[Bias alert: I am writing this post after having closed a substantial position in Tesla (TSLA) far too early, before its parabolic run.] Opportunity cost is arguably more psychologically painful for investors than steep drawdowns. Drawdowns generate collective pain for holders of an asset, whereas squandered opportunity cost plagues the investor’s psyche in isolation. Personally, greed is a far stronger emotion than fear. When I experience a gut-wrenching sell-off, I am initially fearful. Once the Read More

Great minds never tether themselves to absolutes. The opposite of thinking in absolutes is “quantum thought”: the ability to hold different, even contradictory ideas in one’s head without bias. Analogous to the quantum level, where subatomic entities display properties of both particle and wave, quantum thinking helps the individual navigate the endless flux between the finite and infinite—the underlying schema of most of life’s paradoxes. Our linear minds resist this type of being. We are Read More

Self-consciousness is the killer of flow. Squash it. It disrupts rhythm, cultivates inaction, and ultimately retards progress. While it serves a useful evolutionary function for our species (shame helps keep individuals aligned with the tribe’s best interests), self-consciousness is neurosis manifest. Our obsession with social signaling and appearance of self is loudened by social media; our brains can’t healthfully process this scale of attention far outreaching Dunbar’s number (150). Even the quantum level illustrates the Read More

When inspiration strikes, there is an increasingly small window of opportunity to optimally ideate. Once novelty begins to materialize and new connections are made, the non-linear emergent mind quickly begins its transition to top-down editorial-mindedness. It is as if an idea, once blanketed by blank stem-cells teeming with entropic randomness and possibility, is pruned, designated, and closed off. It is the transition from the flow-state to the default mode-network of the mind. Read More

Bitcoin is the perfect confluence of elusive, paradigm-shifting chaos and orderly, predictably-sound monetary policy. It’s a marriage of chaos and order, bursting at the seams of programmable possibility yet democratically distributed in the here and now. The protocol is bound by strict, immutable code save for consensus-arriving changes. Its database is transparent yet pseudonymous. Put simply, bitcoin is capped digital novelty: “bit” is the smallest unit of information in computer programming, and “coin” means create. Read More

Deadlines, despite their time-centric nature, help propel the individual into a state of timeless flow. Indeed, a research-driven hack to enter the flow state—the optimal state of consciousness where one feels and performs their best—is by setting a strict deadline, ideally with socially reinforced parameters (this last part leverages our own consistency bias¹: if you tell your family and friends that you are going to stop smoking, you are much more likely to follow through Read More