The Playing Field by Graham Duncan is BY FAR the best piece of writing I've read on the journey we must all make to reach mastery in our fields. While Graham writes about the journey to master the art of investing, everything in it is broadly generalizable.

In Graham’s view we must all progress from apprentice, to professional, to self-actualization, operating at scale with impact, and eventually (if we make it) mentoring the new generation. It’s a wonderful meditation on mastery — what it is, what it looks like, and most importantly the journey to get there.

Listen & Watch: Listen now on Apple, Spotify, or Google. Watch on YouTube. Or find a link to your favorite player on Pod.link.

Notes & Transcript: Find my full notes and transcript for this episode at outlieracademy.com/playing-field.

‍

‍

Who is Graham Duncan?

Graham is the Co-Founder and Managing Principal of East Rock Capital — which is a multi-family office launched in 2006. He also serves as Chair of the Sohn Conference Foundation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he cofounded the independent Wall Street research firm Medley Global Advisors and worked at two multi-manager hedge funds. Incredibly, The Playing Field is one of just seven posts on Graham’s website at GrahamDuncan.blog.

‍

‍

Top Highlights

In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.

It’s the way you learn to play the cards you’ve been dealt, rather than the hand itself, that determines the worth of your participation in the game.

At this level, an investor begins to consolidate multiple influences into a unique strategy, going beyond his or her original mentor. Warren Buffett may have been at this phase of his development in the 1980’s when he said. ‘I’m now 15% Phil Fisher and 85% Ben Graham.’ He elaborated: ‘Charlie Munger shoved me in the direction of not just buying bargains, as Ben Graham had taught me…it took a powerful force to move me on from Graham’s limiting view. It was the power of Charlie’s mind, he expanded my horizons.

An analogy from competitive swimming is useful here. The sociologist and coach Daniel Chambliss has observed that what he at first thought of as different levels of swimming are in fact different worlds:

Beyond an initial improvement in strength, flexibility and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. …instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps: noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude, are accomplished usually through a change in setting, e.g. working with a new coach, new friends, etc. who work at a higher level. What I have called “levels” are better described as “worlds” or “spheres.”

When we interact with a Level 4 investor, the dialogue is different from the traditional “pitch” or “update” we get from others. Harvard professor Bob Kegan has the best description of the mindset:

People with self-transforming minds are not only advancing their agenda and design. They are also making space for the modification or expansion of their agenda or design. Rather than inquiring only within the frame of their design (seeking information that will advance their agenda), they are also inquiring about the design itself.They are seeking information that may lead them or their team to enhance, refine, or alter the original design.

Buffett has also waded into the more philosophical end of discussions of income distribution, offering an elegant parable that makes John Rawls’ veil of ignorance accessible to financial-market participants:

“It’s 24 hours before your birth, and a genie appears to you. He tells you that you can set the rules for the world you’re about to enter — economic, social, political — the whole enchilada. Sounds great, right? What’s the catch? “Before you enter the world, you will pick one ball from a barrel of 6.8 billion (the number of people on the planet). That ball will determine your gender, race, nationality, natural abilities, and health — whether you are born rich or poor, sick or able-bodied, brilliant or below average, American or Zimbabwean.“This is what I call the ovarian lottery. You’re going to get one ball out of there, and that is the most important thing that’s ever going to happen to you in your life. That’s a good perspective to have when setting the rules for our world.“We should be designing a society that doesn’t leave behind someone who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well-wired for this particular system.”

‍

‍

The Playing Field (Full Essay) by Graham Duncan

Over the last decade, I’ve interviewed and assessed more than 5,000 investment managers. One of the most important things I’ve learned in that process is what separates the great investors from the rest. The great ones view investing as a game, and they know exactly what game they’re playing. It brings to mind an observation from the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah:

“In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.”

One great portfolio manager I know told the story of being driven somewhere by an analyst on a rainy night when a truck swerved and almost ran them off the road. “Why is stuff like this always happening to me?” the analyst instinctually responded. But to the portfolio manager, that response reflected a terrible mindset, whether on the road or in the market: a sense that the world is acting on you as opposed to your acting on the world. It is a mindset that is hard to change. But from what I’ve seen, great investors don’t have it. Instead, they’ve come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot.

One way to relocate your locus of control is to frame investing (and even life more generally) as a game. This allows you to experience luck as luck, to separate the hand you drew from the playing of that hand. As David Milch, the creator of the HBO show Deadwood, put it, he realized late in life that “it’s the way you learn to play the cards you’ve been dealt, rather than the hand itself, that determines the worth of your participation in the game.”

For investors, I’ve come to think of five levels of the game:

1. Apprentice — learning the game
2. Expert — mastering the game you were taught
3. Professional — making the game you were taught fit your own strengths and weaknesses
4. Master — changing the game you play as part of your own self-expression and operating at scale
5. Steward — becoming part of the playing field itself and mentoring the next generation

Level 1: Apprentice — Learning the Game

Each year around 100,000 new college graduates apply for internships at investment banks. Around 10,000 get a spot. After three years of banking boot camp, roughly 4,000 of these analysts want to become investors. Add in some analysts from management consulting and accounting firms, plus a handful of lawyers, and you get around 6,000 talented candidates interviewing for buy-side positions. About one in six gets a seat. So imagine a new cohort of roughly 1,000 twenty-somethings joining 15,000 existing analysts and portfolio managers at hedge funds, and another 30,000 long-only investors.

This new cohort steps onto the field with some training in accounting and valuation, but each member is otherwise a blank slate. At this level, the most efficient way to learn the initial craft of investing is to find a mentor. This is what Robert Greene has called the “apprenticeship” stage, and the person you are apprenticed to is extremely impactful.

I have observed that people who begin on the sell-side or in mutual funds seem to retain that initial frame on how markets work for much of their careers. Years after working at Fidelity, an analyst will still refer to “sector rotation” as an explanation for why one set of stocks is ascendant, whereas someone who began their career at Goldman Sachs would never think of sector rotation as a useful concept. Learning how to model and value companies, to diligence and interview industry sources and management teams, and to identify, with the help of a mentor, the key drivers of a company or a stock.

Level 2: Expert — Playing the Game You Were Taught

The survivors of a reasonably difficult transition from analyst to senior analyst or portfolio manager reach the second level, usually in their late 20s or early 30s. The analyst moves from processing other people’s research agendas to generating the ideas.

Many investors plateau at this level, particularly if they practice their craftoutside a “cognitively diverse” city like New York or London. They often have a somewhat static sense of identity, such as “I am a value investor like Warren Buffett.” This puts them in competition with the index, playing a game that is defined entirely by their peers. By constructing their identity as an “expert” atinvesting in certain sectors or companies, they limit their ability to observe change in those areas.

