Since the turn of the century, SaaS has been the Versailles of business - a golden palace where the SaaStocrats are entertained by courtesans singing of fat margins and dining on inbound recurring revenue. The masses pooled at the gates - covetous of the riches inside - are held back only by a gate ominously labeled “SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT” .

Overnight, the gate comes crashing to the ground. The masses surge forward like a scene from Dawn of The Dead. The palace guards, accustomed only to the cushy life of greeting incoming delegates, are swarmed - engulfed by the hungry mobs they were never trained to fight.

The barbarians are inside the palace, and SaaS will never be the same.

Capitalism’s beauty is found in its paradox - how does a system that explicitly encourages people to be as self interested as possible produce the largest aggregate good? In the context of our preceding dispatches, efficiency is an emergent behavior of capitalism - buyers and sellers alike enter the market each and every day trying to get the very best deal for themselves, and somehow out of this process arises the best possible deal for the greatest number of people.

If the above statement is shocking, it’s because the aggregate good is distinct as the highest good for every agent. The curve slopes up and to the right, but the curve is a weighted average of winners and losers.

For the first time, SaaS is about to find out how the other half lives.

In the subsequent two dispatches, we will go through the market shift through the lens of (1) supply side implications and (2) demand side implications, then take it micro and talk about operational implications for (a) organizations and (b) individuals inside of the ecosystem.

In poker, every hand starts with two players posting mandatory bets. These bets - known as blinds - give other players an incentive to enter the pot; after all, without any reward, there is no incentive to take risk.

When you play a tournament, a clock runs in the background. At pre-fixed intervals, the blinds go up. This escalating floor functions like a rising tide - players who previously had marginal chip stacks find themselves “shallow”, meaning they have very little room to maneuver on any given pot. At a certain inflection point the optimal strategy becomes “push or fold” - go all in or get out of the way. The shallower one finds oneself, the more “marginal” hands it makes sense to go all-in with - you simply don’t have another choice.

For years, SaaS has found itself incredibly deep-stacked with flat blinds.

The interesting take is not “SaaS is dead” or “this is the best time ever to buy SaaS”, but something much more nuanced and pernicious: If you’re in SaaS, the level of rigor and discipline that will be required to survive in this climate is literally unprecedented. AI has raised the blinds both dramatically and overnight.

If this doesn’t sound too intimidating, consider the following: For the majority of its existence, SaaS has seen zero existential threat. Sure, there have been a couple of momentary bear markets - but those have been macro in nature rather than categorical. For the most part SaaS’ precious margins have been protected by one thing and one thing only: Building software was expensive and difficult. What were you gonna do, hire a team of software engineers to build SalesForce internally?

Seemingly overnight, that all changed.

More than ever, software sellers find themselves having to defend against “why don’t we just build this internally?”

Much of the debate in the “SaaS - Dead Or Alive?” discourse has focused on whether it’s feasible to “vibe code” something internally - those who trumpet the demise of for-profit say YAY, while software bulls say NAY.

The answer is...it doesn’t really matter. Here’s why:

When buyers pit you against “build it internally”, they’re running a cost-benefit analysis - which means you’ve got two vectors of counter-attack:

1. Convince them that you can generate additional benefit - dubious given that they think they can build the same thing internally and that largely people think sales people are full of shit.

2. Lower your price to tip the cost-benefit scale back in your favor - way easier to do when sales people just want to close deals to get managers off their back and between closing something and nothing they’d rather pick something

Which do you think is going to happen?

We will discuss the downstream implications of this tomorrow.

CN

Ask any executive what the purpose of their sales team is, and they’ll likely scoff like you just asked what color the sky is: The answer will be some variation of “producing revenue”.

Duh, right?

Not so fast.

“The purpose of the system is what it does” is a pithy quote from legendary cyberneticist Stafford Beer that deserves unpacking:

An expensive car, nominally, is a system designed for the purposes of getting you from point A to point B (presumably in style). In reality, if this expensive car spends more time in the shop than it does on the road, then the real purpose of said-expensive car is to consume attention and resources to be maintained.

A friend who tells you how important you are to them is the nominal model of a system that places great importance in the value of friendships, but if every time you reach out to them they put you off or ignore you, then the real purpose of the system is to make you feel important without having to actually perform the functions a good friend would.

The punchline is this: When a system has a stated purpose and it diverges from its actual purpose, the latter is the product of the system, and thus proof positive of what the system actually is “for”

Take a sales team that indexes heavily on booking meetings - “we just need MORE. MEETINGS.” the sales task master berates week after week. The team will go out and book meetings, alright, but whether those meetings lead to revenue or not (the nominal purpose of the system) is quite another story.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a list of things I’ve seen reps do when their jobs are threatened lest they “book more meetings”:

1. Send a calendar invite to somebody they reach on the phone who says “circle back with me in a few months” and then brag in Slack about the fact that they booked a meeting.

2. Send a calendar invite to somebody who they reach on the phone who says “yeah this is not for me”

3. Beg people at conferences to book meetings, even after the person confirms that they are, in absolutely no uncertain terms, completely uninterested in what is being sold

4. Offer people gift cards or consumer electronics in order to take meetings

The purpose of the system is what it does - not what you want it to do.

CN

Ask 100 different founders what “culture” means, and you’ll get 100 different answers.

Level 1 Culture (L1) - is identifiable by a naive belief in the ability of top-down, prescriptive fiat to shape the actions and outcomes of the agents within an organization. If the following has ever happened in your company, your leadership has L1 beliefs:

(1) Founder gets team together and announces “here is a list of our values” like Moses bringing down the stone tablets from Mount Sinai.
(2) Team takes turns reading the values out loud while everybody else pantomimes contemplation by nodding with furrowed brows
(3) ????
(4) CULTURE!

You all leave high-fiving about your “great culture”, but when it comes time to get to work...nobody has any idea what the pretty board slides actually mean.

Level 2 Culture (L2) - The next step comes by bridging between intention and action. Ben Horowitz summarizes with succinct clarity: “What you do is who you are.” Level 2 Culture takes the platitudes from L1 and ties them to concrete action - “Nobody outworks us” becomes “Reps are required to log 200 dials a week”. In the absence of a strong L2 culture, people will interpret L1 differently, which also means leadership will enforce differently.

Level 3 Culture (L3) - L3 is where things get really interesting. Where L1 declares “say it and it is so”, L2 says “do it and it is so”, L3 says “what have L1 and L2 together actually produced, what variables might we be leaving out of this model, and how is the outcome feeding back to the inputs?”

A few additional axioms:

1. Your organization will have a culture - you cannot avoid this

2. Your organization’s culture will be some dynamic combination of L1 fiat, L2 execution and the interaction of the individual agents and teams doing the interpretation of L1 and 2.

3. All of the above are dynamic variables that work on each other in unpredictable ways that will always be in flux.

L3 recognizes that culture is an emergent behavior - a complex, shifting reality that comes from rational, self interested agents interacting and interpreting both written and unwritten rules to maximize their individual utility.

The implication: Culture takes on a life of its own. And once the feedback loop gets going...functions like an inorganic, sentient intelligence that shapes the very agents seeking to shape it

We’ve asked “how do we control culture?” for so long that we forget to ask “how does culture control us?”

If this sounds disturbing, that’s because it is. Future long form articles will dive in to how to formally model emergent behavior inside of commercial organisms.

CN

After you read this post, two things are going to happen:

1. You’re going to stop leaking your sales team’s playbooks to LinkedIn in exchange for clout from people who don’t care about you

2. You’re going to stop paying attention to the carnival barkers who make this Faustian bargain (because you’ll understand what must be true for them to do it in the first place).

Let’s begin.

As a commercial operative in the 21st century, you are a participant in the most hyper-competitive attention economy of all time.

Your buyers are inundated by attempts to hook and solicit their attention from the moment they open their eyes until they inevitably pass out in a delirious haze of over saturation. By definition, the vast majority of these attempts must fail.

Ipso facto, your buyers have categorized these ad widgets with the same label: “Not Worth My Time”.

It also follows that if you have an effective outreach strategy - which is to say, one that stands out enough to draw the fleeting attentions of exhausted buyers - what you are doing is necessarily a deviation from the above, and represents the exception rather than the rule.

The second you open your big mouth on LinkedIn, however, you expedite the reversal of this advantageous dislocation. In exchange for some happy brain juice Internet points, you cede your alpha and hand it on a silver platter to the teeming masses, who between the pressures of quota attainment and recurring bills will happily take your (soon to be “in”)effective strategy and crowd its effectiveness into oblivion.

“Don’t hand children dynamite” as Christian Retek would say.

Let us turn our attention now to the carnival barkers AKA the “Sales Entertainers”.

Having left the arena years ago (during the bull market....with few to no receipts...) The Sales Entertainer enters the bazaar - sales playbooks in hand with the spirit of a chef who’s Monday “Catch Of The Day” becomes Thursday’s “Soup and Salad Lunch Special”.

