is a DEAD END.
Its a dead end because you will just end up in one gigantic stack of CVs or applications fed through a AI filter machine and that is no way to judge a 4D human!
And in reality, it is always a human who is making the hiring decision, it’s always a human deciding whether something gets done, and if it’s not then a human definitely has the power to intervene in that process.
I tell young people applying for jobs, get off LinkedIn Jobs and go meet people a few years older than you in real life. Go speak to people you don’t know, because only they might know new information you couldn’t get off the internet or a LLM. Meeting people in person will arm with you intel that no one else will have, and will allow you develop character, trust, and judgement. Which are the only edge humans will have versus the machines.
It is similar but harder if you are mid-career, those jobs are definitely like icebergs only 20% of the jobs are advertised, the remaining 80% are silently under the waterline and only available for those that are actually out there having the conversations.
How About Making Money?
Markets have understood this longer than economists have. In the late 1990s Paul Zak and Stephen Knack showed, first in a model and then across countries, that high-trust societies grow faster for a plain reason: where people trust each other, less capital goes to verifying, monitoring and lawyering, and more goes to building. Let trust fall far enough and investment stops compounding altogether — the low-trust poverty trap. Trust did the job for free before clearing houses, escrow and compliance did it expensively. It was the original transaction-cost technology.
I thought about the criticality and absoluteness of trust a lot listening to David Senra discuss Merchant Bankers like Rothschild and Warburg (thank you Nader). Trust and judgement was how the great fortunes were made.
Anyone who has worked in private markets has seen the same force. The best opportunities never reach a screen. They travel through people, over the phone, across lunch tables, inside networks where reputations took twenty years to build.
Today AI, is making one input (intelligence, data, processing power) to a system abundant, value will migrate to whatever stays scarce, and intelligence is being commoditised faster than anyone quite believes.
In public or private markets what will be valuable because it’s scarce is the nuance, the understanding, the feel. These are hand wavy words because it’s at the edge of being human where our edge lies: inside feelings, gut reactions, intuitions and imaginations that can’t be swallowed by the machines, but will remain with the best humans.
The search then is for the most interesting, curious, and original thinkers in the world.
What I Try To Do About It
A decade ago, between after leaving Goldman but before starting in Asset Management, I wrote a short manual teaching students how to network their way into banking — contact lists in spreadsheets, warm and cold tiers, scripts for the first email. Most of it I’d still stand behind: never ask for the job, ask for advice; rank people by who wants to help you, not by who has the grandest connections; give something, however small, before you ask for anything; send the handwritten note nobody sends any more. But re-reading it recently I found a line that was the one that I’ve tried to live the most:
The long-term relationship, is more valuable on every measure including the financial one, and it becomes real when you stop keeping score.
The most important part is not keeping score. A real relationship is built on creating value for others and not worrying about the score.
If I could bottle the mindset into 5 words, they would be: Authentic, Generous, Confident, Relentless and Curious.
A few other things I’d recommend if you are looking to build a network of trust.
Go first. It’s the nearest thing I have to a method — act first, thank first, ask first. If you meet someone at a party or conference, and they seemed cool, reach out first. You listened to a great podcast and loved it, reach out to the guest or host telling them why. You read about someone in the magazine, shoot them an email. Relationships start small and simple. The magic is just beginning. When I audit what I have to give, it comes down to three currencies: the people I can connect, the knowledge I can share, and the willingness to show up when it isn’t convenient. Everyone holds all three in some denomination, including the twenty-two-year-old convinced they have nothing to offer.
Be a convener. Host small breakfasts, lunches or dinners. If that seems too hard, just bring 6 people who don’t know each other (but should) together for a coffee. Being that person is the most underpriced act of generosity. Priya Parker has turned it into a craft anyone can learn. Her rules are simple to the point of discomfort: know what the gathering is for, invite the people it is for, plan how you’ll get them to say something true, and end by letting them tell each other what they learned. The cadence I’d add is one small gathering a quarter, around a question you genuinely care about — four rooms a year, which after a decade adds up to a community.
Make Introductions. Two people a week, most weeks — people who would benefit from knowing each other and might never otherwise collide. An introduction costs minutes, gets remembered for years, and asks nothing back. But by making introductions you are treating social capital, like financial capital, which is to say it only grows when its being invested and not when its kept locked in a box.
Stay Curious. The deepest thing I know about keeping a relationship alive is that loving someone and staying curious about them are the same activity. The people who hold you for decades keep surprising you with depths, and the moment you decide you’ve figured someone out, the relationship flatlines into knowledge. David Brooks divides the world into Diminishers, who use others for their own ends, and Illuminators, whose curiosity makes people feel seen.
