A Learning a Day

Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced “see-brandy”), the co-founder of GitLab, was diagnosed with bone cancer and found himself running out of treatment options when the cancer returned in 2024.

After doctors essentially told him “good luck,” he decided to take ownership. What followed was impressive – He assembled a team, built a 1,000+ page health document modeled after the GitLab Handbook, and pursued what he calls “maximal diagnostics” – doing every test available, as often as possible.

Armed with that data, he identified experimental therapies, navigated the FDA for compassionate use access, and flew to Germany for a cutting-edge radioligand therapy that targeted his specific tumor markers. His cancer is now in remission.

He has documented his entire journey here (this story has a lot of the details too).

While Sid is undoubtedly fortunate to have incredible resources as someone whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars (or more), this is a glimpse of where cancer care is heading – personalized diagnostics, custom therapies, AI-driven drug discovery. He also highlights the aspects of the system that are broken – e.g., getting his own tissue samples and genomic data.

And, as he called out, the basics are not prohibitively expensive.

We have more agency than we think – especially with the tools available to us today.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” | Epictetus

Epictetus had another note that made the same point – “It is impossible to being to learn that which one thinks one already knows.”

It is easy to say “I want to learn.” It is much harder to be committed to being okay with being thought as foolish and stupid. That is a lot of discomfort to endure.

It is why learning is hard.

“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.” | John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

I discovered a collection of pithy and wise quotes from economist John Kenneth Galbraight.

This was one of those – so true.

There’s a short clip on the intense interaction between Maryland coach Brenda Frese and her star player Oluchi Okananwa that went viral.

After a bad third quarter stretch for Okananwa, Frese told her, “I need you to lock in. Stop being distracted. I believe in you, but you’ve got to want this moment. This is not my story.”

It sparked the turnaround she wanted and they went on to win. Both Frese and Okananwa reflected on that moment as just another day in their relationship.

The best players want their coaches to hold a high bar, and the best coaches hold a high bar.

Charlie Munger had a guiding philosophy on checklists: “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.”

His investing checklist reflects that same discipline:

• Risk – begin every evaluation by measuring risk, especially reputational
• Independence – only in fairy tales are emperors told they are naked. You need independence of thought to ensure you aren’t just following the crowd blindly.
• Preparation – the only way to win is to work, work, work, and hope for a few insights.
• Intellectual humility – acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom
• Analytical rigor – the scientific method and effective checklists minimize errors
• Allocation – proper allocation of capital is the investor’s number one job
• Patience – resist the human bias to act
• Decisiveness – when the right circumstances present themselves, act with conviction
• Change – accept unremovable complexity
• Focus – keep things simple and remember what you set out to do

Easy to say. Really hard to do.

But underneath it all, Munger’s approach distills to four things: extreme preparation (work, work, work, work), consistent discipline, patience, and decisiveness.

Applies just as much to investing as it does to life.

“We are all permeable to the influence of the group. What makes us more permeable is our insecurities. The less we are certain about our self-worth as individuals, the more we are unconsciously drawn toward fitting in and blending ourselves into the group spirit. Gaining the superficial approval of group members by displaying our conformity, we cover up our insecurities to ourselves and to others.

But this approval is fleeting; our insecurities gnaw at us, and we must continually get people’s attention to feel validated. Your goal must be to lower your permeability by raising your self-esteem.

If you feel strong and confident about what makes you unique – your tastes, your values, your own experience – you can more easily resist the group effect. Furthermore, by relying upon your work and accomplishments to anchor your self-opinion, you won’t be so tied to constantly seeking approval and attention.” | Robert Greene in “The Laws of Human Nature”

A simple, well stated truth. Applies well beyond truth to authority figures and even family.

Our insecurities never fail to show up – in what we do, in who we choose to do it with, and in the way we talk about ourselves and what we do.

Someone told us recently they were considering an electric car. Knowing we had an electric car for almost 8 years now, they asked us for our recommendation. It got me thinking about how to lay out the case.

Three things stand out.

The first is software. Electric vehicles are built technology-first, and the small stuff adds up fast. The car knows who’s driving. Mirrors, seat position, and climate are all automatic. The navigation is genuinely good. But the bigger point is that the car keeps getting better. Tesla, for example, pushes dozens of software updates. Features that didn’t exist at purchase continue to appear. When you build around software, improvement becomes continuous rather than generational.

