One of the great destroyers of creativity is always defining your success based on your relative performance to someone else. This is what the entire financial industry is based on: performance relative to peers or the index.
The fundamental nature of the industry requires you to play according to the rules of people targeting an average outcome. Most individuals in life and in the financial industry are in a constant state of trying to avoid the “Disorder Family” from Taleb’s Antifragile book:
Instead of avoiding this “Disorder Family” and targeting an average outcome, the goal should be to look for anomalies at the frontiers of knowledge. https://paulgraham.com/getideas.html
Do you really think you’re following the frontiers of knowledge by examining the line items of Apples balance sheet along with a fleet of CFAs?
This is the greatest difficulty for people: to orient one’s focus on what is unseen and unknown. There has already been a flood of VC money driven by excessive focus on people like Sam Altman. In other words, ITS PRICED IN. Do you really think you're going to find the next unicorn with an extreme payout centered around someone with this many Twitter followers?
When you are a trader in financial markets or simply managing the risk, the goal is to find something that has asymmetry due to mispricing. This means finding things that people aren’t talking about. While these ideas should always be quantified via the market signals and fundamental metrics of an opportunity, the excessive focus by the media and social media can tell where NOT to focus.
One of the best comments I saw this week was from Jared Kubin on what most people miss about timeframe (by the way if you don’t follow Jared, you should!):
https://twitter.com/JaredKubin/status/1784385581679575328
Misunderstanding timeframe and misunderstanding how to find ideas are two of the primary reasons why people become part of the average outcome. One of the analogies I like for being creative and finding ideas (or better yet letting them find you) is always orienting yourself to increasing the size of your fish net and casting your fish net. If you try to chase the fish in the water, you will just end up hungry and wet. If you constantly build a bigger fishing net and consistently cast it, ideas will find you.
If you want more of a tangible breakdown of how I think about this process, I wrote about it in the very first article:
Don’t chase the fish