Some Level 2 investors who are traders feel like impostors next to their more analytical peers. But over time some may come to see that filtering otherpeople’s ideas represents an ability to identify key drivers of the game. This type of senior analyst can actually more easily become a portfolio manager who owns ideas through his analysts, while the more “analytic” senior analysts, who do their own deep research on each investment idea, are less able to build out a full portfolio.

While traders still need to train themselves to dig deeply, the essential skill isspotting the key drivers of a situation — seeing the underlying reality — not coming up with the raw analysis. Pride of authorship is an obstacle when it comes to making money.

Attrition at this level is high. Each year ten percent or more of this cohort either peels off into non-buy side roles (marketing or operations) or leaves the industry. The system sorts the more relationship-oriented “fast twitch” people into roles as dedicated traders or marketers.

Level 3: Professional — Fitting the Game to Your Own Strengths and Weaknesses

Level 2 investors who evolve to Level 3 shed habits of imitation in favor of their own investment styles with their own idiosyncratic strengths. Many of the most successful portfolio managers of any age or tenure are at this stage.

At this level, an investor begins to consolidate multiple influences into a unique strategy, going beyond his or her original mentor. Warren Buffett may have been at this phase of his development in the 1980’s when he said. “I’m now 15% Phil Fisher and 85% Ben Graham.” He elaborated: “Charlie [Munger] shoved me in the direction of not just buying bargains, as Ben Graham had taught me…it took a powerful force to move me on from Graham’s limiting view. It was the power of Charlie’s mind, he expanded my horizons.”

One game that is currently operative among many skilled investors is buying quality companies in the midst of short-term difficulties. When Rupert Murdoch was forced to split News Corporation into two after the phone-tapping scandal, its high-quality media assets were available at a discount — and smart investors grabbed them. The same playbook worked for Moody’s as it struggled through lawsuits after the financial crisis.

But a game like this will likely work for several years, before it becomes such a common approach that these “quality” stocks will become less volatile during periods of stress (many high-quality consumer stocks in Asia currently seem immune to sell-offs based on macro uncertainty). So an investor who uses only one game will have less sustainable returns than those who reach the next stage: putting in the time develop new games even while playing the existing one.

The critical challenge for Level 3 investors is to find a way to be exposed to Level 4 investors. If their world consists of only Level 2 and 3, they may stay where they are for the rest of their careers.

An analogy from competitive swimming is useful here. The sociologist and coach Daniel Chambliss has observed that what he at first thought of as different levels of swimming are in fact different worlds:

Beyond an initial improvement in strength, flexibility and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. …instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps: noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude, are accomplished usually through a change in setting, e.g. working with a new coach, new friends, etc. who work at a higher level. What I have called “levels” are better described as “worlds” or “spheres.”

In the investing field, there are also sub-worlds. An analyst who apprentices and then achieves expertise or professionalism within a certain sphere might define what level of game is possible based on how his or her portfolio manager and peers’ portfolio managers define “world class.” But from a higher balcony one might view even excellent process and results as actually just the best at a given level.

Most managers take in capital in excess of what their game permits them to manage in a world-class way. Only someone with the confidence born of a long-time horizon can resist the urge to make more money in the short term while risking mediocrity in the medium term. It is only as managers transition into level 4, that their skills allow them to manage capital at scale.

Level 4: Master — Changing the Game You Play

TS Eliot observed that “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” Getting to level 4 requires what one investor I admire calls a “belief in what’s possible.” The small minority of managers who reach this level are truly “absolute return”-oriented: they define success in terms of what they believe they can achieve over decades, not relative to what others are achieving at a given moment.

David Tepper is a good example. If you invested $1 million with Tepper when he opened his fund in 1993, it is worth well more than $150 million today.

Tepper appears to be using multiple mental models when he invests, choosing what works for a moment or context rather than being constrained by his historical role as a “distressed debt investor.” If you monitor the 13F filings of the stocks he owns, he appears to move effortlessly across sectors and asset classes, scooping up dollars as he goes. You would have a difficult time deciding what benchmark or comparable fund to judge him against.

In my interactions with investors at this level, there are several attributes they seem to share:

Open-minded with a point of view

When we interact with a Level 4 investor, the dialogue is different from the traditional “pitch” or “update” we get from others. Harvard professor Bob Kegan has the best description of the mindset:

People with self-transforming minds are not only advancing their agenda and design. They are also making space for the modification or expansion of their agenda or design. Rather than inquiring only within the frame of their design (seeking information that will advance their agenda), they are also inquiring about the design itself.They are seeking information that may lead them or their team to enhance, refine, or alter the original design.

I see this “open-minded with a point of view” mindset reflected in the way someone grips his or her investment ideas or strategies. Lower level investors are sometimes surprisingly definitive in the way they describe an investment opportunity; they have a too tight grip.

When my partners and I connected one Level 3 manager who was long a stock to a Level 4 manager who was short it, the Level 3 manager viewed the conversation primarily as an occasion to convert the short seller to his point of view. His evangelical approach to the conversation meant that he failed to elicit a number of important data points from the short-seller. Even worse, he failed to take the opportunity to learn subtle elements of the other manager’s research process that might be useful in his own short oriented research in the future.

Keeping score in dollars extracted from the market, rather than whether a piece of analysis was correct, is one of the most effective strategies for maintaining the optimal “grip” on your investment ideas. While any fixed identity may constrain someone’s viewpoint, the identity of “I am great at making money” allows greater flexibility than “I am smart and therefore I make money” or “I am an expert at investing in financial stocks.”

Level 4 investors seem, at one moment, to focus on the businesses themselves, then switch perspectives the next moment to see the business as a “stock,” then switch again to identify the moments in time when one factor is driving the entire stock market.

Robert Greene notes that the “Master” is observing not just “the moves of the pieces on the chessboard but the entire game, involving the psychologies of the players, their strategies in real time, their past experiences influencing the present, the comfort of the chairs they are sitting in, how their energies affect each other — in a word, everything that comes into play, all at once.”

Sometimes the ability to shift perspective involves an empathetic mindset.

Paul Tudor Jones has described how in 1990 he was able to put himself in the shoes of a typical Japanese fund manager under intense pressure to return at least 8% a year. When the market corrected by 4% that January, Jones’ empathy helped him realize that the fund managers would be risking their jobs to double down; he was thus able to predict, correctly, that they would shift to bonds and the stock market would continue to sell off.