The question to spot three-day-old halibut: “If this playbook is so good, why are you dumping it on the market rather than deploying it yourself?”

Follow these two rules and you’ll do just fine:

(1) Keep your playbooks to yourself.

(2) Stay away from the playbooks being offered to you - unless you want prospects responding to your DM with “what’s that smell?”

CN

You’ve clicked in to this email to answer a single question: “What the hell is Black Horizon and when did I subscribe to it?”

The statistical answer:

• 70% of you signed up for “The GTM Operators Club”. Most of you are in the B2B sales space, probably as an individual contributor, and are here because Joey Gilkey and Tony Brophy recommended you subscribe (shout out to the fellas)

• 30% of you signed up for “The Convexity Report”. Most of you are here because John Doe of the absolutely first-rate Collapse Intelligence Agency recommended us (alongside Dr. Michael Burry and Cassandra Unchained, no less)

In the beginning of Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs awakens alone, hundreds of years removed from everything he knows, to a world he doesn’t recognize. He looks in to the mirror, desperate for an anchor to what was, and instead finds a stranger staring back.

Tak is faced with an existential nightmare: Who he is and who he is are fundamentally unreconcilable - he runs into people for the first time who know “him” and their reactions create a hyperstitious feedback loop. The only way out is to let go - and embracing the paradox becomes the very means of its resolution.

Seeing our name alongside Michael Burry’s is a signal we simply cannot ignore any longer.

The forward thesis is as follows: In spite of the oceans of capital and “think pieces” from “experts”, GTM engines at the early stage start-up level remain primitive, linear and predatory systems that destroy far more economic value than they create. For a lot who espouse the importance of being “contrarian”, founders, investors and operators alike cluster around a shockingly vapid set of principles that progressively erode trust between buyers and sellers - a reality conveniently ignored so long as the agents involved can be its beneficiaries before the whole ecosystem comes crashing down. Carnival barkers on LinkedIn work backwards from outcomes and construct self-serving narratives on the how - either too epistemically ignorant or too exploitive to care - so long as they can make a few bucks while Rome burns to the ground.

We spend so much time blathering about creating “scalable revenue engines” that we forget to ask the inverse question - How do the very things our hands shape in return mold us? And how does that endless recursion play out in the emergent behavior of commercial organisms?

Black Horizon answers that question.

One dispatch a day. Every day.

I’ll see you on the inside.

CN

We Are A Product Of Our Time (And Our Time A Product Of Us)

Each generation has memories of mundane moments that define an era.

In an all-too-human twist, we tend to be entirely unaware of how fleeting those moments are. The technologies that define our time, as all technologies are, live on borrowed time - doomed to a lesser or greater extent to be supplanted by the alternatives of the future.

One year my family went on a summer road trip to the Grand Canyon. To a 7 year old with an overly active imagination, our drive from Las Vegas through the arid and desolate expanse of Nevada followed in the footsteps of the pioneers and rebels in my books who settled the West.

We would pile in to the car, where my mother would produce a critical sacrament: An actual, physical paper map.

As soon as I heard the paper crinkle, I would miraculously wake from my nap, my head appearing between the front seats as my father deliberated from the driver’s seat while my mother fussed with the map to get it to lay right.

Like three explorers in a strange land, we would identify a nearby local landmark, tracing possible routes to our destination and debating the merits and drawbacks of each. “No,” my father would give a firm shake of his head as I proposed my route, “we’ll run straight into traffic going that way. Check this out,” he’d suggest his alternative, which would trigger another debate amongst the group. At some point, we’d reach consensus on the best course of action and be on our way.

This experience - one I’m sure is by no means unique to me or my family - has been supplanted entirely by the advent of Google Maps. What we’ve gained in convenience we’ve lost in the skill to read a paper map and debate the merits of route choices.

This example is a microcosm of the trade-offs that define our time: It’s so easy to be spoon fed answers now that our ability to ask the right questions and investigate has atrophied. Increasingly, we have become a people who fail to make the distinction between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Unfortunately, this is a bias built into human biology, and one fostered by the political and societal institutions that surround us. We are a society that pays lip service to the importance of the individual, but at the same time expect our individuals to acquiesce around the existing beliefs of the collective.

What follows is a deeply personal exploration of building that critical thinking muscle by following the wise injunction of Richard Feynman: “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

Enter The Education System

It’s a hilarious, ironic and sad fact that the number one threat to critical thinking in modern society is the education system.

Like all institutions, schools are comprised of people who act in response to incentives, and in a feature all too common of centralized decision making, policies that are superficially well-meaning distort incentives in such a way as to undermine the intent of the policy.

Programs like No Child Left Behind (2001) and the Every Student Succeeds act (2015) made schools formally accountable for the success of student performance. 20-50% of a teacher’s performance rating stems from standardized test scores, with poor performance ratings resulting in career stagnation, getting transferred, or getting laid off. Schools with poor test results risk loss of funding, state intervention, or even closure.

Under such constraints, it’s no surprise what’s happened: Because stakes are high, curricula get narrowed to tested subjects (reading, math), often at the expense of critical thinking, creativity, or non-tested areas (arts, civics). Empirical studies (e.g., Dee & Jacob 2011; Koretz 2017) show measurable score gains on tested material, but not in broader critical reasoning or long-term retention.

The end result is a perversion and destruction of what it actually means to learn. Unlike the School of Athens, where thinkers wrestled with first principles and asked questions so fundamental they bordered on madness, our modern education system looks less like a symposium of inquiry and more like a factory. It engineers compliance, rewards rote regurgitation, and punishes divergence.

Consider Euclid. This man sat down in 300 BC and asked, almost certainly to the bewilderment of all: What even is a point? Not a rock, not a star, not a tree — just the idea of a point. From that wild act of abstraction, he declared: If two points exist, then the line between them exists, too. From there, he conjured geometry out of thin air. That was audacious, heretical, world-making thought.

Education Of A Free Thinker

In 2022, I picked up a copy of Victor Niederhoffer’s Education Of A Speculator. Unlike the litany of trading-specific books on the market, EOAS takes a different track: “Zero practical applications to trading or investing,” one Amazon review reads. “Tangential - when will he get to the point?” Says another. Rather than a prescriptive “how to” on trading, Vic imparts wisdom via Dem Umweg - “the roundabout way” - taking his readers through a personal process of developing universal axioms formulated through living and reflecting upon a rigorous life.

Vic spoke to a spark inside of me that had all but died a decade earlier at the hands of derision from the very serious professors of economics at a “prestigious” institution of higher learning, who viewed learning as rote memorization divorced entirely from reality.

Equal parts Zen koan, statistics paper and autobiography, EOAS embodies the Miyamoto Musashi quote: “If you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything.”

Let’s talk about how you, too, can become acquainted with The Way.

The Niederhoffer Six - An Experimental Framework

What the myopic Amazon reviewers seeking a silver bullet missed was that EOAS is fundamentally fractal in nature: The narrative structure reveals exactly what one must do to find The Way.

“A speculator must think for himself [and] follow his own connections,” Vic advises, “self-trust is the foundation of successful effort. Don’t follow the mentally lazy habit of allowing a newspaper or broker or a wise friend to do [your] security market thinking.”

Chapter after chapter of Education Of A Speculator laid out the same playbook in different applications:

1. Range Widely

Do interesting things across many domains. Let curiosity surface questions — even if they seem ridiculous, trivial, or obvious at first glance.

2. Collect Evidence

Gather and clean the data you need to explore those questions.

3. Build Capability

Learn (or borrow) the skills required to analyze the data properly.

4. Think Originally

Reflect on your findings and generate conclusions that are yours, not inherited.

5. Put Skin In The Game

Test your ideas in the real world. Take it to the next level and go _à la Niederhoffer_ - i.e., with extreme leverage and the ever-present risk of blowing yourself sky-high. They say the best way to learn about a hot stove is touching it, right?

6. Loop Back

Repeat the process endlessly: curiosity → data → skill → thought → test → curiosity again.

Let’s dive deeper into each of these principles.

1. Range Widely:

Victor Niederhoffer is a man that defies pigeon holing: National squash champion, trader, board game enthusiast, musician, art collector, writer...the list goes on and on.

How does the orthodoxy usually respond to such proclivities? You’ve probably heard the most common one: The jack of all trades is the master of none. You have to focus.

This injunction is a lie born of the Industrial Revolution. In a world where Adam Smith’s model of specialization has won out as a means of maximizing economic production, axiomatic “truths” are often merely a reflection of the role we are meant to play: Cogs in a machine that are optimized to take the fewest possible inputs to generate the largest output - what is called efficiency.

And yet we forget that it’s not efficiency - the predictable relationship between inputs and outputs - that categorize the genesis of era-defining technologies, but rather the happy accidents and chance stumbling-upon of the intellectually curious at play:

Stop asking yourself what “the point” of learning something is. If your heart calls to it, do it. Reject the tenets of a system that cares only for your ability to operate within its confines to produce more of what the world already has. The world needs you. It needs you to experience, to love, to reflect, to write, and in the process to derive your own truths from the intersection of what calls to your heart.

