Thanks for the link. Although there were some points in the article where i was not sure he was being serious or sarcastic.
Just began reading the actual book Playing to Win (Its available free for online reading: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw ). It has already struck me as very intelligently written and insightful when you view its lessons as applying to life (at least the competitive aspects of it) rather some video game.
This is a killer idea! Looking forward to seeing where it goes... will be as helpful, if not more, than ERC has been for me while searching for answers.
Interesting how he says that extremely high IQ may even be a disadvantage:
And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that. At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess... Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
And that his big shtick is his focus, intuition, and domain expertise - not his IQ:
No. In terms of our playing skills we are not that far apart. There are many things I am better at than he is. And vice versa. Kasparov can calculate more alternatives, whereas my intuition is better. I immediately know how to rate a situation and what plan is necessary. I am clearly superior to him in that respect.
This makes sense in that IQ is a measure of general intellectual capacity at the concscious level, but the underlying raw processing power of the human brain is much much greater, we just usually lack the ability to apply it directly to problems—it's like a very high level programming language; whereas mathematical savants or intuition, in this case, can outperform much higher IQs by having a sort of unconscious ASIC under the hood, as it were.
I find it odd and funny that he considers a career in mathematics a distraction. He later says there's more in life than chess, but in this quote he doesn't seem to realize that.
I doubt I'd want to be world champion if it required giving up all those "distractions".
Sounds to me like he's speaking descriptively, not normatively. He doesn't say that Nunn shouldn't have gone down the path that he did; just that Nunn could have been world champion, if that had been all he'd focused on.
This reminds me of Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs and how it detailed his many eccentric habits and behaviors early on before starting Apple... how he never took showers while working at Atari, his odd dietary habits, his daily wardrobe, etc. But that's why he was able to "think different"...
"A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)"
I think things are a bit different in the age of the internet. Seeing into the private lives of others, their quirks and eccentricities, you might find that these traits are fairly common, and even desirable by certain sociocultural groups to be as 'odd' and 'quirky' as possible, as it seems to correlate with success and the capacity to think differently.
Self confidence, I agree is huge, but it can't be faked. It has to actually be known. Sometimes that seems to mean letting your mind go for a loop, coming back again, and realizing you can never know anything while also knowing something.
I just don't really think any of the side effects of being a percieved genius matter as much as the work actually done. Sometimes it means going against the crowd, sometimes it means going with.
That reminds me of the story of how Walt built Disneyland.
When he went around asking others what they thought, every single person said he was nuts and it would never work. That made him extremely excited - and more determined than ever - because he knew he was on the path of doing something truly different.
Maybe these are also the same qualities required to be a winning investor. Thinking clearly, loving the area that you're working in, and developing domain expertise.
He never had superior intelligence growing up, it's something he trained really hard for. And I actually read his books and audio CDs a few years ago, and competed in one of these memory championships myself. At the peak of my training, I was able to memorize a pack of cards in order in under 2 minutes.
"Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there." - http://paulgraham.com/love.html
- Angel investment in Facebook at 37, co-founded Palantir the same year
- Founder's Fund at age 38
Interesting that he's had all of his big wins starting in his 30s, that each success compounded into more successes and enabled him to go up to bat for even bigger wins, and that it's the result of 10+ years of hard work and intense focus.
Don't forget about Clarium Capital - at it's peak $8b under management - but then he made a series of bad bets on hyper-inflation in the dollar and got crushed. Anyone know if it is still open? I think he's clearly better at the private investing side than the public investing side.
> His hedge fund did get clobbered. Thiel’s peak-oil thesis did well by Clarium until mid-2008, as the price of oil soared from about $40 a barrel in 2002 to nearly $140. During that stretch the fund swelled in value from about $10 million to more than $6 billion as stock valuations skyrocketed and new investors flocked to his door.
> But by February 2009 oil prices had temporarily fallen back to almost $40 again. And though Thiel had foreseen the real estate bubble, he still underestimated it. “We didn’t fully believe our own theories about how bad things were,” he admits.
> Worse, he overreacted and missed the rebound, causing Clarium to badly underperform in 2009 and 2010. Most institutional investors fled. Today Clarium—with about $200 million under management—handles just the money of Thiel, friends and family, and a few select investors.
Yeah, with his experience I bet he has way more of an edge with private investing.
Good point, several mistakes and failures throughout his tech/investing career path too, like that $100K investment in Luke Nosek's startup that failed. It goes with taking risks and playing the game, only way to learn and level-up.
