Math is my Love Language, what's yours?

Some people feel in colors. Others in sound. Some even in shapes. I feel in numbers. You may have heard of the concept of “love language,” in which each person expresses and receives love in their unique way. The idea is that we all have our way of seeing and feeling meaning. For some, it might be sex, and for others, making a beautiful dinner. None is better or worse, it’s just how we are each hard-wired slightly differently. In work—in business—this concept is very similar. Each of us discover your unique way of processing the world—how you make sense of the unintelligible. This awareness is a key to finding your way to a calling and will give you an edge in your life’s work. One of the keys to my success was that I found my business language relatively early. After college, I accomplished very little. I had gotten a consulting job where I lasted a grand total of four months before landing on my brother’s couch and eventually starting my career as a temp. In the next few years, I moved up to administrative assistant to assistant market research manager in the textbook division of a book publisher, where I hard coded paper surveys sent out to professors. All the while primarily focused on drinking my ass off. A friend had started Columbia business school, and, on a whim, I decided to follow him. I sat down at my desk in my shared shit-hole shared apartment in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts to take a practice GMAT. I was shocked by how well I did particularly on the math portion of the test (and most of it involved math in some form). This motivated me to study harder. When I finally took the paper exam in a classroom at MIT, despite loud construction noise through, I knew I had aced it. I bought a bottle of tequila on the way home to celebrate by myself before meeting friends later that night (yes, I would get sober but that would be for several years). At Yale School of Management, I first took statistics with one of the world experts on modeling the spread of the AIDs epidemic and then Fixed Income with a brilliant J.P. Morgan banker who would take the train up to New Haven on Friday afternoons, loosen his tie, roll up his sleeves, and fill blackboard after blackboard with Monte Carlo simulations. I never felt like I had to learn any of the funny symbols either professor wrote out for us. To me it was obvious. It just made sense. In my head, math is the basis for everything. It is my poetry, and it is my gift. It’s a language like French or Mandarin, except that it goes to the very nature of all things, especially when it comes to business. In chess, skill is judged by how many moves in advance you can see on the board. Because of the complexity of the game, a novice player can generally only see one or two moves in advance. However, a grand master can see six, seven, or even ten. Due to the number of alternatives at each move and countermove, the math grows exponentially. I could stare at very complicated mathematical explanations of the price of a call option on a stock or in stats class at the impact of needle exchange on the growth of the AIDs epidemic and understand directly, without having to interpret the numbers and symbols into any other “native” language. Math was and is my native language. During my business career, I refined this tool to my advantage. I never felt like I was doing “high-level” math in any business context: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentials (which is also a form of multiplication). It’s just that I could instantly see the mathematical implications in every situation. Others either couldn’t at all or would take a long time to do the work methodically to figure it out. My father is perhaps the most brilliant intellect I have ever known. He has a photographic memory. He is also on the spectrum. Maybe some of that rubbed off on me, even though I have undergone extensive testing that would indicate I am not on the spectrum. But some people who have autism are known to have weird and unusual mathematical computation abilities. Whether I am doesn’t matter. I see the world in numbers, and that has been a very good thing. I have worked as CFO of a large media company, run my own venture capital firm, and then made direct investments in search fund investments. In all these situations, math has been a key. Not accounting or finance per se, just the brute math at hand. There have been many complex negotiations where I knew the other side did not understand the underlying math because they would negotiate against their own interest. They were in the dark because they had not correctly recognized the numerical interactions, and they were moving in the wrong direction. This always caused me to laugh inwardly because all I had to do was get out of the way and let them push the negotiations further and further to the benefit of me and my team. In meetings with boards and CEOs, I could clarify confusion and highlight what truly mattered by doing the math, considering the full picture, and reasoning backward. I hate to admit it, but this often came out as frustration—swearing, pounding my fist, or getting in people's faces—to make my point clear. Sometimes, I kept my cards close and let a board member talk on and on about why we should do something, fully aware of the flaws in their argument, allowing the noose to tighten around their neck, waiting to gently expose their mistake when they ran out of steam, to point out the error in a way that couldn’t be denied. Not nice. But effective. I’m not proud of how I sometimes used this gift. My point is twofold here. Math is important. Even if you don’t have freak abilities in the area, you will need to contend with that and with people who do have those abilities. The second is that you need to be radically honest with yourself about your language of understanding in business: how do you make sense of seemingly random things? The answer to that will determine your strengths and should guide your career choices. Emotional intelligence and the ability to communicate effectively, both in writing and in person, are two equally essential languages in the business world. I am okay at both, but not great (as evidenced by beating much younger CEOs upside the head a few too many times). But if I were particularly good at one or the other of these, I would have taken a different path to take advantage of that strength. And there are many, many other languages of understanding in business. Find yours.