You are too unique, too interesting and too beautiful to let anybody put you in a box when you were meant to nurture a garden.

2. Collect Evidence

As you’re following your heart’s calling, your brain will naturally chime in - “I wonder if that’s true”, “I wonder if there’s any relationship between this and that” - all the greatest things in life start with “I wonder...”. Let it be your guide

Your brain will be your greatest ally at this stage but also your greatest enemy - resist the urge to pre-judge any of the data you gather. Niederhoffer counted everything - snowfall data in Central Park, number of filler words used by a representative of the Federal Reserve, the correlation of headline sizes with stock price movements - nothing lay beyond his capacity for counting. The truth lies at the heart of the paradox - if you knew why you were collecting the data, you wouldn’t need to collect it to begin with.

Regardless of what you want to know, there’s probably a public database you can access to pull the data you want, and unlike Vic, who had to use pen and paper, the litany of tools available for low to no cost today make intellectual explorations more engaging than ever. This leads us to step 3....

3. Build Capability

The advent of LLMs have made developing proficiency in your tool of choice a breeze.

Up until recently, self-paced learning was largely unidirectional: You’d go to a resource - whether that was a book, course or guide - and cross your fingers that the way the information was presented jived with your preexisting mental models. If not, you were pretty much screwed - no ability to say “explain that to me like I’m in the 4th grade” or “When you use [THIS TERM] my understanding of it is:....how accurate is that understanding and what would you challenge or build on?”

This feedback loop is one of the most joyous applications of LLMs there is. Rather than simply knowing the names of things, you can truly understand them.

And rather than learning in a vacuum - having completed steps 1 and 2 - you have two of the most important pre-requisites necessary to improve your information retention as well as your engagement: A why and a what

Reject consumption and embrace the tools of our era to enhance your capabilities and create your own world. Instead of spending an afternoon scrolling your phone in front of a TV show you’re not even watching - jump into Excel and run a model looking for the relationship between how two things you care about relate to each other. Earn the right to your opinions and stop letting media controlled by people with an agenda tell you what to think. Hunt down the raw data that is necessary to form an intelligent conclusion and hammer away at it like a blacksmith until you have something you’re proud of and can explain with something besides “the man on the TV said so”

We stagnate and ultimately die as a species when we stop asking questions and simply accept the answers that already are. What would our world today look like if Gutenberg conceded that copying books by hand was really quite therapeutic, or Edison had decided that candles smelled nice and offered sufficient illumination?

The tools to help you unearth your truth are out there. Seize them.

4. Think Originally

Armed with the results from step 3 , WRITE!

Resist the urge to jump straight to conclusions: Write about what led you to ask the question, write how you sourced the information to seek an answer, and the delta between what you expected/actually found.

Writing is not merely a mechanism to convey information but also a mechanism to work through your thoughts and clarify them. Like a muscle, the more you work it, the stronger it gets, and the more benefit you get. Most people never ask ”do I really believe that?”

Writing forces you to confront that question, and in the process become a more effective critical thinker.

If you’ve spent years in school, you will have a proclivity to judge the quality of your writing. Even if there were an objective definition for “good” writing (which there isn’t), such considerations put the cart before the horse: You can’t be good before you’re ok, and you can’t be ok before you suck. Rip the bandaid off. The sooner you swallow your pride, the sooner you reap the benefits of proficiency.

5. Put Skin In The Game and Bet

This section was originally called “Optionally, Bet” before I realized that skin in the game is not an optional component of the Niederhoffer Six.

Part of what tethers us to answers that already exist is a tendency toward risk-aversion and defaulting to the herd mentality.

In the nascent years of our species, disagreement was a death sentence - among our competitive advantages in the dominance hierarchy was an ability to cooperate and leverage social intelligence. Consequently, anybody who was uncooperative or fought the tribe was likely exiled or died in a heroic but valiant 1 v 1 with a sabretooth tiger.

But as we’ve reached the top of the dominance hierarchy (...for now...) and ascended Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, risking disagreement is no longer the death sentence that it once was - though physiologically it will still feel like it.

If you want to think original thoughts, this proclivity is one that must be broken, and the only way out is through. Put your findings in the public sphere and embrace the possibility that people might disagree with you.

This step forces you to in the words of Justin Bieber, really stand on business when it comes to what you’ve learned.

What you’ll find is that most people really don’t care enough to disagree, and you’ll actually attract your tribe (see Jung quote above)

Optional: Massively lever up and bet on foreign bank stocks amidst a banking crisis and lose 35 years of gains. Just kidding. (although you’ll definitely learn a thing or two)

6. Loop Back

Having completed steps 1-5, you are a different person.

And being a different person means looking at the world a different way - which makes it a different world.

Nietzsche’s “Three Metamorphoses” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes the spiritual journey of self-overcoming through three stages:

- the Camel, which embodies the spirit that carries heavy burdens and conforms to external values;

- the Lion, which symbolizes the rebellious spirit that says “no” to these values and seeks freedom;

- the Child, the ultimate goal, representing a new beginning, creativity, innocence, and the ability to create one’s own values and will a new world.

Every time you go through the Niederhoffer Six, you undergo these three metamorphoses over and over. Embrace the growth.

CONCLUSION

In a world that’s so willing to tell you the names of things and what to think, it’s rare to find resources on telling you how to learn what you think.

Follow the Niederhoffer Six and you will blaze your own trail.

In the next article, we’ll be using the Niederhoffer Six to examine a topic where everybody seems to have names but no understanding: Bitcoin.

"Is this a sales call?"

It sure is, Bill.

And since I can already tell how indignant you are that a sales person is interrupting your precious Monday morning…

I’m gonna switch gears.

Let’s begin.

The phone you used to answer this call? Apple spends $775 million per year on advertising and marketing efforts to make sure you have that gleaming device in your pocket when you need it. Someone sold you on the idea that you deserved the latest iPhone, and thank God they did, because now you can FaceTime your grandkids, navigate unfamiliar cities, and capture every meaningful moment of your life.

Your carrier? Verizon invested roughly 3.85 billion U.S. dollars in advertising in 2023 to build the network infrastructure that lets you stream Netflix during your lunch break, work remotely, and stay connected to everything that matters to you. Someone convinced executives to invest hundreds of billions in cell towers so you could have 5G everywhere you go.

The earbuds pumping your favorite playlist directly into your brain? AirPods generated $10 billion in revenue for Apple in 2024 because someone understood that music should be seamless, wireless, and beautiful. They sold you on the future where tangled headphone cords became a distant memory.

Come on, now, Bill.

But let's not start this call off on the wrong foot. What did you do on your 26.8-minute commute to work today?

You know, the one that starts with you getting into your car—$742 a month, right? That's the average monthly payment in 2024, but think about what you're really buying: climate-controlled comfort, safety systems that prevent accidents, entertainment systems that make traffic bearable, and the freedom to go anywhere, anytime. Someone sold your grandfather on the crazy idea that every family should own multiple cars. Thank them.

Then you put on that podcast, streamed effortlessly through Spotify's $1.6 billion content investment. Someone convinced comedians, intellectuals, and storytellers that millions of people would pay to hear their thoughts during morning commutes. Now you have access to more knowledge, entertainment, and perspectives than any human in history—delivered for the cost of lunch.

Next stop: Dunkin' Donuts for your morning fuel. That $5.49 medium iced coffee represents a global supply chain spanning three continents, sophisticated logistics, climate-controlled storage, and skilled baristas—all orchestrated so you can get premium coffee exactly how you like it, exactly when you need it, in under three minutes. Someone sold the world on the idea that great coffee should be convenient and consistent.

During that 26.8-minute commute, you encountered approximately 73 messages about products and services designed to solve problems you didn't even know you had. That's not manipulation—that's innovation discovery. Every billboard, every radio spot, every app notification represents someone who believes they've built something that could improve your life.

So yes, Bill, this is a sales call.

But let me tell you something: Everything that makes your life possible is.

Here's what we've created together, Bill: The most incredible consumer paradise in human history.

You wake up to an alarm that syncs across devices, check weather that's predicted with satellite precision, brew coffee from beans sourced globally, stream music from artists worldwide, drive vehicles safer than anything royalty owned a century ago, and carry in your pocket more computing power than NASA used to reach the moon.

You think this all happened by accident?

Every convenience, every pleasure, every solution to life's daily friction exists because someone, somewhere, looked at a problem and said: "I can fix that. And people will pay me to fix it."

• Your smartphone connects you to humanity's accumulated knowledge

• Your car transforms distance from barrier to choice

• Your coffee shop provides a third space between home and work

• Your streaming services deliver entertainment precisely calibrated to your taste

This isn't exploitation - it's the greatest collaborative achievement in human history. Millions of people, across thousands of companies, working to make your ordinary Monday extraordinary.

