Match Quality
The NBA executive turned venture capitalist, Sam Hinkie, was asked how he thought about shaping his career path. “The way I thought about it,” Hinkie said, “was: ‘Could you design a world where you get leverage on seeing around the bend a little bit…and where patience and temperament are rewarded?’” Those things mattered to him, he said, “because, by nature, I think in decades, and I have a steady temperament. So, Hinkie thought, “Can you get to a place where there is leverage on that kind of thinking, where that kind of steady temperament is rewarded?’”
Hinkie is describing what is known in economics as “match quality”—the degree of alignment between the traits of a profession and the traits of a person. Match quality—that is the theme of this SIX at 6…
Play To Your Anatomical Strengths
When the musicians John Mayer and Cory Wong got together to jam, Wong showed Mayer this new strumming angle he was working on. As someone who knows very little about the guitar, I can only describe what Wong played as “fast.” “Could you keep doing that all day?” Mayer asks. “You could keep doing that all day, right?” Yes, Wong says. “Amazing,” Mayer says. “Here’s what I want to talk about. I watched you play a bunch online.” As Mayer watched videos of Wong, he said, he watched Wong’s right hand—his strumming hand. “You have an anatomy thing working for you with your right hand,” Mayer said. “Your right hand is shaped in a way—you have long fingers, very sinewy hands—that allows you to play like that.” Wong’s anatomy and his playing style are completely aligned, Mayer says. “And I wish more players would embrace finding their strengths are anatomically—the way your hand is shaped, the way your mind works, etc.—and play to those strengths.”
Fit The Style To Who You Are
At an early age, Michael Burry became aware of some of his peculiar personality traits. In particular, his obsessiveness. “His mind had no temperate zone,” Michael Lewis writes in The Big Short. “He was either possessed by a subject or not interested in it at all…when it synced with his interests…[he had] unusual powers of concentration.” One subject that possessed Burry was the stock market. In grade school, he began to read about the market. Pretty quickly he learned about “value investing,” formalized by Benjamin Graham in the 1930s and made famous by Graham’s student, the richest investor in the world, Warren Buffett. Essentially, value investors search for mispriced or misunderstood companies to invest in at a discounted price. Or, they just try to copy Buffett. “The more Burry studied Buffett,” Lewis writes, “the less he thought Buffett could be copied.” To Burry, the lesson of Buffett was to match your investing style to your peculiar personality traits. “If you are going to be a great investor,” Burry said, “you have to fit the style to who you are…At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules.”
Be True To Your Interests
The music producer Rick Rubin is a voracious consumer of art. He’s constantly listening to music, reading a book, watching a movie, at a museum, or driving around just to look at beautiful architecture. “It’s all I do,” he told screenwriter Brian Koppelman. “But not because it’s my job. It’s like, my job is my job because the person that I am loves to do those things…I try to be as true to my interests as possible.”
Express Your Unique Character
Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy, quit playing chess around the age of 18. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,” Waitzkin explained. “My style was to create chaos on the chessboard, and my strength lay in finding hidden harmonies.” With this style, Waitzkin won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at the age of 11 and became an International Master at age 16. Then, Waitzkin got a coach who forced him to play like the world champions, Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” When he was forced to play a style that didn’t align with his natural proclivities, Waitzkin said, “I lost my love for the game.” So Waitzkin quit playing chess, and shortly after, he took up martial arts. He trained for just two years before he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said he leaned into his unique physical and mental traits. “And in my observation of competitors in any discipline, this a really fundamental idea,” he said. “Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.”
The Essence of Our Art
“It seems to me,” the puppeteer Jim Henson (The Muppets, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, etc.) said, “that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism”—whether you’re an NBA executive, a venture capitalist, a music producer, a guitar player, a value investor, a chess player, a martial artist, or a puppeteer.