Level 4 investors relate to other market participants, their employees, and their investors as chess pieces in a game of their own invention, a game that is “for” them.

Relationship to time

Level 4 investors display the full range of urgency and patience, of aggression and conservatism, of trying to make money now but also knowing they will be investing for decades. They adapt their tempo to the pace of the market and decide how and whether to position themselves based on whether they “see the ball” at that moment.

You can gauge this orientation toward time by how an investor thinks of success: is it primarily in terms of an internal rate of return or as a multiple of money? Analysts often begin with a MOM mindset — success is doubling their money on an investment over any time horizon. But skilled portfolio managers have at times a sense of urgency — they want to pull that time horizon forward as much as possible — and at times a sense of patience — they wait to participate until the moment of sharpest appreciation (or decline) in a given security.

An investor’s relationship to time also influences how he or she views periods of recovery or quiet. Good investment management comes from a mindset reflecting the assumption that the manager will be investing for decades, but that investment activity is as a series of sprints and recoveries rather than one extended marathon. As Lenin once said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The tempo of a strong investment culture is in sync with the reality of long periods of inactivity.There is often a shared mood that the game is afoot, but not a rushed feeling to do something based on fear or greed. Then, when the moment is right, top investors are startlingly aggressive.

Relationship to risk

Sometimes an investor’s vocabulary reflects a desire to expand what is possible around risk taking. Stan Druckenmiller said once, “There is a phrase on Wall Street that I think is completely wrong: bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered. It takes courage to be a pig, but you want to be a pig with discipline. Three or four times a year you have conviction, and it is when your conviction is high that you have to bet big.”

Investing ultimately requires a nuanced relationship to fear and greed. As investors mature, they can sometimes push those emotions into conscious awareness and manage them better.

David Tepper notes, “We’re value-oriented and performance-based like a lot of funds. But I think what differentiates us is that we’re not afraid of the downside of different situations when we’ve done the analysis. Some other people are very afraid of losing money, which keeps them from making money.” In my experience, Level 4 investors are more tolerant of risk than other market participants.

This greater risk tolerance may come in part from the fact that the Level 4 investor does not view his identity as at risk in a given investment, and instead sees interacting with the markets as an occasion for rapid feedback on his own development. The philosopher Paul Tillich defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity.”

The Level 4 investors I have met have an unusual intensity and see their interactions with the market to more fully realize themselves. This sense of equanimity and a certain fearlessness — a form of wisdom — that emanatesfrom a Level 4 investor is perhaps what the markets are recognizing as they hang on the every word of David Tepper.

Level 5: Steward — Becoming Part of the Game Itself

Level 5 investors have achieved a mastery at investing, and a level of financial success, that allows them to turn some of their attention to taking care of the playing field itself. They may have preferred to keep a lower profile in earlier stages, but have since become willing to influence those outside their immediate orbit, including by acting as role models and mentoring younger players. They have begun exploring how they relate to the system itself — and how their actions help shape it.

There are very few Level 5 investors, but Warren Buffet is certainly among them. Buffett has steadily increased his public presence over the last several decades and he was even more present in the media than usual during the 2008 financial crisis. He regularly went on CNBC and Charlie Rose to try to calm market participants and encourage Congress to act on fiscal stimulus. He used metaphors designed to appeal to a broad swath of the public, in the hope of building support for congressional action: “Look, the patient is undergoing cardiac arrest right now and the first thing we have to do is to stabilize the patient.” His authority had reached a level that allowed him to take responsibility for the system itself — to assert our collective reality, operating in an entirely different realm from the participant who preferred to remain at his desk shorting financial stocks.

Buffett has also waded into the more philosophical end of discussions of income distribution, offering an elegant parable that makes John Rawls’ veil of ignorance accessible to financial-market participants:

“It’s 24 hours before your birth, and a genie appears to you. He tells you that you can set the rules for the world you’re about to enter — economic, social, political — the whole enchilada. Sounds great, right? What’s the catch? “Before you enter the world, you will pick one ball from a barrel of 6.8 billion (the number of people on the planet). That ball will determine your gender, race, nationality, natural abilities, and health — whether you are born rich or poor, sick or able-bodied, brilliant or below average, American or Zimbabwean.“This is what I call the ovarian lottery. You’re going to get one ball out of there, and that is the most important thing that’s ever going to happen to you in your life. That’s a good perspective to have when setting the rules for our world.“We should be designing a society that doesn’t leave behind someone who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well-wired for this particular system.”

No matter what ball you got in the ovarian lottery, what card you were dealt, what game you are playing or think you’re playing, I think it’s useful — even for those of us who aren’t masters — to occasionally zoom out for a bird’s eye view of the playing field.

‍

Originally published on Graham Duncan’s website.

‍

‍

Brought to you by HVMN. With Ketone-IQ, fuel your best anytime with a boost of awesome-feeling energy and clarity. Unlock the power of nature's superfuel—no fasting or keto diet required.

Daniel Scrivner (00:01.162)
Level two investors who evolved to level three shed habits of imitation in favor of their own investment style with their own idiosyncratic strengths. Many of the most successful portfolio managers of any age or tenure are at this stage. At this level, an investor begins to consolidate multiple influences into a unique strategy going beyond his or her original mentor or mentors. Warren Buffett may have been at this phase of his development in the 1980s when he said,

Daniel Scrivner (00:31.19)
He elaborated, Charlie Munger shoved me in the direction of not just buying bargains has been Graham had taught me. It took a powerful force to move me on from Graham's limiting view. It was the power of Charlie's mind. He expanded my horizons. That was an excerpt from the blog post I'm going to talk to you about today, which is the playing field by Graham Duncan, which is by far the best piece of writing I've ever read on what mastery looks like in the journey to get there. While this piece focuses on mastering the art of investing.

Everything in it is broadly generalizable to founders, athletes, artists, and any other form of mastery. You can find my notes on this blog post and the transcript for this episode at outlieracademy.com slash playing field. Now, I thought it'd be helpful to talk a little bit about Graham Duncan and then we'll go ahead and jump into the playing field. Graham Duncan is a co-founder and managing principal at East Rock Capital, which is a multifamily office launched in 2006. He also serves as chair of the Sohn Conference Foundation.

which for anyone that's not familiar, it's probably the best investment conference put on each and every year. 100% of the proceeds go to charity, and every year Graham hosts this conference, and it's incredible. He's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he co-founded the independent Wall Street research firm, Medley Global Advisors, and worked at two multi-manager hedge funds. The playing field is one of just seven blog posts on Graham's website, which you can find at grahamduncan.blog.