Let me tell you a quick story, Bill.

I was at the arcade with my buddy Peyton on Saturday. He’s 8. We come across this Star Wars VR game: Vader Immortal. Lightsabers, fighting bad guys, using the force, riding speeder bikes…all the good stuff.

Anyway, point is - I’m going on and on about how great this game is gonna be. Peyton’s just looking at me and I can tell something isn’t right - he’s nodding like I’m saying all the right things but when I lift the headset for him to take, the kid ain’t moving.

His eyes are darting all over the arcade - you know how arcades are, Bill - they might as well be Time’s Square when you’re 8; kids screaming, machines going off, some god awful top 40 playlist making sure you can’t even hear yourself think.

Finally I ask him - “hey, what’s wrong?”

And you know what the kid says to me, Bill? Looks me dead in the face and goes “Charles, what happens if I fail?”

You know what this really is, Bill?

Every successful salesperson you encounter is someone who reminds you that "What happens if I fail?" wasn’t a good enough reason to not try.

They're people who:

• Pick up the phone to call strangers knowing most calls end in "no"

• Believe in their solutions enough to face daily rejection

• Understand that someone saying "no" isn't a personal attack

• Recognize that every "no" gets them closer to the right "yes"

I know you’ve got a wordy rebuttal handy, Bill - but I’ll save us both the time and call your whining what it really is: You’re too afraid of rejection and too uncertain of what you have to offer to ever put yourself out there and risk hearing no. And every sales call reminds you of that.

Which is why when somebody gives you a call and says “Yes, I’m here to sell you something”, they become the villain of your story. Your very safe, very comfortable, very entitled story. You’re a Dostoevsky character with a mortgage and too many subscription payments.

So the next time someone calls you with an opportunity, remember: They’re participating in the same system that built everything you value about modern life.

They're the people who said "yes" to risk when you said "no" to possibility.

You don't have to buy what they're selling. Heck, you’ve put me off working with you anyway - hard pass. But the least you could do is appreciate the fact that sales people are willing to do the job that makes your consumer paradise possible.

Without us, Bill, you'd still be growing your own food, making your own clothes, and walking everywhere you needed to go.

Everything else? That's the result of someone making a call.

And being brave enough to risk failure for the chance to create something better.

So yeah, Bill. This is a sales call.

You’re welcome.

A coin lands heads 5 times in a row

What’s your best guess on how it will next land?

If you said “heads”, you might be a trend follower.

If you said “tails”, you might be a mean reverter.

In both cases…you’d be right.

In both cases…you’d be wrong.

To make our point - let’s take a journey to a parallel reality - one in which two of the most famous investors - George Soros and Victor Niederhoffer - start a bar together.

Welcome To The Quantum Saloon

Despair

It’s 4:00 PM on a Friday afternoon, and The Quantum Saloon is all but deserted.

“Don’t worry, George” warbles a thin voice from beneath an oversized bucket hat at the end of the bar. “Statistically speaking, this place is bound to fill up eventually.” Victor Niederhoffer slurps his margarita loudly as if to prove a point, drawing a glance from the mildly irked bartender who had been deeply engrossed in his phone.

“Victor…you do not understand,” his sullen Hungarian partner scowls “we are badly positioned in this market. The emptiness of our establishment begets more emptiness. My great niece was right: Foosball tables are So. Out.” Soros punctuates these last two words with frustrated slaps to the bar top. A group of waitresses gathered at a nearby high top folding napkins with the efficiency of the salaried killing time snicker.

“Excuse me dudes, do you guys, like, have happy hour?”

The room goes silent as all eyes snap to the front door. A conference lanyard identifies the wanderer as “CHAD - REGIONAL ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE, SYNTHESIS CORP”, whose friendly grin is fading by the moment as the motley crew before him exchanges furtive glances.

A burp breaks the terseness.

“We do now.” Victor Niederhoffer smirks as he pushes away a now-empty margarita glass.

CHAD’s eyes continue to wander, reflecting the silent mental calculus of a man making a decision. Finally, he turns his back on the group, seemingly concluding that greener pastures are elsewhere. Soros takes a step forward, hand outstretched and mouth beginning to open in protest. He is halted by a clasp of the shoulder by Niederhoffer, who points to the evolving scene.

A sea of CHADs begins to funnel through the saloon doors - CHAD is joined by THAD, who fist bumps BRAD and BRIXTON as he brushes his way past the very confused Soros.

”Tequila SHOTS!” Shouts a Patagonia-clad BRAYDEN, stepping out of the pack like SaaS Achilles leading a charge of the Myrmidons. A murmur of assent rises from the group, which has now rapidly outnumbered the staff. The bartender, having discovered an application for his phone that isn’t Tik Tok, throws on “Summer House Mix”.

“Told you.” Niederhoffer elbows Soros in the ribs just as THAD lifts his shotglass - shouting something to the group about “Synthesis To The Moon”

Euphoria

By 8:30 PM, The Quantum Bar & Grill is the place to be. TYLER, a "Growth Marketer", gets on LinkedIn Live to broadcast his whereabouts to "his peeps", an exercise which Soros observes involves many peace sign gesticulations and the repeated phrase "crushing it." TYLER's phone is angled to capture both his face and the packed bar behind him, ensuring his 847 LinkedIn connections understand that he is, indeed, where the action is.

"What's good, LinkedIn fam! Your boy TYLER coming at you live from The Quantum - and let me tell you, this place is absolutely fire right now!" He pivots the camera to show BRAYDEN attempting to balance three tequila shots on his forehead while THAD provides color commentary. "The energy here is just... chef's kiss... immaculate vibes only!"

Niederhoffer, now on his fourth margarita, leans over to Soros. "You see? This is peak euphoria. Classic distribution pattern."

But Soros isn't listening. He's watching TYLER's livestream metrics in real-time as hearts and fire emojis cascade across the screen. Seventeen people have already asked for the address in the comments.

By 9:15 PM, those seventeen people have arrived, each clutching their phones like digital divining rods, following the algorithmic breadcrumbs that led them here. MADISON, a "Brand Strategist" with 23K TikTok followers, immediately begins documenting her "authentic bar experience" with a series of carefully curated Stories. Her caption reads: "Sometimes you just need to disconnect and be present ✨ #mindfulness #authentic #livingmybestlife" - posted, naturally, from her phone.

"Do you guys have anything with adaptogens?" asks HUNTER, whose LinkedIn bio lists him as a "Wellness Thought Leader & Disruptor." The bartender, whose name tag reads "Steve" but who has been internally referring to himself as "The Last Sane Person in This Building," simply points to the beer taps.

Soros nudges Niederhoffer. "Notice how each arrival validates the next arrival. The social proof creates its own momentum. FOMO becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"But look at the fundamentals!" Niederhoffer protests, gesturing wildly with his glass. "The drinks are overpriced! The music is too loud! The bathrooms have a line! This is clearly unsustainable!"

As if summoned by his words, PRESTON - whose business card lists him as "Chief Happiness Officer" at a company that definitely didn't exist six months ago - begins leading the crowd in what appears to be a spontaneous rendition of "Sweet Caroline." The "BAH BAH BAH" echoes off the walls with the enthusiasm of people who have forgotten they have jobs to return to in the morning.

Decline

By 10:30 PM, the scene has reached fever pitch. SKYLAR, a "Content Creator" with 342 LinkedIn connections (but 340 of them are recruiters), is attempting to interview random patrons about their "entrepreneurial journey" while livestreaming to her seven viewers, three of whom are her mom using different accounts.

The bartender - Steve, the Last Sane Person - has given up all pretense of maintaining order. He's now simply opening bottles and pointing in the general direction of whoever has money, occasionally pausing to wonder how his economics degree led him to this moment of witnessing late-stage capitalism's bachelor party.

"This," Soros declares, watching CHAD attempt to explain blockchain to a potted plant, "is how bubbles form. Not through rational analysis, but through collective delusion masquerading as collective wisdom."

Niederhoffer nods sagely, then immediately contradicts himself: “Statistically speaking, George, this has to end soon. I mean, look at CHAD - he's literally talking to vegetation. This is clearly the top."

Destruction

By 11:47 PM, something shifts. It's subtle at first—the kind of change that Niederhoffer, despite four margaritas, notices immediately. PRESTON, the Chief Happiness Officer, is no longer leading sing-alongs. Instead, he's squinting at his phone, calculating Uber surge pricing with the focused intensity of a day trader watching volatility.

"4.7x surge," he mutters to BRAYDEN, who responds with the first rational thought he's had all evening: "Dude, that's like... expensive."

Niederhoffer elbows Soros, a victorious gleam in his eye. "Watch this, George. The marginal utility of staying is about to intersect with the exponentially increasing cost of leaving. Basic economics, my friend."

