I have a classic “moth to the flame” personality. Being irresistibly drawn to something — or someone — that is ultimately dangerous or destructive seems to be in my DNA. The attraction is so powerful that I cannot help myself, even when the outcome is potentially or predictably bad. The armchair shrinks in the audience will say that this implies self-destructive tendencies that forces me to operate through compulsion more than it’s about trickery by others. The “moth” often knows the danger on some level but can’t resist anyway. He is the scorpion on the frog’s back who recognizes that it’s in his nature to do what he knows might be bad for him. It all suggests a form of fatal attraction — beauty and danger combined. The flame doesn’t hunt the moth — the moth goes to it willingly. Why does this expression so resonate? Moths actually navigate by light — a survival instinct that works perfectly until artificial light exists. The flame hijacks a natural, innocent drive and turns it fatal. That’s what makes the metaphor so powerful — the moth isn’t stupid, it’s just built that way and the environment seems to serve up false flags that it’s compelled to seek out. It’s a beautifully tragic idiom — desire and doom in one image.
I could probably come up with dozens of flames in my life that have drawn me in. Some are obvious and others far more nuanced. I have been “retired” for six years now and that is the conceptual state that I am trying to protect. I say conceptual because I know very few people who are prepared to let their lives lapse into a full-time leisure state. I know we all try to fill up our days with activities we enjoy, but I am not convinced that gardening and property management are work or that engaging in them makes you able to claim you are not retired. To be retired means that you are no longer out there trying to kill the wildebeest to feed the family. To me, to be something other than retired requires you to be somehow gainfully employed. That can be a fill-time W-2 thing, a 1099 gig-work thing, or even an investor carried interest or capital gains thing. The key is in the mindset of trying to do it to make money. If that’s your jam, then you are not retired.
I am not retired. I can get away with saying I’m semi-retired, because my expert witness gig work is well less than full-time (looked at annually), even though there are times (like right now), when I’m putting in 8+ hours/day at it. There is one other subtlety, which is that I do the professional side exclusively, and not the business wrangling side…and that matters to me. I’m even Involved with an investment for a friend and am earning a carry, so that’s clearly a form of work, but then, doing it to help out a friend rather than seeking it out also takes a meaningful edge off of the work angle.
The other day I got a call from an old and dear colleague. After the pleasantries, he got down to the reason for the call. He has an opportunity he wants me to consider. It seems that someone he knows and who knows of me wants me to set up a start-up in what can only be called a very high-tech Fintech space where everything from crypto (stablecoin) and AI would be involved. I agreed to do some preliminary research and I found that this arena bring proposed is about the hottest thing out there at the moment. The competition in the space is daunting. The scale and gravitas of the players is nothing short of monumental. The complexity is intense. And tge speed with which this is all happening is blinding. For these sorts of things I have two go-to guys I talk to. They both acted as guest lecturers for my Advanced Corporate Finance course a few years ago and they respectively taught the last two lectures…just to put a point on how leading-edge this arena being proposed resides on. This is all a bonfire of the vanities when it comes to the flame it creates. And this moth is staring right into that flame.
My initial read, driven mostly by sound advice and a bit of personal angst, was that this was too big a wave to try to surf. I suggested a solution for the initiator and said I would help facilitate introductions to give an alternative path. I even sent a deck to explain the alternative. But no dice. Apparently, I had failed to fully grasp the unique potential of the play and would need a tutorial call to help me see the light…as though that flame wasn’t throwing off enough candlepower to light up San Diego or that this poor moth had failed to notice it. But let’s go back to the whole moth and flame situation. A mature and well-balanced moth knows how to give no for an answer, but I’m not that kind of moth. I’m the kind that keeps dreaming that there’s a great reason to fly straight into that flame. The only word I know is yes.
So, while I’m suddenly full-up on expert witness gig work, work that I love and gives me no angst whatsoever, I also have this bonfire on the periphery of my vision, distracting me not so much constantly as persistently. I will take that tutorial call and go another round with the flame, tempting fate yet again with a quagmire of a project that could tie me up in knots for years to come. Naturally they say it’s an eighteen month unicorn success story waiting to be had. But my experience with unicorns involves more horseshit than unicorn poop, so I’m not buying that quick in and out concept.
I wish it was not in my nature to be drawn to the flame. I wish I didn’t need beauty and danger simultaneously in my life at this stage, but the problem with moths is that the flame really is a part of their nature and the best they can hope for is for the fire to burn itself out before the moth scorches its wings.