Daniel Scrivner (01:55.362)
So again, some of the reasons, I want to talk a little bit about why I like this piece so much. So this is a blog post that actually a friend sent to me as a Word doc, I want to say probably five years ago, and I've probably read it at least five times over the last five years. It's something that, I mean, it's one of the best pieces of writing I've ever come across, to be super frank. And I've never seen anybody to be able to articulate what mastery looks like, why we're all chasing mastery.

And what's involved in that, what's sort of the levels and the progression that happens is we're on our way to becoming masters of our own crafts. And of course, you know, you and I put a tremendous amount of time, energy and passion into what we do. We are clearly, whether we have acknowledged it or not yet, chasing mastery. And so I think this piece is incredibly important. And so I highly encourage you to read the full piece. You can find it again at OutlierAcademy.com slash playing field.

And I encourage you to read it even once a year, you know, and set yourself a reminder to do it. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and jump in, read a little bit of the beginning, and I'll add commentary along the way. Over the last decade, I've interviewed and assessed more than 5000 investment managers. One of the most important things I've learned in that process is what separates the great investors from the rest. The great ones view investing as a game and they know exactly what game they're playing. It brings to mind an observation from the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah.

In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game, the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing. One great portfolio manager I know told the story of being driven somewhere by an analyst on a rainy night when a truck swerved and almost ran them off the road. Why is stuff like that always happening to me? The analyst instinctually responded, but the portfolio manager, that response reflected, but to the portfolio manager, that response reflected a terrible mindset.

whether on the road or in the market, a sense that the world is acting on you as opposed to your acting on the world. It's a mindset that is hard to change, but from what I've seen, great investors don't have it. Instead, they come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot. And just on this point, what this immediately reminds me of, this idea of the great investors focusing on what they can control and ignoring everything else that they can't, I feel like there's no better reference or example for this than Charlie.

Daniel Scrivner (04:15.186)
Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. I mean, they talk a lot about how they do not make macro predictions. They do not listen or actively read macroeconomic news. They don't make predictions on the market. They have a whole host of things that they've identified as not being worth their time. And so they don't focus on that at all. They know that these things are outside of their control. And so they put all of their time, energy and effort into what they can control, which is typically one of two things. It's finding world-class companies at valuations that they think are attractive long-term.

And it's making sure that for the businesses that they own and own 100% of or own a majority stake of that they're being operated by the world's best managers. And those are the two controllable things. And so again, this idea, you know, focusing on what you can control and forgetting everything else. And I think really what this speaks to is this idea that we all have finite time and attention. And the only antidote to that is to ruthlessly focus. Okay. Back to the text.

One way to relocate your locus of control is to frame investing and even life more generally as a game. This allows you to experience luck as luck, to separate the hand you drew from the playing of that hand. As David Milch, the creator of HBO show Deadwood put it, he realized late in life that it's the way you learn to play the cards you've been dealt rather than the hand itself that determines the worth of your participation in the game. Quote so good, I've got to say it again. It's the way you learn to play the cards you've been dealt.

rather than the hand itself that determines the worth of your participation in the game. For investors, I've come to think of five levels of the game. We're going to come back to this. We're going to focus on each one of these levels. But the first five, the five levels, just for a quick overview is number one, apprentice, you're learning the game. Number two, expert, you're mastering the game you were taught. Number three, professional, making the game you were taught fit your own strengths and weaknesses. Number four, master.

Changing the game you play as part of your own self-expression and operating at scale. Number five, steward. Becoming part of the playing field itself in mentoring the next generation. And just for a second, I think it's worthwhile to pause and just consider where you're at. You know, I think I'm somewhere around number three. I have huge aspirations to get to number four and number five. But, you know, I highly identify.

Daniel Scrivner (06:28.682)
With number three, which is the professional. It's about making the game you were taught fit your own strengths and weaknesses. Where are you? What level resonates with you? Okay, we're now gonna go through them one by one. We're gonna start with level one apprentice, person that's learning the game. Each year around 100,000 new college graduates apply for internships at investment banks. Around 10,000 get a spot. After three years of banking bootcamp, roughly 4,000 of these analysts wanna become investors.

Add in some analysts from management consulting and accounting firms, plus a handful of lawyers, and you get around 6,000 talented candidates interviewing for buy side positions every single year. About one in six gets a seat. So imagine a new cohort of roughly 1,020 somethings joining 15,000 existing analysts and portfolio managers at hedge funds, and another 30,000 long only investors. This new cohort steps onto the field. So again, this is the playing field.

So we've got 6,000 talented candidates. You know, one in six gets selected. And we've got what, about 46,000 by grams count, you know, kind of players on the field. And this is new analysts, existing analysts, portfolio managers, and long only investors. This new cohort steps onto the field with some training in accounting and valuation, but each member is otherwise a blank slate. At this level, the most efficient way to learn the initial craft of investing is to find a mentor. This is what Robert Green has called the apprenticeship stage.

And the person you are apprenticed to is extremely impactful. I've observed that people who began on the sell side or in mutual funds seem to retain that initial frame on how markets work for much of their careers. Years after working at Fidelity, an analyst will still refer to sector rotation as an explanation for why one set of stocks is ascendant, whereas someone who began their career at Goldman Sachs would never think of sector rotation as a useful concept. Again, he's saying all of this to make the point.

That when you're at the apprenticeship stage, who you are apprentice to, and this can be a person, this can be a team, a company, exceptional people that you're joining, is extremely impactful. It sets the frame that you're gonna use and that you're gonna have to work hard to change and evolve as you move forward. Learning how to model and value companies to diligence and interview industry sources and management teams and to identify with the help of a mentor, the key drivers of a company or a stock. So again, that's level one.

Daniel Scrivner (08:54.166)
when you are learning the game. Okay, let's move on to number two, which is expert playing the game you were taught. The survivors of a reasonably difficult transition from analyst to senior analyst or portfolio manager reach the second level, usually in their late 20s or early 30s. The analyst moves from processing other people's research agenda to generating the ideas. Many investors plateau at this level, particularly if they practice their craft outside of a cognitively diverse city like New York or London.

This is a topic we'll come back to again and again. Part of evolving and moving up to different levels is encountering new stressors, things that push you outside of your comfort zone, that challenge the way that you think. So Graham's making a point here that, you know, and I think this is a very true point, that a lot of plateauing, it depends on the people you're around and you need to be in cognitively diverse places. That can be cities. I've also been at cognitively diverse teams, teams that force me, you know, to think differently.