TYLER, the Growth Marketer, ends his LinkedIn Live abruptly. "Alright LinkedIn fam, this has been absolutely incredible, but your boy's got an early morning grind session!" What he doesn't mention is that his phone battery died three minutes ago, cutting off his connection to the validation he came here to harvest. Without the digital dopamine feedback loop, the bar suddenly feels... like just a bar.

"I think I'm gonna head out," SKYLAR announces to no one in particular. But in the hyperconnected social ecosystem of The Quantum Bar & Grill, every departure is a public statement. THAD, overhearing, suddenly remembers he has a "core workout" at 6 AM. MADISON realizes her "authentic bar experience" has generated enough content for the next three days.

The exodus begins exactly as Soros predicted it would—with reflexivity working in reverse.

"It's fascinating," Soros observes, watching BRAYDEN suddenly discover that his credit card has been declined. "The same social proof that created the crowd now accelerates its dissolution. Each departure validates the next person's decision to leave."

By 12:30 AM, the carefully curated crowd has thinned to a manageable level. The waitresses, who had been performing their Bolshoi Ballet routine for hours, now stand around looking confused, like dancers whose music has suddenly stopped. Steve the Bartender allows himself a brief moment of relief before realizing he now has to clean up after what appears to have been a small, localized hurricane of human ambition.

"The fundamentals," Niederhoffer says with deep satisfaction, "always reassert themselves."

CHAD—the original CHAD, the one who started it all—finds himself in the surreal position of being back where he began: in a nearly empty bar, wondering if he should stay or go. The irony is not lost on him, though he lacks the economic vocabulary to articulate it. He's experiencing mean reversion in real-time, watching the social event he helped create dissolve back into the statistical average from which it emerged.

By 1:15 AM, even PRESTON has surrendered to economic reality. The Chief Happiness Officer looks genuinely unhappy as he splits a $67 Uber with three people he met two hours ago and already can't remember.

At 1:30 AM, The Quantum Saloon has returned to its original state. The same stools. The same dim lighting. The same Steve behind the bar, now methodically cleaning glasses with the thousand-yard stare of someone who has witnessed the complete life cycle of a social bubble.

Niederhoffer drains his final margarita with the satisfaction of a man vindicated. "You see, George? The trend always reverts to the mean. Always. The only question is timing."

Soros nods slowly, but his expression is thoughtful rather than defeated. "Yes, Victor. But notice what happened in between. For three hours, this was the most valuable real estate in the city. Everyone wanted to be here. The trend created genuine value—temporarily."

"Temporarily!" Niederhoffer emphasizes. "That's exactly my point!"

"But," Soros continues, "the people who recognized the trend early and left before the reversal—they captured real value. TYLER probably gained fifty LinkedIn connections. MADISON has content for a week. SKYLAR..." He pauses. "Well, perhaps not SKYLAR."

Steve the Bartender, overhearing this exchange while stacking chairs, interjects with the weary wisdom of someone who works for tips: "You guys want to know the truth? This happens every few months. Different people, same pattern. The bar gets 'discovered,' it gets packed, then everyone moves on to the next place. The only people who profit are the ones who work here and the ones who leave early."

Niederhoffer and Soros exchange glances. In the silence that follows, they both realize they've learned something profound about markets, human nature, and the eternal dance between trend and reversion.

The last customer—a confused-looking guy in a conference lanyard who wandered in just as everyone else was leaving—approaches the bar. His name tag reads "DEREK - Marketing Automation Specialist."

"Excuse me," DEREK says hopefully, "do you guys do Sunday Brunch?"

A blog called “The Convexity Report” without a post explaining convexity seems strangely incomplete.

Today, we will begin to remedy this oversight by surveying the first of several topics that will serve as the foundation for future posts:

• Convexity vs. Concavity vs. Robustness

• Mean Reversion vs. Trend Following

• Power laws and asymmetry

• Expected value - quantifying decisions

Fundamentally, what we’re examining is non-linearity.

Why and how is it that some small inputs generate massive outcomes, while others barely move the needle?

What are the inexorable patterns of The Universe that seem to govern large dynamic systems - from ecology, to physics, to economics - until just as suddenly…they don’t?

Archimedes once famously said “give me a lever long enough and fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world”.

“The Convexity Report” is both a celebration of the lever and the fulcrum. May it inspire you and equip you with the tools necessary to move your world.

Bad News: We Know Almost Nothing About Anything

Fundamentally, systems are a mechanism by which inputs - in the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld: “known”, “unknown” and “unknown unknown” alike - produce outputs.

Enter: Humans.

Humans tend to take a look at the visible inputs, the visible outputs, and construct highly linear narratives explaining the workings of the system that usually bear little resemblance to what “actually” happened.

And any time you hear the word “because” - you can rest assured knowing that this fallacy has almost certainly occurred.

The bathtub fills because you turned the tap.

The vending machine dispenses a soda because you stuck a quarter in the slot.

The stock market is up today because of a statement made by the Recognized Central Banking Authority.

Your company grew top-line revenue this year because of the tireless work of your sales team and the ingenuity of your executives (ok, ok, I’ll stop)

Evolutionarily, the bias makes total sense: Decision making is only possible in the face of certainty, and certainty is only possible in the face of gross and deliberate oversimplification.

You’d probably never enjoy a bath again if your brain went through every single step of what actually had to happen - from the mechanics and history of plumbing to the origin and construction of the specific infrastructure in your home.

Go back and look at the predictive track record of nearly any financial analyst and you’ll find a veritable graveyard of painstaking research - tens of thousands of hours of “research” that ends up being total gibberish bearing no resemblance to what actually ends up happening.

It’s pretty hard to galvanize hundreds of employees and justify massive executive salaries with a rousing speech about how your entire organization is levered beta with expensive commercial real estate and a kombucha bar.

For the most part, things happen around us and we construct a hindsight-heavy “good enough” narrative about the inevitability of the events that transpired, high-five each other, and move on.

At some point we all must confront that what we “know” is dwarfed by the enormity of what we don’t know, which is a mere footnote in the infinite cosmos of what we don’t know we don’t know.

Ironically, none of this is doom and gloom. And if you read it as such then get ready to take the Red Pill.

Good News: We Know Almost Nothing About Anything

What if I told you that you don’t have to know anything to lead a happy, successful and prosperous life?

Even better, what if I told you that you didn’t have to pretend to know anything to lead a happy, successful and prosperous life?

Open your eyes, Neo.

Let’s begin.

Convexity vs. Concavity vs. Robustness

Ironically, we will have to commit the very sin of oversimplification discussed in the prior section in order to build an actionable operating system. In poker, we call this a “toy game”: By simplifying some assumptions, we knowingly trade off sophistication for clarity. The trick is to make the decision consciously, rather than fool yourself into thinking the world is as simple as your assumptions.

Let’s examine three types of systems you likely see in your day to day life and some general guidelines on how to behave within them.

Robustness

This is the linear world of predictable cause-and-effect relationships. Robust systems exhibit proportional responses: doubling the input results in a doubling of the output. Think of a savings account earning interest, or a manufacturing line where each additional worker produces a predictable increase in output.

Robust systems are characterized by:

• Predictable scaling: More effort reliably yields proportionally more results

• Limited downside: Losses are bounded and proportional to inputs

• Limited upside: Gains are also bounded and proportional to inputs

• Stability: Small changes produce small, predictable outcomes

The trade-off? Robust systems offer safety and predictability, but they cap your potential. You'll never lose everything, but you'll also never experience exponential gains.

Convexity

Convexity is a property of non-linear systems that exhibit asymmetric payoffs favoring the upside. In convex systems, you benefit more from positive changes than you suffer from equivalent negative changes.

Think of a startup equity position: If the company fails, you lose your investment (limited downside), but if it succeeds, your returns can be 10x, 100x, or 1000x your initial investment (unlimited upside). The key insight is that convex bets have capped downside and unlimited upside.

Other examples of convexity:

• Buying Options: You can only lose the premium paid, but gains are theoretically unlimited

• Learning a new skill: The time invested is fixed, but the long-term benefits compound exponentially

• Network effects: Each new user makes the platform more valuable for all existing users

• Venture capital: Most investments fail (limited loss), but a few generate massive returns that more than compensate

Convex positions love volatility and uncertainty. The more unpredictable the environment, the more likely you are to capture asymmetric upside.

Concavity

Concavity represents the opposite: asymmetric payoffs favoring the downside. In concave systems, you suffer more from negative changes than you benefit from equivalent positive changes.

Consider selling insurance or running a traditional bank: Most of the time, you collect steady premiums or interest spreads (limited upside), but occasionally you face catastrophic losses that can wipe out years of profits (unlimited downside) - Warren Buffett describes this as “picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer”.

For more on how even really smart people can get caught by this trap, Google “Long Term Capital Management”

Examples of concavity:

• Short selling: Limited upside (stock can only go to zero), unlimited downside (stock can rise infinitely)

• Leverage without hedging: Small market moves against you can trigger margin calls and force liquidation

• Reputation-dependent businesses: Years of building trust can be destroyed by a single scandal

• Performance bonuses tied to avoiding losses: You get modest rewards for meeting targets, but severe penalties for missing them

Concave positions hate volatility. The more unpredictable the environment, the more likely you are to get blindsided by asymmetric downside.

