“Yeah, interest rates are gravity. If we knew interest rates were gonna be zero from now till judgment day, you know, you could pay a lotta money for any other asset.”
Warren Buffett, CNBC Squawk Box, October 3, 2017 (interview with Becky Quick)
I learned to code alone. Vim was my editor. A single bug could hold me up for a month.
There were books and YouTube. Nobody nearby could unblock me in the moment. Each solution took ten times longer than it would with someone to help.
Each feature took days or weeks instead of minutes or hours. In financial terms: a high interest rate environment. Working alone makes each action expensive the same way high interest rates make each asset expensive to hold.
Friction is to action what interest rates are to assets.
Low friction means cheap action: you can afford speculation, side experiments and habits with distant or uncertain payoff. High friction means expensive action: each move has to justify its cost and most fail to.
When friction is low, wasteful behavior survives. Zero-rate years let companies live that should have died, kept alive by cheap debt. The same dynamic applies to people. Easy environments let wasteful habits live on borrowed time. The drag is invisible because each action costs almost nothing. There’s little to no selection pressure.
High friction does the opposite. Most people in that situation give up and try something else. The few who survive carry the marks of a thousand near-quits.
I survived. My first engineering job made actions cheap overnight.
The biggest change was access to experienced people. A senior engineer at the next desk could unblock me in minutes on a problem that would have cost me days alone. That one change compounded fast. I went from junior to senior in under two years.
I came in with skills nobody else had:
- Vim fluency
- debugging endurance from weeks on single bugs
- a deep grasp of how things actually worked underneath
Nobody was coming to save me, so I had to understand each system to solve a single bug in it. With access to senior engineers, I picked up everything else fast.
Engineers who come up under low friction often break when friction rises. They can solve problems only when the help is there, the docs are fresh and the search is fast. Take any of those away and they stall.
Test for any habit, skill or commitment: raise the friction. Strip time. Add chaos. Remove the help. What survives works when conditions are hard. What collapses only worked because conditions were easy.
Buffett said interest rates are gravity for assets. The same gravity governs people. Your environment prices each move you make. Low friction tilts you toward speculation. High friction tilts you toward survival skills.
Given the choice, you would pick low rates. The odds at high rates are stacked against you and the casualty list is long. Most people in hard mode landed there by chance. The environment either breaks you or you make it through.
There’s a line from Madea’s Family Reunion. A daughter confronts her mother over the suffering she allowed: “You are going to rot in hell.” The mother answers: “I vacation there.” That captures what surviving high friction does to a person. You came from what others fear. When conditions worsen, you know the territory. You have done it before. You can do it again if you have to.
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What did you learn in a high-rate environment that became an unfair advantage later?