And you can even assemble those on your own if you're an investor There's all sorts of clubs that you can join whether that's tiger 21 local clubs of investors Again, it's very important. You don't plateau early You often have a somewhat static sense of identity such as I'm a value investor like Warren Buffett This next line is so important this puts them in competition with the index playing a game that is defined Entirely by their peers now what I love about this point is it's kind of making the macro point on how important it is To choose your competitors well.

You know, one of the things I think we all don't appreciate enough is that we get to choose who are comparing ourselves again. And here Graham's making the point that when you're competing with an index, you know, you've defined a game for yourself. And I think a lot of this is just making the point that this game is a game of your choosing and you're going to define the rules and you're going to figure out how to play. And your ultimate goal is to play a game that plays to your strengths. And a big part of doing that is choosing your competitors well.

This is extremely important. You need the right external enemy. By constructing their identity as an expert at investing in certain sectors or companies, they limit their ability to observe change in those areas. Some level two investors who are traders feel like imposters next to their more analytical peers. But over time, some may come to see that filtering other people's ideas represents an ability to identify key drivers of the game.

Daniel Scrivner (11:12.482)
This type of senior analyst can actually more easily become a portfolio manager who owns ideas through his analysts, while the more analytic senior analysts who do their own deep research on each investment idea are less able to build out a full portfolio. While traders still need to train themselves to dig deeply, the essential skill is spotting the key drivers of a situation, seeing the underlying reality, not coming up with a raw analysis. Pride of authorship is an obstacle when it comes to making money.

And here I just want to pause for a second because I think these last two sentences are incredibly important. The essential skill is spotting the key drivers of a situation. What is that about? It's seeing the underlying reality, not coming up with raw analysis. What I love about this is, you know, and I think this will resonate with a lot of people. It certainly resonates with me. You know, it's very easy, I think, in investing or kind of any intellectual sport or game.

to focus a lot on analysis as opposed to just trying to see reality clearly. You know, it makes me think of the writing of Warren Buffett, where I feel like so much of what he's reflecting on and what he's sharing is his ability to see reality, his ability to not buy into narratives, to not buy into what's common, to not buy into what other people believe in truly just seeing reality for what it is. It's an incredibly important skill. And then I just love the point that he makes here. I think it's an incredible sentence. Doesn't really make sense without the context we just shared.

but pride of authorship is an obstacle when it comes to making money. It's not important that you wrote it. It's not important that it's your idea. It's important that you saw reality correctly, that you took the right actions. Attrition at this level is high. Each year, 10% or more of this cohort either peels off into non-buy-side roles. This could be marketing or operations, or leaves the industry. The system sorts the more relationship-oriented, fast-twitch people into roles as dedicated traders or marketers. And again,

This is all about level two, which is mastering the game you were taught. So again, at first level, we're all picking a mentor. This can be conscious, this can be subconscious, this can be a person, this can be a company. At level two, it's then all about mastering the game we were taught. So again, and this is, if we're about to go through a fascinating shift as we move to level three, at level two, you haven't potentially identified your own strengths.

Daniel Scrivner (13:33.526)
You haven't picked a game super intentionally. You haven't tried to shape what you're doing around those strengths. You may not have a lot of confidence. You may actually have a ton of insecurity around your strengths. So level one, you're learning the game from somebody else. Level two, you're trying to get better at that. But again, it's still their game. And then level three, and as we progress, and this is why I think just the way that Graham has put this together in the transformation that happens, it's not these kind of simple incremental skills. It's these foundational shifts that start to happen as we move up.

Okay, let's dive into level three. This is the professional fitting the game to your own strengths and weaknesses. Level two investors who evolved to level three shed habits of imitation in favor of their own investment styles with their own idiosyncratic strengths. Many of the most successful portfolio managers of any age or tenure are at this stage. At this level, an investor begins to consolidate multiple influences into a unique strategy going beyond his or her original mentor.

I'm going to say this again, this is incredibly important. At this level, an investor begins to consolidate multiple influences. We have this whole constellation of people that we're inspired by. And at this stage, you are actively leaning into that. You are identifying the influences that you want to become a part of your style. You are remixing what they do. You're building your own skill stack. You're coming up with your own kind of competitive edge as you're doing this. And you're consolidating these multiple influences into a unique strategy.

Going beyond his or her original mentor. Warren Buffett may have been at this phase of his development in the 1980s when he said, I'm now 15% Phil Fisher and 85% Ben Graham. He elaborated, Charlie Munger shoved me in that direction of not just buying bargains as Ben Graham had taught me. It took a powerful force to move me on from Graham's limiting view. It was the power of Charlie's mind. He expanded my horizons.

One game that is currently operative among many skilled investors is buying quality companies in the midst of short-term difficulties. When Rupert Murdoch was forced to split News Corporation into two after the phone tapping scandal, its high-quality media assets were available at a discount and smart investors grabbed them. The same playbook worked for Moody's as it struggled through lawsuits after the financial crisis. But a game like this will likely work for several years before it becomes such a common approach that these quality stocks

Daniel Scrivner (15:53.09)
become less volatile during periods of stress. Many high-quality consumer stocks in Asia currently seem immune to sell-offs based on macro uncertainty. So an investor who uses one game will have less sustainable returns than those who reach the next stage, putting in the time to develop new games, even while playing existing ones. This is fascinating. So you want to move from having one style of play, one approach, one series of techniques into being able to toggle between.

Daniel Scrivner (16:24.878)
Okay, we're going to keep moving on, still on level three. The critical challenge for level three investors is to find a way to be exposed to level four investors. If their world consists only of level two and three, they may stay where they are for the rest of their careers. So this is so important. It's evolving from level to level. So he's saying here at level three, the difference between moving on and progressing and not, potentially forever.

is being exposed to level four investors. It's finding people that will make you uncomfortable. It's finding people that'll challenge your assumptions. It's finding people that have put in the work to be further along and they put in the work to have a more crisp definition of what they do in an idea about why it matters and why they do it. So important. So again, this goes back to the site, you know, he talked about cognitive diversity earlier. I think it's the same thing. You were, we're talking about not just cognitive diversity, not just being around.

people that are going to push and pull on your style, but being around people better than yourself and doing that proactively and doing that to learn and doing that to challenge yourself. An analogy from competitive swimming is useful here. Love this analogy. The sociologist and coach Daniel Chambliss has observed that what he at first thought of as different levels of swimming are in fact different worlds. Such an important point. So what Graham's about to say is that, you know,

Progressing in a sport is not just incremental. It's about unlocking things that are a step function change. So here's a quote from that sociologist and coach. "'Beyond an initial improvement in strength, flexibility, and feel, there is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. Instead, athletes move up to the top ranks through qualitative jumps. Noticeable changes in their techniques, discipline, and attitude are accomplished usually through a change in setting.'"