The Strategic Framework

The key insight is recognizing which type of system you're operating within and positioning yourself accordingly:

In robust systems: Focus on consistency, efficiency, and steady execution. Optimize for predictable, sustainable growth.

In convex systems: Embrace uncertainty, take calculated risks, and position for asymmetric upside. Think like a venture capitalist: make many small bets knowing most will fail, but the winners will more than compensate.

In concave systems: Either avoid them entirely or hedge extensively. If you must operate in concave environments, minimize exposure and exit quickly when things start moving against you.

Conclusion

The universe doesn't operate on our linear narratives. It's a complex adaptive system where small inputs can trigger massive outputs, where cause and effect are separated by time and space, and where the most important variables are often invisible until it's too late.

But here's the silver lining: You don't need to understand the system to benefit from it. You just need to position yourself to capture convexity while avoiding concavity.

This is why Nassim Taleb advocates for "antifragility" – not just surviving uncertainty, but thriving because of it. VCs can’t predict which specific startups will succeed; but they can make enough bets that the winners (hopefully) cover the losers.

Your job isn't to predict the future. Still, you can raise the probability of enjoying it if you can put yourself in a position where small inputs can generate massive outputs, where you benefit more from being right than you suffer from being wrong, and where time and uncertainty work in your favor rather than against you.

In a world of unknown unknowns, convexity isn't just a mathematical concept – it's a philosophy of thriving in uncertainty.

Welcome to The Convexity Report, and may the asymmetries be ever in your favor.

“Before every game, say the following: I can defend myself from my opponent, but who will defend me from myself?” - Tom Wiswell, “The Education Of A Speculator” (Niederhoffer)

Poker and sales are both games of incomplete information. Whether it’s facing an all-in on the river from an opponent that’s checked their way through a hand or figuring out how to respond to a sudden aggressive discount demand from a prospect that’s previously been cooperative and interested, poker pros and sales reps alike are balancing what they know, what they don’t, and the complete unknown to make an educated guess about how to proceed.

In both domains, participants make the best decision they can with the information available to them, and at no point do they have the luxury of acting on 100% complete information.

It turns out the felt has a lot to teach about sales (and not in that goofy “here’s what my dog coming home with a dead squirrel taught me about B2B sales” way)

Here are three rookie mistakes in poker—and how they map surprisingly well to similar errors in running a sales process.

Playing too many hands

One of the first things you learn as a poker player is that you’re probably playing too many hands.

After all, nobody’s sitting down at a table not to play, and it can be hard to resist playing marginal hands, particularly when it feels like you’ve been folding all night.

Worse, any one overplayed hand may not cost you, but viewed in aggregate, overplaying junk quickly becomes a significant leak in your game.

Spending time with unqualified prospects is the same. It’s easy enough, particularly when your pipeline is light, to shrug your shoulders, say “it’s just 30 minutes,” and run a demo to an unqualified prospect - just like playing a weak hand, it’s easy enough to justify in a vacuum - but do that enough times, and before you know it, you’re spending your days following up with and chasing “deals” that are anything but.

In both cases, the direct costs are small enough to justify, but the real pain is in the indirect costs: Every dollar bled from overplaying small hands is a dollar that can’t be allocated to a strong bet. Every hour spent following up with people who will never buy from you is an hour not spent following up with people who will.

The answer in both cases is the same: Know your strike zone, protect it, and when in doubt, ditch the marginal hands.

Not playing hands aggressively enough

Spend enough time with a poker player, and the word “solver” will inevitably come up.

“Solvers” are the calculators of the poker world - computational engines that run through every possible situation or “line” and tell you what to do in any given situation.

You’re on the button, and highjack raises? It turns out that you should 3-bet with about 9% of your range, call with 3.5%, and fold the rest.

Curiously, the correct answer here in most cases is to either put up or shut up: Simply calling puts you in a purely reactive state. Any decent player who raises first in from late position will do so with a wide variety of hands, ranging from suited connectors to pocket pairs to substantial broadway holdings, and absent challenging the strength of their hand with a re-raise it’s impossible to put your opponent on a range and see how serious they are.

In the same way that passivity doesn’t pay off in poker, continuing to send meek “just checking in” emails is the kiss of death for any deal cycle - you learn nothing, the process drags on and on, and the deal eventually dies anyway. Take a page out of Chris Voss’ book: “Have you given up on this?”. “Go for no” isn’t a new concept, but reps often are too afraid of rocking the boat and losing a deal.

Sticking with shitty hands for too long

As the incomparable Justin Middleton is apt to say: “Hope is not a strategy.”

Unfortunately, humans tend to a pernicious combination of confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy.

“Well, I already paid my blind..might as well pay to see the flop” we rationalize while looking down at 92o - doubtless replaying the memory of that one time 5 years ago we flopped a full house when the flop hit 992 while conveniently forgetting the 600 big blinds we lost in the same amount of time playing shitty hands.

The flop comes, and we brick it—villain bets.

“Well…it’s only a few dollars to see the turn. Maybe I’ll hit there…”

It’s a tale as old as time, but we call them classics for a reason.

“I know their team is a little bit small…But I already met with them, they seem interested, and we worked with that other similar company, and it was great,” we tell our skeptical VP.

The best time to make a good decision is the first time you’re given the choice.

The second best time is the second.

Don’t let having made a shitty decision before stand in the way of making a good decision now.

Conclusion

Games of incomplete information are fascinating domains for exploring probabilistic thinking.

In most cases, we’re forced to confront the truth that we’re not as rational, as disciplined, or as consistent as we fancy ourselves, and games hold up an objective mirror that allows us to become better versions of ourselves.

As far as generalizable axioms for life, it’s hard to beat what we’ve discussed today:

Be selective in your participation.

Once you decide you’re in, act with strength and conviction.

If you realize you’ve made a mistake, it’s never too late to get out.

When I ask you about what your "greatest gift is", what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Most answer from the ego: "What makes me more noteworthy or accomplished than other people?" or "What do other people know me for/tell me I'm really good at?"

In this article, I propose that this traditional way of evaluating "gifts" lacks nuance, and as a byproduct implies a limiting belief that is the source of much insecurity, anxiety and suffering. Worse, it blinds people to the TRUE gift that they were born with - and like God's love - they can NEVER lose, except by choosing not to embrace.

I spent many years locked into the same mindset before realizing that I had it all wrong - and the realization I had has since changed my life forever. I hope it does the same for you.

Embracing Your Powers For Good

We'll start today with a reflection on the very questions that I proposed in the introduction: "What makes me more noteworthy or accomplished than other people?" or "What do other people know me for/tell me I'm really good at?"

If you're like a lot of people, just vocalizing that question will come with a panoply of feelings - many of them negative. It's not uncommon to reflexively feel guilty, anxious or distressed by this question, and I invite you to sit with those feelings, whatever they may be, and ask yourself: Why might I be feeling that way?

One answer might be that society has conditioned us to believe that downplaying our gifts is a virtue, a behavior that is positively labelled "modesty". We carry within us ideas that are not ours, but accumulated from others as a byproduct of living, and these beliefs invoke emotional responses, which left unchallenged solidify into a self-fulfilling prophesy of "truth".

I am inviting you today to challenge the passive emotional reactions you've inherited from your upbringing, society and the people around you to take up the axe of introspection to swing at your consciousness and uncover your unknown unknowns.

What you find may shock you.

Applying Some Logic

If you feel guilty or shameful at the possibility of being "better" than others in a specific domain, then by definition you're associating that fact with the idea that acknowledging or demonstrating a developed aptitude is "wrong" in some capacity.

After all, there is no reason to feel guilty or shameful if you're not doing something wrong, is there?

One possible explanation for this is that being talented draws attention to other people's "lack" of talent.

"Be humble", we hear, or "nobody likes a show-off". If we deconstruct the underlying logic to these axioms, we find them wanting: Is skill a zero sum game? I.E: If I am skilled in something, does that necessarily mean you are not? Does it mean I am tapping a finite resource by which I deny your doing the same? No, of course not.

Another is that demonstrating your skillset is necessarily a mechanism to serve the self or the ego. To be sure, this CAN and DOES happen, but is hubris a NECESSARY CONDITION of skill?

I'm sure you can point to plenty of people with considerable talents who you would consider extraordinarily humble, and by the converse several with no discernible aptitudes at all who display a great deal of hubris.

It is fair, then, to conclude that the two are not mutually inclusive, and that talent does not beget hubris.

Following this logical chain, we conclude that the mere possession of talents and gifts should not be a source of guilt or shame, but rather that the fork in the road lies in our fundamental motivations FOR leveraging our talents and gifts.

Tied all together, we have the following proposition:

Being humble and reserved about your talents and gifts is only a virtue if you believe that showcasing them is a mechanism to elevate yourself above others.