The second is maintenance – or the near absence of it. A gas engine has nearly thousand moving parts – pistons, valves, transmission, exhaust, cooling system, fuel system. Each one is a potential failure point. An electric drivetrain has a fraction of that complexity with twenty or so parts. No oil changes, no timing belt, no catalytic converter. We’ve had ours a few years now. Maintenance has been close to nothing. That’s not anecdote – it’s physics.

The third is all about the math and this is where it gets interesting. If you take a comparable 28 MPG gas car as the benchmark (3.5 miles per kWh for the EV), here’s how the numbers look across a few places:

• Northern California (off-peak EV rate): ~7¢/mile electric vs ~17¢/mile gas. With solar covering a meaningful portion of charging, that drops closer to 4–5¢/mile.
• Texas: ~5¢/mile electric vs ~10¢/mile gas.
• Florida: ~5¢/mile electric vs ~13¢/mile gas.
• London: ~10¢/mile electric vs ~26¢/mile gas.
• Paris: ~7¢/mile electric vs ~24¢/mile gas.
• Mumbai: ~3¢/mile electric vs ~17¢/mile gas.

These figures are approximate and shift with energy markets (notwithstanding the war-driven oil shocks right now) and local taxes. The direction, though, is consistent. The gap is narrowest in Texas and widest in Europe – but across every location above, electric comes out 2–3x cheaper per mile.

In sum, you now have technology that enables a car to be personalized and to keep improving through software. It means virtually no maintenance. And, most importantly, it has a per-mile cost that’s 2–3x lower at minimum than gas, pretty much anywhere in the world.

There’s nothing like simple math to help make better decisions.

Robert Greene, in The Laws of Human Nature, tells a story about Anton Chekhov that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Chekhov had a miserable childhood. His father was physically and verbally abusive. Anton and his siblings grew up in a household defined by fear and resentment. When the family fell into financial ruin, everyone except Anton left for Moscow. He stayed behind to finish his diploma, taking up tutoring on the side to earn money.

Something shifted during that time alone. Free from his father’s voice, he slowly realized he wasn’t useless. He had worth. Confidence, tentative at first, began to build.

As he examined his own thinking, he came to a realization – he had the freedom to choose his attitude. He thought about his father differently. Not just as the man who had hurt him, but as someone shaped by generations before him, by his own suffering, his own inheritance of pain. That shift in perspective allowed Chekhov to see his father as a victim rather than a tyrant. And from there, remarkably, came forgiveness. And eventually, unconditional love.

That freedom – to choose how to respond to what life dealt him – is what drove Chekhov to Moscow. His family all lived together in a single room in a red-light district. The conditions were as adverse as they come. And yet every time despair crept in, Chekhov reached for perspective. He understood something that’s easy to know intellectually but hard to actually live – that you can’t always choose your circumstances, but you can choose your response to them.

Over time, he turned his family’s fortunes around, not just financially but emotionally. He became the person holding everyone else up.

And it didn’t stop there. Even as he grew in stature as a writer and playwright. Even as tuberculosis slowly took hold of him. People who met Chekhov in his final years remarked on the calm he carried. He had, in some way, found freedom even from death itself.

Agency (or the ability to be proactive) is one of the most powerful freedoms available to us.

Maybe the most powerful one of all.

“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.” | John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

It got me thinking about how often I’ve done this.

I chuckled at this other related accompaniment – “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”

Loss aversion is real.

A few nights ago, I chose to sleep less to get something done. It was fascinating to see the difference in some of the choices I made as I ran out of steam toward the end of the day. I made dinner choices I wouldn’t normally make (lot more carbs). I then crashed immediately after eating.

One of the lessons from a few weeks with a continuous glucose monitor showed a metabolic response on low-sleep nights that looked like the Nasdaq – it was all over the place. Poor sleep wrecks your metabolism. The glucose response to the same food looks meaningfully worse when you’re sleep-deprived.

But that’s only half of it. The other half is that poor sleep also degrades your decision-making. So you’re not just less equipped to handle the metabolic hit – you’re also more likely to make the choices that cause it in the first place. Worse decisions, worse outcomes from those decisions. It’s a double whammy.

Now, not every night will be a perfect night of sleep. But it is worth keeping in mind for the next time. Awareness is the first step.