This could be working with a new coach, new friends, et cetera, who work at a higher level. What I have called levels are better described as worlds or spheres. So again, I love this point. There is little increasing accumulation of speed through sheer volume of swimming. What I love about this point is it debunks this idea that just by getting in more volume, more reps of doing the same thing.

Daniel Scrivner (18:34.91)
that is going to eventually propel you to different levels. And I think what Graham is saying here is incredibly astute, which is there are points in your progression. We're doing more volume will get you nowhere. It's not going to help you make this step function change. You know, it's, it reminds me of this idea, you know, this kind of idea. It's a, it's a wonderful book. Um, but I think of it as more of a concept that, you know, I, it shows up in the world all the time, which is just this idea that what got you here is not going to get you there. And I think what that speaks to is this idea that's not about incremental. It's not these incremental.

you know, moves and putting in more reps, it's about unlocking these step function changes. And the other thing that I love here is, you know, he talks about, you know, you move up to the top ranks through, top ranks through qualitative jumps, and he gives some examples. And I think what's fascinating about these examples is they're all examples of new stressors. So one is working with a new coach. A new coach is gonna challenge you. A new coach.

is gonna make you feel really uncomfortable. A new coach might actually make you feel incompetent because he's going to show you things and challenge you to do things that you previously have mastered. And he's gonna say, that's not, or she's gonna say, that's not what we're doing anymore. We need to move on and be able to do this. Could be new friends, but it's always people who work at a higher level. So it's not about levels, it's about progressing between worlds or spheres. In the investing field, there are two sub-worlds.

An analyst who apprentices and then achieves expertise on professionalism within a certain sphere might define what level of game is possible based on how his or her portfolio manager and peers portfolio managers define world class. So again, they're judging themselves based off their peer definitions, not their own definition. But from a higher balcony, one might view even excellent process and results is actually just the best at a given level. Talking about local maxima. You know, it's like it's you're doing exceptional.

but you're at a level in the game that's many, many levels below what you can achieve. You have to get out of these local maximas and be able to move on. Most managers take in capital in excess of what their game permits them to manage in a world-class way. Only someone with the confidence born of a long time horizon can resist the urge to make more money in the short term while risking mediocrity in the medium term. It is only as managers transition to level four that their skills allow them to manage capital at scale.

Daniel Scrivner (20:48.386)
So that was level three, which again is all about making the game you were taught fit your own strengths and weaknesses. It's about, uh, you know, if you were taught, uh, you know, guitar, you know, by a amazingly talented, you know, player, you're going to pick up that, that style. You're going to take that style as far as you can, but you're still stuck within that style. And then at some point you need to realize that there's a whole world of other styles and you need to progress beyond that. You need to switch to being able to be competent.

and graceful at being able to switch between different ways of playing, different ways of approaching playing guitar, period. I think the same thing applies again, investing. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're an athlete, this is universally applicable. I think it's so powerful. Okay, so now we're going to talk about level four. And this one we're going to dive into a bit deeper. And Graham's going to take a deeper look at some of the strengths, some of the traits that this level of investor has.

So this is all about mastery. It's about changing the game that you play. T.S. Eliot observed, only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. Again, that's only those who will risk going too far can possibly find how far one can go. Getting to level four requires what one investor I admire calls a belief in what's possible. The small minority of managers who reach this level are truly absolute return oriented.

They define success in terms of what they believe they can achieve over decades, not relative to what others are achieving at any given moment. So again, this is so important. What's what is Graham saying here? He's saying, part of becoming a, you know, a level four investor, part of progressing is at some point you have to stop comparing yourself with your peers. You know, it's a wonderful, Tony Deaton is an investor that I admire a tremendous amount. And one of the things that he stresses and it's such a simple, but, but powerful point.

is that everybody's playing a different game. And so as an example, when you're sitting with other investors and I'm comparing last year, I made 15% and other investors sharing that he made 20%. One thing that Tony said that is just such an amazing perspective is that I actually don't care about the number. The number doesn't tell me anything. The number is actually meaningless. It only is helpful to me when I know what your goals and aims were and basically how you approach playing that game. And only if I know those things,

Daniel Scrivner (23:10.038)
Do I know whether I should try to compare myself to that or even if it's comparable at all? And I feel like it's such a great way of saying it in life. It's so easy. The default for all of us is to benchmark ourselves against our peers. These could be people that we happen to be working around at the moment. These could be people that we seek out and find. We all have peers that we think of and a certain point about mastery and about, you know, achieving higher levels of success is just this idea that at some point you have to ditch that.

You have to have your own internal scorecard and you have to judge everything off of that. And you also have to think incredibly long term. You know, so you they define success in terms of what they believe they can achieve over decades, not relative to what others are achieving at a given moment. David Tepper is a good example. If you invested one million with Tepper when he opened his fund in 1993, it is worth well more than one hundred and fifty million dollars today. Tepper appears to be using multiple mental models when he invests.

choosing what works for a moment or context, rather than being constrained by his historical role as a distressed debt investor. What's Graham saying here? He's saying Tepper was able again, he didn't just have one style of play. He didn't have one way of approaching investing or approaching the market. He had multiple lenses. That's often one way that I think about this is like, imagine you've got 10 pairs of glasses or 10 pairs of monocles, you know, monocles as silly as a visual that might be. You want to and you need to be able to.

find these, develop these different lenses, these different ways of seeing the world, these different ways of making decisions. And you then need to be able to not just be competent each, you need to be competent the meta level of knowing which to apply, which to use at any given moment in time. If you monitor the 13f filings of the stocks he owns, he appears to move effortlessly across sectors and asset classes, scooping up dollars as he goes. You would have a difficult time deciding what benchmark or comparable fund to judge him against.

Such an important point. And again, goes back to how he thinks about competition. You'd have a difficult time deciding what benchmark or comparable fund to judge himself against. This is basically another way of saying, you wanna be a sample size of one. You wanna be incomparable. You wanna be playing your own unique game in a way that there's truly no benchmark or comparable fund to judge you against. That's what mastery start to look like. In my interactions with investors at this level, there are several attributes they seem to share.

Daniel Scrivner (25:29.094)
Open-minded with a point of view. When we interact with a Level 4 investor, the dialogue is different from the traditional pitch or update we get from others. Harvard professor Bob Keegan has the best description of this mindset. People with self-transforming minds are not only advancing their agenda and design. They're also making space for the modification or expansion of their agenda or design, rather than inquiring only within the frame of their design, seeking information that will advance their agenda.

