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Perspective

How accurately do your perceptions map to another's perspective?

People interpret reality to fulfil their own narratives. Practice sitting in the shoes of the person opposite you. People mostly just want to belong and feel understood.

Capture data to broaden your perspective and deepen expertise. The more you know, the more you can see.

Mantra

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination - John Lennon

Value​

The value of gaining better perspective:

  1. Improved relationships: It can transform personal and professional relationships.
  2. Career advancement: It provides an edge in the workplace and can change your career trajectory.
  3. Conflict resolution: It helps in winning arguments and resolving disagreements.
  4. Enhanced understanding: It allows for a deeper comprehension of others' motivations and actions.
  5. Competitive advantage: It provides superior information and positioning in various situations.
  6. Personal growth: It broadens one's understanding of the world and different viewpoints.
  7. Effective communication: It enables more impactful and persuasive interactions.
  8. Strategic thinking: It enhances the ability to anticipate and influence others' actions.

Practice​

Detach emotionally to float above the scene to take in a broader picture.

From 10,000 feet observe the world with curious detachment to build up an objective picture of the situation.

  1. Shift from perception to perspective:
    • Perception is your unique interpretation of the world, while perspective involves observing the world from outside yourself.
    • Moving from perception to perspective gives you an informational advantage.
  2. Practice "sitting in someone else's shoes":
    • Try to understand what others' lives are like, their feelings, fears, and stressors.
    • This approach provides superior information and positioning.
  3. Apply perspective-taking broadly: Use this technique with your boss, spouse, children, and others to improve relationships and outcomes.
  4. Go beyond empathy:
    • While empathy focuses on understanding feelings, perspective encompasses both emotions and logical thinking.
    • Consider others' aspirational goals, life experiences, and future actions.
  5. Anticipate and influence actions: By understanding someone's perspective, you can better predict and potentially guide their actions.
  6. Foster connection and community:
    • Perspective-taking helps validate others' experiences and creates a sense of shared understanding.
    • This fulfils people's desire for connection and community.
  7. Practice presence and validation:
    • Acknowledge and be present with others, regardless of empathy or feelings.
    • This creates powerful, intimate connections in various contexts.
  8. Recognize the uniqueness of perspective: Most people are trapped in their own perceptions, so adopting a perspective-taking approach gives you a distinct advantage.

Spend time with more knowledgable others to review and objective vs subjective thinking patterns.

  • Objective: The world as it is, independent of personal feelings or opinions.
  • Subjective: Personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Nowcasting​

Leverage data to capture a better perspective of reality.

Be process-driven, targeted and differentiated in your research while embracing intellectual honesty and curiosity. Mastering the intersection of multiple disciplines and filtering signal from noise is key to generating unique, high-conviction insights.

Systems​

  • Source data directly from online retailers across various geographies to track prices in near real-time, ahead of official inflation prints.
  • Monitor daily electricity consumption as a gauge of real-time economic activity. Spikes in electricity usage can indicate something is happening in the economy even if the narrative suggests otherwise.
  • Develop automated nowcasting tools to track as many relevant time series as possible in real time, to pinpoint anomalies and strange moves in markets as they happen.

Discipline​

  • Admit when you are wrong to maintain transparency and trust with your customers / community.
  • Focus research on areas outside the US, such as Europe, China, Japan, to find tradable trends that are less-covered.
  • Develop a structured research process, but be willing to explore new topics by regularly meeting with experts outside your domain.
  • Keep a running list of research ideas and observations, connecting dots to generate insights. Writing is a powerful tool to structure thinking.
  • Simplify the expression of big macro views into single, high conviction trades rather than trading everything.
  • Read widely outside of finance, in areas like technology, science, history, to draw insights and develop a latticework of mental models.
  • Maintain a carefully curated Twitter feed to track sentiment, narratives and potential gaps in your own views.
  • Ruthlessly prioritize what data, assets and markets to monitor - only follow what you intend to trade based on your research process and edge.

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