Bonus: 10000 days - by coachparin
This entire interview with investor Chris Davis by William Green is very inspiring but one concept that really resonated from a coaching perspective is the idea of life being organised by 10000 day blocks.
10000 days is roughly 27 years
20000 days is roughly 54 years
30000 days is roughly 81 years
Chris divides life into three 10,000-day stages:
The first 10,000 days are for exploration and trying new things.
The second 10,000 days are for going deep and focusing on relationships and career.
The third 10,000 days are for revisiting and maintaining relationships, and making sure you are prepared for the end of life.
I could not do it justice with a summary so please find the transcript of this section of the interview below. I know this will deeply resonate with many of you readers as you think about your transition from 10000 to 20000 and 20000 to 30000!
[00:03:05] William Green: All right. Hi, folks. I’m absolutely delighted to welcome today’s guest, who’s Chris Davis. And Chris is chairman of an old and renowned investment firm named Davis Advisors, which I think was founded back in 1969 and he’s also a member of the board of directors of a small obscure company that some of you may have heard of, namely Berkshire Hathaway. It’s lovely to see you, Chris. Thanks so much for joining us.
[00:03:30] Chris Davis: Oh, I’m so glad to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this, which I don’t say about a lot of interviews but I feel like the way you approach life and the universe and everything has made me look forward to this conversation.
[00:03:42] William Green: Thank you so much, and before I forget, since we were talking about it right before we got on, talk to me about this idea of our 30,000 days, because it’s such a beautiful idea, and two hours from now I’m likely to have forgotten that we talked about it, so discuss the significance of this before we get started on anything else.
[00:04:00] Chris Davis: Well, I’m going to start, I’m going to go back to my days as an accountant because this is actually when I first sort of started thinking about it, I’m not much of a birthday celebrator but one of the things I’m particularly struck by is the ones that are hallmarks tend to be tied to 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and so on, not a lot of life changes around those sort of random decades.
[00:04:24] Chris Davis: And when I was working back at State Street as an accountant, I had the worst job, which is I had to, at one part of my job was to calculate the NAV of money market and bond funds. And that meant accruing the interest by the day. And so, Lotus 1, 2, 3 had just come out and so I was using that to write a little program to make it easier to calculate bond interest and count all the days and so on.
[00:04:54] Chris Davis: And when I was testing it, I put in my own birthday and ended up, I was at the time, something like 9,500 days old. And that was sort of the genesis of this idea where I started thinking, we live about 30,000 days or generally have 30,000. Really productive days and our life divides much more naturally on the 10,000 day increments.
[00:05:18] Chris Davis: So, after 10,000 days, you’re about 27 or so, 28, somewhere in there, and you often think that first 10,000 days is about going wide, experimenting, trying new things, new places, new professions, new people, new towns. It’s a time of exploration and 21 years old doesn’t capture it or 20. And by the time 30 comes around, usually you’re already into what I would call that second phase of life.
[00:05:46] Chris Davis: So right around 10,000 days by then, usually on average, people have decided what they want to do, where they want to do it, who they want to do it with. And instead of going wide as they have for the first 10,000 days, it’s about going deep, just the depth of relationships that comes through marriage, through family, through your vocation, your profession, your colleagues, you sort of have 10,000 days to execute. 10,000 days to accomplish and build what in many ways will be the sort of monuments of your life, your family, your kids, your profession, and then right around 55, 56, 57, somewhere in this 50s range, but what happens, your kids are grown and beginning to leave, what you’ve achieved professionally is fairly settled.
[00:06:37] Chris Davis: And in a funny way, it lifts an enormous weight off many people. I think it’s one of the reasons people actually end up growing happier as they get to their 50s, 60s, 70s. Because you’re in a time when you can, in a sense, go wide again, you have more perspective, you have less of that urgent depth of the day to day.
[00:06:56] Chris Davis: So, anyway I know when we started talking, we were talking about this idea of both sort of completing the, maybe our second 10,000 days and now looking at how we think about this next 10,000. This chapter that sort of gets us from here to around in our 80s and how does this affect the way that you’re actually living?
[00:07:18] Chris Davis: Like, what is this awareness of these three phases do to your view of how to behave and what to focus on and what you’re actually optimizing for at this point?
[00:07:30] Chris Davis: Well, this sort of ties in with how I think about investing is so much about it. It’s about anticipation and preparation. So I think a lot of people go through unhappiness in their thirties in part because they’re sort of thinking, where did my youth go? I used to be able to do all these different things and now I’m tied down and if instead you have this mindset, you really look forward to that. The privilege of being able to go so deep to concentrate and I think how it’s affected me thinking about this next 10,000 days is a little bit about this idea of inverting it and thinking about what would stand in the way of this 10,000 days being a very enriching time of life. And of course, health is one of them. So it becomes, as you think about going into this next third, it becomes a time where you think a lot about taking care of yourself.
[00:08:24] Chris Davis: You think about investing in relationships. When you’re raising a family, when you’re in the office every day, when You know, a lot of your life and your social life are structured for you. As you get to the next 10,000 days, people can lose touch. So I think it’s also been a time when I’ve really invested in maintaining, invigorating, revisiting relationships, deeply getting to know my children’s partners and spouses.
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