They're also inquiring about the design itself. They're seeking information that may lead them or their team to enhance, refine, or alter the original design. It's wonderful. I think it could be said actually much, much simpler, which is just to say that, you know, like there's kind of two ways of going about holding a view. And I think one is this idea that I'm not gonna disconfirm. This is the, and this is the default approach. I'm not gonna disconfirm. I'm actually going to continue to look for things that, will basically plus this idea, will make this idea seem correct, will reinforce that this idea is the right idea, and I'm just gonna push this idea forward.

And the other way, which is I feel like I've experienced this working with incredibly talented creative people. I've experienced this working with some of the world's best founders. They have very strong opinions, but they're always looking for disconfirming data. When they're sharing an idea, they share an idea, and then they said, if you believe differently, please, they're always.

They're always asking for people to effectively argue them, debate them. You know, if someone disagrees with one of their points, they want to know what data that someone else might have that might disconfirm this or that might change this perspective or that might tweak it slightly and, you know, move it five degrees to the right or five degrees to the left. And so it's this idea of, you know, you have the confidence to have a point of view, you know, this reminds me of this idea, you know,

What strong opinion, strong ideas held loosely, you know, is I think a strong opinion is held loosely. And that's exactly it. And you can only do that when you're confident. And I think what's powerful about this is, you know, anytime you have a perspective and all you're trying to do is advance that, you know, you're certain to lose at a certain point in time. Because what that does not recognize is that the world is constantly changing and that there's, you know, by leaning into the perspectives and ideas of different people,

Daniel Scrivner (27:48.39)
You can gut check your own idea. It makes me think of Steve Jobs who once compared the creative process to this idea of a rock polisher. It's like the world's best people, they're always using a rock polisher to polish their own ideas. So they're sticking in this idea, they believe in it, but they're open to having it be shaped, questioned, changed completely. And then they're throwing in other people's ideas into this rock polisher and they're having the rocks hit into one another, shape one another. It's like that is what you do when you're confident, competent.

And you don't care about whether the idea is your own, you just care about being right. You care about recognizing reality and having the right perspective on what to do next and where to go next. I see this open-minded with a point of view mindset reflected in the way someone grips his or her investment ideas or strategies. Lower level investors are sometimes surprisingly definitive in the way they describe an investment opportunity. They have a too tight grip.

When my partners and I connected, one level three manager who was long a stock to a level four manager who was short it, the level three manager viewed the conversation primarily as a conversion to convert the short seller to his point of view. This is crazy. You've got someone on here that has a 180 degree different view and your goal is to try to convert them. You're gonna sell them. You're not gonna say, you know, and try to deeply understand why someone has such a different take on this stock than you do. It's crazy.

His evangelical approach to the conversation meant that he failed to elicit a number of important data points from the short seller. Even worse, he failed to take the opportunity to learn subtle elements of the other manager's research process that might be useful in his own short-oriented research in the future. Keeping score in dollars extracted from the market rather than whether a piece of analysis was correct. This is so important. Keeping score in terms of dollars extracted from the market. That's what winning looks like.

Rather than whether a piece of analysis was correct. That's meaningless, it doesn't matter. Is one of the most effective strategies for maintaining the optimal grip on your investment ideas. While any fixed identity may constrain someone's viewpoint, the identity of I'm great at making money allows greater flexibility than I'm smart and therefore I make money. Or I am an expert at investing in blank. That could be investing in financial stocks, investing in value stocks.

Daniel Scrivner (30:01.322)
What I love about this is it pushes back on this idea that you should be dogmatic and that you should have a narrow perspective on the world and that success is having, you know, scoping your perspective as narrowly as possible and then applying that to everything. I feel like what does that look like? That looks like viewing everything. You know, you have a hammer, you have one single tool and seeing everything as a nail. It's crazy. It's a crazy way to go about life.

Daniel Scrivner (30:30.658)
Then switch again to identify the moments in time when one factor is driving the entire market. And this sentence, the person that immediately comes to mind is Stanley Druckenmiller. I feel like Stan is a master at, he can just, I mean, honestly, it's hard pressed to find an interview where he's talking and he doesn't do a phenomenal job at being able to toggle. One, he's a master at this idea all the time as he's sharing his perspectives. He's talking about that he could be wrong. He's talking about that.

This might not be right, that this may be the wrong way to read the market. So he's always, he always is clearly showing that he has this, you know, open openness to having his ideas be modified and changed. But he's also constantly going between different lenses and different ways of looking at the world. Robert Greene notes that the master is observing not just the moves of the pieces on the chessboard, but the entire game involving the psychologies of the players, their strategies in real time, their past experiences influencing the present.

The comfort of the chairs they're sitting in, how their energies affect each other in a word, everything that comes into play all at once. Sometimes the ability to shift perspective involves an empathetic mindset. Paul Tudor Jones has described how in 1990, he was able to pull himself, put himself in the shoes of a typical Japanese fund manager under intense pressure to return at least 8% a year.

When the market corrected by 4% that January, Jones' empathy helped him realize that the fund managers would be risking their jobs to double down. He was thus able to predict correctly that they would shift to bonds and the stock market would continue to sell off. Level four investors relate to other market participants, their employees and their investors as chess pieces in a game of their own invention, a game that is for them. So this again, level four investors relate to other market participants, their employees and their investors as chess pieces in a game of their own invention, a game that is for them.

He also talks about the relationship to time. Level four investors display the full range of urgency and patience, of aggression and conservatism, of trying to make money now, but also knowing they will be investing for decades. They adapt their tempo to the pace of the market and decide how and whether to position themselves based on whether they quote unquote, see the ball at the moment, which again goes back to this idea that what's most important is seeing reality. That's seeing the ball. That's that's

Daniel Scrivner (32:53.138)
Recognizing whether you have a correct perspective, a realistic perspective, a rooted perspective in what's going on at the moment. You can gauge this orientation towards time by how an investor thinks of success. Is it primarily in terms of an internal rate of return or as a multiple of money? Analysts often begin with a multiple-of-money mindset. Success is doubling their money on investment over any time horizon, but skilled portfolio managers have it.

Have at times a sense of urgency. They wanna pull that time horizon forward as much as possible. And at times a sense of patience. They wanna wait to participate until the moment of sharpest appreciation or decline in a given security. An investor's relationship to time also influences how he or she views periods of recovery or quiet. Good investment managers come from a mindset reflecting the assumption that the manager will be investing for decades, but that investment activity is a series of sprints and recoveries rather than one extended marathon.