The Special Sauce. Benjamin Zander gives everyone he meets an A and invites them to live into it — The Art of Possibility is quite possibly a top-five book of my life. Cal Fussman, who spent a career interviewing everyone from Gorbachev to Muhammed Ali, says the craft reduces to aiming questions at the heart instead of the CV. Brooks keeps a rotation of questions for his own family, and the two I’ve stolen are “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?” and “what has become clearer to you as you’ve aged?” Ask either at your next dinner and watch the temperature of the conversation change.
None of these habits is clever, and that’s the point. Naval Ravikant’s line about playing long-term games with long-term people gets quoted mostly for the money; the returns he meant come from compound interest, and relationships compound the way money does — slowly, invisibly, and only if you don’t interrupt them. Every practice above is just a deposit small enough to repeat for thirty years.
And that reminds of James Clear’s 1%: If you can improve by just 1% a day, you would be 37x better in a year. It might be hard to grow your capital by 1% a day, but I think it’s fairly easy to grow your network and social capital by 1% a day.
Here’s what Uncle Warren would tell you to watch out for.
Listen To Uncle Warren
Everything above reads like an argument for more — more dinners, more curiosity, more rooms. So let me argue the other way, because the biggest mistake I’ve watched successful people make, and made myself for years, has nothing to do with toxic ties.
There’s an exercise usually attributed to Warren Buffett. Write down your twenty-five goals, circle the top five, then treat the remaining twenty as the danger list — close enough to your heart to steal time from the five that matter.
Oliver Burkeman builds Four Thousand Weeks around the same uncomfortable math, and it applies to people at least as brutally as to goals. The threat to your closest relationships comes less from enemies than from the plausible, half-warm commitments you never quite say no to. I’ve yet to watch anyone’s inner five lose ground to a rival; the ground goes, hour by pleasant hour, to the twenty.
When I have reflected back on a bad month or year, it was always the half assed meeting, the uninspired coffee I knew I didn’t need to have.
That’s where Alfred Adler comes in. His psychology reached me through The Courage to Be Disliked (a book I have recommended to many, including my wife) holds that all problems are interpersonal problems, and his discipline for them is subtraction. Ask whose task this actually is, then hand back every task that isn’t yours, including the task of managing what other people think of you. He is ruthless about the warm-seeming stuff too: much praise is manipulation with good manners, delivered down a vertical relationship, and much helping is intrusion. What survives the subtraction is his definition of real connection between equals — confidence in another person, extended without conditions.
If you want to try something less philosophical, my old firm’s COO made his entire team read Greg Mckeown’s Essentialism, the main idea is the aim, you have to get better at knowing who is worth being with and what is worth doing, and ruthlessly prune the bullshit.
The blank spaces in my calendar are the most valuable ones, and guarding them — saying no to perfectly nice people making perfectly reasonable requests — is what turned “I’m too busy” back into “I can think again.”
This little segment on Charlie Rose with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates is a fun one with that exact message.
Brooks noticed the same paradox in the lives he studied for The Second Mountain: the people who end up deepest in community usually crossed a stretch of wilderness alone first.
What Am I Really Telling You To Do?
Tim Urban did some math that I re-read every year and have never got comfortable with. If you leave home at eighteen, you have already used up roughly 90% of the in-person time you will ever spend with your parents. What remains is the tail end, and it passes mostly unnoticed, in visits that feel routine until they stop. I’ve done the sums on my own parents, and then on my daughters, who are with me now in a way they will not always be. The numbers changed how I schedule my weeks.
There are maybe ten people on earth who love me with no scoreboard, and my only real job is to know exactly who they are and deliberately make memories with them. Everything else is networking — useful and worth doing well, but not the point. Maybe the point is love, validation, connection — to know we mattered to the people who shared our room with us.
So write down your five. Notice who is on the list, and notice who you assumed would be and isn’t.
Then before the quarter is out go think about the next 15, 50 and 150, build one room — a breakfast, a call, a walk — around a question you care about, with people you chose on purpose. Go first: act first, thank first, invite first. Most of the network you have today was assembled by seating charts. The one you build next, you get to choose.
My Reading List
The Art of Possibility — Benjamin & Rosamund Stone Zander. Give everyone an A, don’t take yourself so seriously, and when it goes wrong say “how fascinating.” Possibly a top-five book of my life.
How to Know a Person — David Brooks. The Illuminator’s handbook — how to make another human feel seen, and why you’re worse at it than you think.
Never Eat Alone — Keith Ferrazzi. I read it in 2009 and again in 2018. Generosity-first relationship building, decades before the algorithms made it countercultural.
Thanks for sharing this one. I got a lot out of reading it.
I love you with no scoreboard big dog