Meditations on investing
Alt: Meditations on conviction
Every investment is a story about time. A wager on what will matter later, and a quiet confession of what you’re willing to be wrong about now.
We speak of investing as if it’s a rational act.
As if judgment lives in spreadsheets, and clarity in consensus.
As if pattern recognition is wisdom and belief can be quantified.
But real investing, the kind that seems to bend reality towards its vision, not just track it, starts somewhere murkier. Deeper.
It starts with what you notice before others. With how long you’re willing to stand there, noticing. And with how much of yourself you’re willing to put at risk to act on it.
This inner landscape is where the real bets are made.
The Ontology of a Bet
To invest is to decide: This is how the future unfolds.
You may not say it outright, but the act speaks louder. Every allocation reveals a thesis on what behaviors will remain, what constraints will collapse, which mental models will outlast the cycle, which architecture the next layer of society will be built upon.
The cleaner the pitch, the less likely it’s early.
The deeper the bet, the more it reflects a kind of unprovable clarity. A truth felt before it can be demonstrated.
Investing, at its core, is not about finding what is true. It’s about recognizing what might become true and getting there before the crowd makes it obvious.
Instead of discovering how things might unfold, what if each investment is an intentional act of will that forges an entire ecosystem, bending the shape of tomorrow? That is the deeper alchemy of capital: not merely reading the world, but rewriting it. Without action, the world remains just an idea.But this act of rewriting demands more than just analysis; it requires a certain kind of presence.
Conviction is a Quiet Frequency
We worship at the altar of conviction. Yet real conviction is rarely ostentatious.
It doesn’t always come from proof. It often comes from presence — the ability to hold tension, the capacity to sit with ambiguity without collapsing into simplification. It's the patience to nurture potential, understanding that, like children, not all brilliance emerges on a predictable schedule.
Certainty breaks on contact with the unexpected. True edge grows elsewhere—in the space between knowing and not knowing. In the capacity to extract signal from noise without needing immediate resolution, seeing patterns before they've fully emerged while everyone else chases echoes. This is where alpha hides, not in loud declarations, but in a calibrated relationship with uncertainty.
Being early will feel like being alone. And being alone, if you’re not careful, will start to feel like being wrong. What survives is your relationship with that silence, and with yourself. This relationship is tested not just intellectually, but physiologically.
Your Nervous System is Your True Risk Profile
Markets aren’t efficient. They’re emotional. And your ability to navigate them isn’t just a function of intelligence; it’s a function of nervous system range.
Most missed investments aren’t due to lack of insight. They’re due to discomfort. With ambiguity. With unconventionality. With the absence of social proof.
You can’t see clearly if your body’s threat response reacts faster than your judgment. Tranquility, in this sense, is alpha. Yet, even with a calm nervous system, past experiences can still subtly shape our present judgments.
The Ghost in the Framework
Every investor thinks they’re rational. But every framework hides a ghost.
A missed deal you overcorrected for.A charismatic founder who betrayed your trust. An era you’re still secretly trying to redeem.
We think we’re building models. But often, we’re just managing unresolved memories.
The best investors are rarely the ones with the cleanest logic. They’re the ones who’ve metabolized their ghosts. Understanding these inner ghosts is crucial, but so is understanding the external dimension against which all bets play out: time.
Time is the Most Misunderstood Variable
You can raise more capital. You can hire better analysts. But you cannot fake time.
One of the greatest edges in investing is temporal control.
The ability to operate on a longer cycle. To stay patient when the market speeds up. To wait for the signal while others chase the noise. The quant fund seeks millisecond edges; the deep tech investor holds for a decade until the market understands.
To believe in something long enough for it to become obvious. Survival requires patience through inevitable struggles.
But what if time itself isn’t linear in markets at all? If mood, sentiment, and momentum can “bend” time, then each investment might exist in a warped field, where the future arrives abruptly, or the past lingers. Recognizing these subtle shifts—these temporal distortions—before they turn into full narrative collapses or expansions might be the true key to outlier returns.
