1/15 Two of my favorite people on Twitter ( @jposhaughnessy & @trengriffin) collaborated for a podcast episode, and it exceeded expectations. Here’s a thread on why this episode is brilliant: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tren-griffin-escaping-gravity/id1489171190?i=1000501196645

2/ When faced with the choice of following a mercenary or a missionary, choose the missionary because they’ll make it through to the other side. The mercenary will quit when the going gets tough.

3/ Whether it’s investing or anything else, you need to develop a baseline of knowledge and then a circle of competence built on top of it (more on this later).

4/ Via negativa: an important concept I learned from Taleb. Here, the conversation focused on having anti-role models. Knowing what you don’t want to do is just as important as knowing what you want to do.

5/ Write down what you believe. If I learned anything from @david_perell, it’s that writing helps the writer more than anyone else. Tren Griffin has done a lot of writing. In addition to several books, his 25iq blog is timeless wisdom. https://25iq.com 

6/ He can always return to these blog posts and share them on Twitter. Anytime he shares an article starting with “A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from...” I open it. Like he says in the podcast, writing is brave. It can be a book, blog, or tweet. It’s putting yourself out there.

7/ “The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards” -Arthur Koestler. Reminds me of how @mlombardiNFL detailed the scouting system that Belichick, with the help of Gil Brandt, put in place with the Cleveland Browns...

8/ Projecting a players role with a team and how quickly they’d get there seems obvious, but many teams didn’t do it then and still don’t now.

Risk is not the same as uncertainty. “Risk & Uncertainty” was my favorite course in college....

9/ Risk is drawing a red or blue ball out of a bag when you know exactly what’s in the bag. Uncertainty is when you don’t know what’s in the bag, and that’s what most of life is. If everything was risk, the house would always win.

10/ If you want to be a successful investor, get a circle of competence in something. Find one area and go deep, then when you’re an expert you can have the odds in your favor and make big bets.

That’s where base rates come into play. Base rates act like gravity...

11/ bringing everything down. The way to defy gravity is being better than everyone else. To do that you have to learn, and learning is a virtuous cycle. People came to Tren because of his love of learning, and then he learned more than those who came to him.

12/ When you’re becoming an expert, context is important. If you’re investing, ask yourself how many companies can you really know and beat the level of expertise that exists today? You can go to inefficient markets and clean up. Say you’re interested in sports analytics...

13/ For many reasons, baseball is years ahead of football when it comes to individual player analysis, in-game decision making, and many other areas. Or, as Munger tritely says, “go where the competition is dumb.”

14/ Getting back to the circle of competence, the most important takeaway I had from this podcast was that you have to understand many things to understand one thing well. In the context of this podcast, it’s investing, but that extends to many other domains.

15/ Both @trengriffin and @jposhaughnessy are on my list of highly recommended Twitter follows. In the same list I compiled the best podcasts, books, and blogs across many domains (leadership, health care, education, etc) that have sparked my curiosity. https://www.25hourideas.com/recommendations