In investing and business, everyone dreams of being early.
But the reality of being early is more difficult than it seems.
Being early is rare because every aspect of the experience runs counter to our deepest primordial urges.
Most challengingly, being early often means traversing prolonged seasons of intellectual and emotional loneliness:
- Intellectually, one must identify and connect disparate dots (that most don’t yet see) with little help or external validation from others.
- Emotionally, one must find comfort amidst the loneliness, uncertainty, and volatility that comes with being so early.
Few can summit this mountain of the self. The persistently-disorienting conditions cause most to lose the way and/or the will to keep going.
Being early (and staying early) requires world-class internal conditioning.
Specifically, one’s “early-ness” is a function of their ability to…
- Understand and coexist with one’s own primordial urges and tendencies
- Craft first-principals-based decision-making frameworks that are independent of these urges
- Foster the discipline to adhere to the signals they produce
— i.e., the more one improves their internal conditioning the earlier they’ll be. 🏔