If you use your talents and gifts a means to raise others up and serve them, humility is not only NOT virtuous, but actually a vice - for it denies others the ability to benefit from or be inspired by your talents

Thus, perhaps the guilt and shame we associate with having a stand-out skill set is not possession of the skillset in and of itself, but rather the fact that we hoard those skills for self promotion rather than to exercise the "true gift", which is to spread the word of God not through our rhetoric, but by enriching the lives of those around us with our unique talents.

I invite you to consider that it's precisely this fundamental misunderstanding that leads us to spend so many years of our lives hiding away our precious light, either wrestling with the limiting belief that doing so makes us responsible for feelings of inadequacy in others or guilt associated with being special.

And yet we are missing something to this whole discussion: We can sit around and debate definitions all day, but when it comes down to it the most dearly held knowledge is first-personal in nature. Here's my story of coming to this realization for myself - which I share with you so that you may look back across your own life and connect the dots.

My Story

For as long as I can remember, music was an important part of my world.

Some of my earliest memories involve hearing my mother thundering away on a Steinway grand, her fingers a vortex flying up and down the ivory keys with machine-like precision and filling the air with the sounds of Schumann, Beethoven and Bach. At my grandparents' house, I would sit at the top of the stairs reading while my grandma taught her vocal lessons, peeking my head around the banister and making funny faces to distract students in the middle of a particularly challenging aria and then retreating just in time before "The Professor", as my grandmother was known, would launch into a tirade about the importance of focus and preparation.

Around this time, we moved to Southern California, and it was here that I was exposed to contemporary American culture - at the time, VH1 and MTV competed for cultural supremacy, and Green Day's "American Idiot" had just hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Music videos by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hoobastank and Linkin Park ruled the air waves in between episodes of Punk'd and Jackass, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater occupied every other moment I wasn't outside terrorizing the neighborhood on a skateboard. Thousands of miles away from my piano teacher and against this cultural backdrop, J.S Bach and Beethoven didn't stand a chance, and my great epiphany was that if I wanted to impress girls with music, the electric guitar would be the best way to do it.

Shortly thereafter, we moved back to Thailand, and with my school over an hour each way from our home, I found it difficult to integrate with classmates who all lived within walking or biking distance. The guitar was there for me, and the next couple years were spent not with my peers, but locked in my bedroom developing my alternate picking to the insistent click of a metronome and devouring Hot Licks instructional videos and monthly issues of Guitar Techniques.

So it was only natural that when I showed up for high school, a boarding school in the idyllic Housatonic Valley in Southern Connecticut, surrounded by recruited athletes, the children of celebrities and oligarchs, that I would lean into the guitar even more. As all young teens do, I sought to carve out my niche and my space, and I retreated further into the identity I had spent the last couple of years creating so single-mindedly: I played the guitar really fast.

My skills stagnated as I "practiced" only what I was already good at, refusing to acknowledge, much less confront the idea that there were things I could not yet do.

When I wasn't alienating bandmates, friends and audiences alike, I also played the bass - an instrument which I perceived as a "lesser" guitar.

To a developing prefrontal cortex, the math checked out: The bass had 2 fewer strings, bass players had "fewer" solos and "nobody thought" the bass was cool. Sure, I got looped into playing the guitar's "lesser cousin" across a variety of applications: Big band, jazz combo, rock groups, even classical double bass in an orchestra - but I resented "being in the backseat" and inevitably found ways to excuse myself from contributing to some very cool musical projects. In my youthful indiscretion, I decided that if I couldn't have as large a percentage of the pie as possible then it wasn't worth having at all.

After I graduated high school and found other paths for external validation, my relationship with music waned, and it would be over a decade before I would play in a band again. God sends His signs at exactly the right time, and when our church's bass player left, I heard the news with polite but detached interest. Thankfully, God also sends heralds, and upon hearing the same news my wife immediately insisted we go to Guitar Center and - over my reflexive protests - that we not leave until we had picked out a bass.

Months later, I've continued to cultivate the joy of supporting others. Through this example, I invite you to take a look at how you can apply your own gifts in service of others, and in the process discover how beautiful and rewarding contribution to something greater than yourself is.

Here’s three simple axioms you can abide by to do the same:

1. Serve Progressively -Encouragement and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Service is part of an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off activity and it's important that you meet people where they are. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a powerful reference framework for this and helps diagnose where so many well-intentioned sales people go wrong.

Pastor Hal Oakley relates the concept of "encouragement", which he notes comes from the Old French word "encouragier", which is a combination of "en" - "to put in" and "courage" - "courage/heart".

If you're playing with another musician for the first time, the "safety" of the song is the only thing that matters. In the same way that picking out kitchen counters for a house before the foundation is built puts the cart before the horse, pitching somebody on a product or service that will "radically transform" their business before they feel comfortable even talking to you is unlikely to yield positive outcomes for either party. Put your needs aside, start small with the right intention in your heart and be patient - you serve people on their timeline, not yours.

2. Be "The Glue"

The bass bridges the sonic space between guitar and drums. Being a good bass player requires intently listening to what the drums are doing and being the bridge over which those efforts flow into the other instruments and the song at large.

Doing this effectively requires putting the self completely aside and engaging in deep, active listening - often at a level that surpasses that of the person you're listening to. Success means the gratifying experience of force multiplier on the overall quality of the music being produced, and you'll know you've done it right when you mirror back something another musician does and they look up at you and beam with gratitude. Maya Angelou's words are fitting here: "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

To paraphrase David C. Baker, most people are inside the jar trying to read the label. Be their eyes on the outside.

The future customers you wish to serve are deeply involved in their day to day workflow. They're not just on the inside of the jar trying to read the label, they've forgotten entirely that they're inside the jar to begin with. Help them begin to see the jar and enable them to step beyond it by equipping them with the insight to excel in their role. Seneca said it best: "While we teach, we learn". Break down current events and industry reports into sizable chunks using The Feynman Technique.

Be their eyes and ears by running competitive analyses of their business against their competitors and identifying gaps that if resolved will improve their competitive standing.

IMPORTANT: These gaps should be identified EVEN IF your solution does NOT resolve them. If they do...great, but a simple litmus test is as follows: Will the insight you share make your prospect look like a hero in their next 1:1 with their boss or peers? Too many sellers reach out with lazy, self-interested garbage: "Just touching base" - why?

Think deeply about the people in your network and what connections would be greater than the sum of its parts. The moment you want more than anything else for the people around you to win is the moment you will have everything you ever wanted.

3. Break "The Rules" (If "The Rules" deny you the ability to serve)

"I've never had a bass player move around the fretboard as much as you do", my band director said during an early rehearsal.

Our worship band is a smaller acoustic ensemble, and while listening deeply to audit the sonic gaps, it was apparent that there was a lack of mid-range melody and counterpoint - the guitars predominantly stuck to open chord shapes, and in the absence of an instrument playing single note melodies, the instrumental sections lacked differentiation from verses and choruses

Most bass players have a self-limiting belief that their job is to "stick to the low end" - typically manifesting itself in uninspired, thoughtless playing, simply mirroring the root note of the chords the guitar players are playing. That may make sense when there's a lot of dense instrumentation, but thoughtlessly following "rules" does all involved a disservice, and often originates from a place of fear.

Note the distinction I make here - intention is everything - if the situation doesn't call for doing so, breaking the rules for its own sake is an exercise in ego: This is where self-reflection is critical - Why are you REALLY doing what you're doing?

Sales people unknowingly fall into this all the time - agonizing over the false dilemma of whether they need to be using "phone, LinkedIn or email" to reach prospects just because that's how most people do it.

If you know you can contribute and serve but you're holding back because "that's not how it's usually done" or "that's somebody else's job", then you are depriving the world of your gifts and talents. Realize that a fear of being different is most likely grounded in a fear of rejection, and come to terms with the possibility by knowing that your message is too important not to share. Don't know where to start? Check out Dale Dupree and the Sales Rebellion.

As you take this bold leap into the unknown, equip yourself for the journey with the wisdom of Townsend Wardlaw by taking up Self-Trust as your sword and Faith as your shield.

Self-Trust: Knowing that the answers are within you, and that even in uncertainty, you are capable of navigating the unknown

Faith: Knowing that you're exactly where you're supposed to be, regardless of the situation at hand

Conclusion

Your greatest gift is not any of the skills or aptitudes you've cultivated, but rather the ability to use those things as vehicles to serve and better the lives of the people around you.

In doing so, you craft your reality while spreading the Gospel through action rather than words.

The Truth of God is not passed by rhetoric shouted down from a pulpit, or in the passive contemplation of scripture. Instead, it’s about putting yourself on the line in service of others, humbly meeting people where they are, serving as “the glue” and leveraging your creativity to form novel connections that expand prosperity for all.

