#52 - Learning Medley on Luck & Success from Maria Konnikova and David Epstein
July 27, 2020: Thinking through the relationship of management and business model in creating upside potential and downside protection for various businesses, Maria Konnikova’s fascinating career and skill/people in poker, and David Epstein on accumulating diverse experiences for a fulfilling career, questioning the ‘grit’ research and stories on what makes a successful comic book creator and Nintendo’s Gameboy story.
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Episode Notes:
Random Thoughts
Businesses where great management acts as downside protection (i.e. insurance and banking) vs. upside potential (i.e. software). While the industry/business model results in steady state outcomes vs. high rates of failures.
Maybe that explains why valuations for public software companies remains high. Given the barriers they would’ve had to overcome to get to that point
So if I wished to bet on the manager, should I look at businesses where management is the upside potential while the business model is the downside protection?
Odd Lots Podcast - How To Become a World Class Poker Player
Interview with Maria Konnikova: A career in journalism, writing, TV production and poker… whilst a PhD in psychology.
The “people” edge in playing live vs. online poker. Online poker is more advantageous to quants/left-brained who utilize ’solvers’ to try and gain certainty
~12% of winning hands in poker actually win. Such disparity creates an environment where skill plays a major factor.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-26/how-to-become-a-world-class-poker-player-podcast
Invest Like The Best - David Epstein – Wide or Deep?
Third listen to this podcast episode.
Dark Horse Project + Paul Graham Commencement Speech = People try to plan out their lives for the next 20 years. Like creating a map. That’s called pre-mature optimization in CS. In fact, the Harvard team found that the fulfilled careers were all seen as “odd”. They required constant exploration and having an ‘odd’ career may be a requirement to build a fulfilling one. Hence, short-term planning with a directional compass may be the best route. Iterate given opportunities. Given 18-29 is when we hit a psychological ‘finish’ point on who ‘we are’, one can say that we should explore as much as possible before 30 and only from that point on can we think about understanding who we might be.
“Grit” research is focused on achieving narrow outcomes. It’s not whether someone has it or not. Rather, people will achieve ‘grit’ if they are in the right place, doing the right things for who they are. I imagine this is much like flow. If this is the case, it's not important whether someone has grit. It’s important to help them figure out what they should be doing so as to cultivate grit.
Pulling out fascinating stories about Nintendo’s creation of the Game Boy (simple + tinkering wins) + The largest predictor of success for a comic book creator (its the number of genres they’ve created)