As Lennon once said, there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. The tempo of a strong investment culture is in sync with the reality of long periods of inactivity. Again, wonderful example of this, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. There is often a shared mood that the game is afoot, but not a rushed feeling to do something based on fear or greed. Then, when the moment is right, top investors are startlingly aggressive.

Talks also about the relationship to risk. Sometime an investor's vocabulary reflects a desire to expand what is possible around risk taking. Stan Druckenmiller said once, "'There's a phrase on Wall Street "'that I think is completely wrong. "'Bulls make money, bears make money, "'and pigs get slaughtered. "'It takes courage to be a pig, "'but you want to be a pig with discipline. "'Three or four times a year you have conviction "'and it is when your conviction is high "'that you have to bet big.'" Investing ultimately requires a nuanced relationship to fear and greed.

As investors mature, they can sometimes push those emotions into conscious awareness and manage them better. David Tepper notes, we're value-oriented and performance-based like a lot of funds, but I think what differentiates us is that we're not afraid of the downside of different situations when we've done the analysis. Some other people are very afraid of losing money, which keeps them from making money. In my experience, level four investors are more tolerant of risk than other market participants.

Daniel Scrivner (35:15.046)
This greater risk tolerance may come in part from the fact that level four investor does not view his identity as at risk in a given investment. And instead sees interacting with the market as an occasion for rapid feedback on his own development. Again, this goes back to this idea. You know, you're looking for disconfirming. You're looking for you're looking to put skin in the game and learn and you're open to learning and you're open to being wrong and you're open to deciding to double down. It's incredibly powerful.

Again, I'll just say that again, you know, the seas interacting with the markets as an occasion for rapid feedback on his own development. The philosopher Paul Tillich defines power as the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity and extensity. The level four investors I have met have an unusual intensity and see their interactions with the market to more fully realize themselves. They see it as a flywheel. They see it as a way to get data and to be able to shape themselves. This sense of equanimity and a certain fearlessness.

A form of wisdom that emanates from a level four investor is perhaps what the markets are recognizing as they hang on every word of David Tepper. So again, this was all about level four, which is the master, changing the game you play as part of your own self-expression and operating at scale. And now we're going to close by talking a little bit about level five. And you know, with each of these levels, well, some of these levels, somebody immediately springs to mind. And level five is all about being a steward.

And becoming a part of the game yourself. And really it's about basically making the full transition into now being able to mentor other people. So it goes all the way back to, because where were we at level one, you were someone who was apprenticing. You were someone who was looking for a mentor. And so what is level five? Well, you're now a steward. You're a steward of the game. You're a steward of your own game. And your job is to help other people be able to make their own progression.

And the person that immediately comes to mind, I've been doing a lot of reading and hoping to put together some incredible episodes about this person in the future, is Sam Zell. Sam Zell has sadly just passed away. I would say over the last five years, he has clearly been at this steward level. He has been sharing incredibly generously all of his ideas and his perspectives and conversations. And that is incredibly important. It's incredibly important to give back and to help those that are gonna come after you.

Daniel Scrivner (37:36.458)
Level five investors have achieved a mastery at investing in a level of financial success that allows them to turn some of their attention to taking care of the playing field itself. They may have preferred to keep a lower profile in earlier stages, but have since become willing to influence those outside their immediate orbit, including by acting as role models and mentoring younger players. They have begun exploring how they relate to the system itself and how their actions shape it. There are very few level five investors, but Warren Buffett is certainly among them.

Buffett has steadily increased his public presence over the last several decades, and he was even more present in the media than usual during the 2008 financial crisis. He regularly went on CNBC and Charlie Rose to try to calm market participants and encourage Congress to act on fiscal stimulus. Again, what is all of this? This is his way of giving back. So some of it is mentoring other people. Some of it is just acting as a steward for the entity that you're a part of, the game that you're a part of. And that's what Warren was doing here.

Daniel Scrivner (38:36.43)
Broad swath of the public in the hope of building support for congressional action. Look, the patient is undergoing cardiac arrest right now and the first thing we have to do is stabilize the patient. His authority had reached a level that allowed him to take responsibility for the system itself to assert our collective reality operating in an entirely different realm from the participant who preferred to remain at his desk shorting financial stocks.

Buffett has also waded into more philosophical, the more philosophical end of discussions of income distribution, offering an elegant parable that makes John Rawls' veil of ignorance accessible to financial market participants. Now this is so good. It's 24 hours before your birth and a genie appears. He tells you that you can set the rules for the world you're about to enter. Economic, social, political, the whole enchilada. Sounds great, right? What's the catch?

Before you enter the world, you will pick one ball from a barrel of 6.8 billion, which is the number of people on the planet. That ball will determine your gender, your race, nationality, natural abilities, and health, whether you were born rich or poor, sick or able-bodied, brilliant or below average, American or Zimbabwean. This is what I call the ovarian lottery. You're gonna get one ball out of here, and that is the most important thing that's ever going to happen to you in your life.

That's a good perspective to have when setting the rules for our world. We should be designing a society that doesn't leave behind someone who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well wired for this particular system. No matter what ball you got in the ovarian lottery, what card you were dealt, what game you were playing or think you're playing. I think it's useful even for those of us who aren't masters to occasionally zoom out for a bird's eye view of the playing field. And that was the playing field by Graham Duncan.

Which again, I just, I can't recommend enough. I've read it at least five times. I will come back to it many, many more times. And I highly encourage you to read the full thing. You can find it online at outlieracademy.com slash playing dash field. That's outlieracademy.com slash playing dash field. My copy is full of underlines and it's something I reread regularly. And I think now maybe five times, is it just that good? It's a fantastic reminder that we're all playing our own separate games.

Daniel Scrivner (40:51.19)
And that it's up to us to set, you know, one to realize that we're on an individual quest, to separate from the pack, to decide the game that we want to play, to take the multiple influences that we found and weave those together, you know, to become a sample size of one. Our goal is to become unique, singular. And so the entire goal here, and I think this is like, just even outside of any of the lessons and quotes and ideas that are in there, just this idea that is what mastery is about. It all starts off with very simplistic ideas.

Taking those ideas as far as we can, then moving to playing our own game. When we're starting to weave together these influences and then, you know, figuring out how to play those at scale and play those in a way that really matters, but it has an impact. And then five, you know, we were returning back to the beginning and it's now our job to pass this on. It's incredibly powerful to get my top 10 highlights from this post and every book letter and speech that I share here, sign up for my email list using the link below in the notes for this podcast.

Or simply visit outlieracademy.com. Thank you so much. Be back with more very soon.