Of course, mastering time is just one way to play.
There are Many Games
Not all investing is intuitive, contrarian, or slow.
Quant trading thrives on short-term signals. Tiger-style capital allocators maximize speed and scale. Benchmark wins with high conviction and few moves. Sequoia reinvents itself every decade. Each demands a different relationship with time and conviction.
None of these are wrong. And sometimes, consensus is right; the obvious move is the best one.
What matters is whether your behavior matches your chosen game.
Playing the wrong game is fatal. Long-horizon talk with short-horizon behavior. Contrarian posture with consensus psychology (or consensus posture while ignoring genuine edge). A desire to lead paired with fear of reputational risk.
Most blow-ups are not analytical errors. They’re identity errors. Avoiding these requires deep self-awareness. But sometimes, the most profound alignment involves transcending your old self entirely. Treat each commitment as a step toward self-transcendence, letting go of old biases with every new bet. When you stop clinging to what you were, you can adapt to what the market, and your intuition, might become. This adaptive capacity is essential, because the most transformative opportunities often defy existing categories.
The Anomaly Always Looks Off
The ideas that matter never look quite right.
They arrive too early. The creator’s energy is too much. The design is off. The story doesn’t fit any neat box. Think of the protocol that breaks existing mental models or the market insight that seems naive until it proves prescient.
But that slight discomfort is the point. Anomalies feel wrong until the frame catches up. While contrarianism for its own sake is dangerous, recognizing genuine anomalies requires looking beyond current consensus.
If you only back what makes sense now, you’ll never own what defines you later.
The "outsider advantage" isn't just naïveté. It's perception arbitrage. When expertise calcifies, those unburdened by the prevailing field's assumptions see what insiders have rationalized away.
This is why breakthroughs often come from the edges. From those who cross boundaries.
Their power isn't ignorance. It's freedom from the very frameworks that both illuminate and blind.
The most valuable insights live in the negative space of expert consensus. Not because experts lack intelligence. But because specialized knowledge creates specialized blindness. Beyond recognizing external anomalies, however, lies an internal one: the pull towards a specific vision or person, a resonance that transcends logic.
Falling in Love
Perhaps the deepest anomaly isn’t in the market or the model, but in the believer’s own heart. We speak of due diligence, of analysis, of rational conviction. Yet, whisper networks sometimes mention another force, closer to love. Not sentimentality, but a profound, almost cellular recognition.
It’s the inexplicable resonance with a founder’s vision, seeing their essence beyond the pitch deck. It’s the quiet certainty that transcends data, a willingness to champion something fragile precisely because you perceive its hidden strength. You see not just what is, but what could be, and feel an almost personal boundness to help bring it forth. It’s the feeling that this isn’t just an investment but your investment to make.
This resonance isn’t irrational; it’s trans-rational. It’s the edge that forms when deep pattern recognition meets unwavering belief. Like love, it commits beyond reason alone. It sees the potential like a lover sees the beloved – whole, flawed, yet undeniably vital. It’s the secret fuel for the conviction required to stand alone, believing, while the world catches up. Ultimately, engaging with these deep resonances reveals as much about ourselves as it does about the investment.
You’re Always Investing in Yourself
Every deal is a mirror.
Not just of your judgment — but of your attention, fears, and aspirational identity.
Your portfolio becomes a trace of your perceptual edge. Your omissions, a trace of your blind spots.
You’re not just allocating capital. You’re curating a worldview and testing it in public, with consequences.
And over enough cycles, your returns will reflect more than your skill.
They’ll reflect the quality of your perception under pressure.
Investing, in the end, is not just a science of capital, it’s a discipline of attention.
What do you see that others don’t? What can you hold that others can’t? And what future are you willing to underwrite — not just with money but time?
And obviously, this is a meditation on investing, but also everything else.