Ben Casnocha’s description of Reid Hoffman makes him sound like the Superman-analog of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, the Samaritan, who laments that he has no time to enjoy life, because there’s always some good he could be doing:
Every decision has tradeoffs: when you choose to do one thing it means you choose not do some other thing. When you choose to optimize a choice on one factor, it means necessarily suboptimizing on another factors. Reid faced tradeoffs in his life that were heavier than the ones you or I face. Imagine you could meet anyone, from the President of the United States on down. Do almost anything you can think of — from saving the local opera company from bankruptcy to traveling to the farthest outposts on earth in total luxury. A small number of humans have virtually no constraints on their decision-making, and Reid is one of them. When Reid chose to fly to Las Vegas and speak at this event, the list of things he chose not to do with that time was very, very long.
Often, Reid wrestled with these tradeoffs. Author E.B. White once captured the essence of why. “I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world,” White said, “This makes it hard to plan the day.”
For some, savor is the easy answer to the task of planning a life. For those with no constraints, the plan is often straightforward: they put their name on a few buildings of their alma matter, buy a pro sports franchise, and call it a day. For the 99% of people with resource constraints, they might bag a 9–5 job, accumulate vacation days as diligently as possible, retire early, and maybe donate to their friend’s Walk Against Cancer. Reid likes to savor, albeit not hedonistically. Savor for him means arriving at intellectual epiphanies; it means spending time with friends.
But what he really wants to do is save. He wants to use his talent and network and money to change the world for the better and solve some of humanity’s biggest problems. He is among the most selfless and externally-generous people I’ve met in my life.
Maybe if the “man in Boston” wasn’t stumbling around waiting for a caped savior, he would be more aware of his surroundings to save himself.
Similarly, it’s not Hoffman’s specific personal interventions or charitable contributions that are important, but the platform he developed that people use to make their own lives more productive.
Humble bragging?
In this setting, “immigration reform” means bringing in more people to replace those who built and maintained the society that raised up and succored Hoffman and Zuckerberg. They have the Pharaoh instinct of burying their support staff.