Unshackle yourself from the faux-modesty society demands of the gifted by embracing your differentiating points as tools for the amplification of an abundant reality, apply these axioms, and watch as you soar in the pursuit of mastery in your domain.

Consider the following question:

What do the master and the novice have in common?

As is the case with all great questions, there is no “right” answer, but only the right answer for you.

In this article, I talk about my lifelong journey with this question and the inspirations that shape my personal answer. I invite you to read what follows not to persuade you of my conclusion, but to give you some inspiration for finding your own.

At the end of the day, looking for the most important answers outside is a fool’s errand. Your reality is created by your Listening, and your Listening comes from within.

I invite you to see from where I Listen, and that it may be a vantage point from which you may find your own perspective.

For both of the case studies, we will give surrounding context and then provide actionable takeaways. If you’re pressed for time, simply Ctrl+F and search “That’s A Nice Story, Charles, What Do You Want Me To Do With This Information?”

Let’s dive in.

Randy Rhoads

One of my favorite guitar players growing up was Ozzy Osborne's Randy Rhoads. To this day, my parents probably still have the intro to "Crazy Train" stuck in their heads from when 12 year old Charles locked himself in his room until he got every note of it just right - with many an earnest mistake along the way.

Lest this post be misinterpreted as a public apology, I'm keenly aware that this karmic debt is one I'm likely to pay back 10x when my future son goes full "Whiplash" on me and decides that drumming is his life's calling...

In any case, my room at the time was a shrine to the single-minded pursuit of 6 string excellence. Anyone not frightened away at the rattling door, hanging on for dear life against the sonic assault of a Marshall tube amp, would enter Maze Runner: Guitar Edition - a landscape fraught with trip wires (instrument cables) and perilously leaning walls constructed out of stacks of Guitar World magazine and Hot Licks VHS tapes.

Amidst the hundreds of guitar magazines, one stands out in particular: Guitar World March 2006. Although I couldn't tell you much about the rest of it, there was one anecdote that has stuck with me for nearly 20 years, although it's only now that I can really appreciate it.

There were many stories of Randy Rhoads' musical brilliance, with several notable guitarists and musicians sharing their testimonials of his prodigious acumen. Between the glowing endorsements was one story in particular that to this day guides how I approach life:

Whenever he was on tour, the first thing Randy would do when he got to a new town - while his bandmates chased groupies and partied - was open up the yellow pages to look for a music teacher. It didn't matter where in the world he was, or that he was one of the most celebrated rock guitarists of all time, or that in most cases when he would show up he would be met by a starstruck teenager, teaching guitar to local youths as a way to make a little summer money (the "lesson" in these cases would be Randy doing the teaching, then paying for the privilege of doing so).

The anecdote is moving: One of the greatest guitar players of all time took delight in the possibility that people had things to teach him, and maintained that orientation despite contrary evidence. His ego could have easily gotten the better of him: Randy could have said "I don't need to learn from anybody.”, He could have concluded after so many disappointing encounters with teachers that weren’t able to pass on the knowledge he so desperately sought that there really was nothing more he could learn. He could have let that justify sinking into nihilism and falling into the same superficial indulgences of his bandmates. He could have charged enormous fees to conduct seminars and opine on what he already knew to adoring fans.

But neither of those things afforded the possibility of becoming better. and if there was even a 1% chance of that happening, Randy was going to do whatever it took to seek that out - even if that meant 99% of the time he would actually be paying for the privilege of teaching the person who was meant to be teaching him.

In this respect, the master and the novice did not differ at all - Randy Rhoads sought betterment at his craft with the same hunger and vigor of a novice developing his first set of callouses, and by all reports maintained that perspective until the left this eart

That’s A Nice Story, Charles, What Do You Want Me To Do With This Information?

The actionable takeaway? In the words of Alex Hormozi: “Don’t invest in the S&P 500, invest in the S&ME500”. Stephen Courson blew my mind with this reframe when we met at a seminar: Financial advisors will recommend you save a fixed percentage of your income, but very rarely will you hear the same advice when it comes to investing in your own self-development Taking 10, 15 or even 20% of your monthly salary and committing it toward investing in mentorship will yield many multiples of return beyond any financial asset you can put your money in to.

Objections to this allocation typically come from a misguided sense of risk aversion as well as a false dichotomy. Let’s address that:

1. “What if I don’t learn anything and get nothing out of my investment?”

   1. Investing in asset markets, absent entry and exit points, is a fundamentally passive endeavor. In other words, once your money is in, you have ZERO control over the decisions or vicissitudes of fortune that ultimately determine the return of your investment. Learning, on the other hand, is an active experience - the more you put in, the more you get out - when you invest in mentorship, what you get out of it is constrained only by what you do with the information you get and the connections you draw with

2. “What if the person I pay to learn from isn’t ‘the best person to learn from’?”

   1. There’s a reason I used Randy Rhoads as an example for this section - the idea that you cannot learn from somebody is a fundamental limiting belief. If you invest in learning and get something other than what you expected, good: You’ve now exposed an area of the map that was previously gray, and have a concrete model of what NOT to do. Via Negativa is a powerful framework to equip yourself with - TLDR: Learning what to AVOID is a powerful step in learning what to EMBRACE. As such, WHO you learn from is fundamentally secondary to your willingness to learn and your attitude around doing so.
      

With these limiting beliefs overcome, I invite you to go out into the world, humble yourself and invest your income into acquiring the skills, knowledge and perspective to build a new reality. The only failure comes from not trying, and as Seneca chides “You act like mortals in all that you fear, and..immortals in all that you desire.”: What do you really have to lose? Time waits for no man, and every day that goes by where you don’t acquire new skills is one less day you have to deploy them. Get to it!

Bruce Lee

I was very blessed to have grown up abroad in Thailand in an era before “modern” television.

Most of the Western movies available to me were 20 or 30 year old martial arts flicks - chosen presumably as a byproduct of cheaper licensing fees and a lower language barrier (gun fights and explosions are the same in all languages, after all). In any case, while I shredded away on the guitar, endless re-runs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Jason Statham and Steven Seagal would play on a loop in the background - influences who would change my life forever.

Among my action hero retinue was Bruce Lee, who said it so succinctly in the way that has since become a trope of wise martial artists: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own”

His personal martial arts philosophy is built on these axioms - famously combining Wing Chun, boxing, fencing, Muay Thai, Judo, Karate, grappling and Taekwondo into something greater the sum of its parts.

Bruce Lee’s thirst for knowledge extended beyond the constraints of martial arts, with over 2,200 books encompassing philosophy, psychology, self-help, bodybuilding and sales archived to date by The Bruce Lee Library Research Project. Some particularly noteworthy highlights (via TBLRP):

• 22 books on or about Krishnamurti; he bought his first Krishnamurti book Think on These Things on November 19, 1966 at Pickwick Bookshop in Hollywood, along with Charles Lohse's Creative Selling and the 1916 book The Fighting Man

• 68 books on the art of fencing

• 300 boxing books

• 140 books on physical fitness, kinesiology, weight training, bodybuilding, and physiology

• 200 books on acting and filmmaking

• 63 books about wrestling

• 6 books on Gestalt Therapy

• Several papers on Newtonian Physics

That’s A Nice Story, Charles, What Do You Want Me To Do With This Information?

A zest for knowledge is a zest for life, and the creative exercises a muscle which can be flexed across domains. However, unlike physical musculature, it’s the perspective of the author that creativity has no linear constraints, instead growing in an exponential fashion - the more you create and the more you learn and synthesize to feed that flywheel of creation, the wider a base you can draw from, allowing for the repetition of the cycle with increasing ferocity.

As you write, you will discover what for you is useful, develop the confidence to discard what is not, and uncover the voice to add what is uniquely yours.

One of my favorite tools for harnessing and nurturing this type of exponential growth is Obsidian. The linking feature allows users to connect notes that on the surface may seem unrelated, and the more you write the larger a repository of cross-linked notes build up - creating the kindling for unique synthesis and novel insights that wouldn’t otherwise form even with the same volume of notes.

For those with a preference for the analog, Ryan Holiday’s Common Place Box Method (a framework he learned from his mentor Robert Greene) accomplishes the same thing - allowing ideas that would otherwise not cross pollinate to interact and providing the requisite materials for you to generate new ideas as a result.

Your homework for this section? Start writing and developing a system that breaks down the silos between your ideas and allows for your writing to interact with itself. Like investing financial capital into your own self-improvement, the sooner you start investing your TIME into writing the sooner you will start to build the muscle of examining your own beliefs. A common objection we hear to this practice is “I’m not a good writer”. Leaving aside the absurdity of refraining from development of a skill you’re not yet good at, here’s a framework to take some of the pressure off:

1. Take notes on something you’re reading

2. Expand those notes into an outline

3. Expand that outline into a journal reflecting on the ideas in the outline

4. Start pulling in notes/outlines from other materials you’ve given the same treatment

5. Congratulations, you now have an article derived by your own unique synthesis.

To speed up the inevitable question of “which method should I go with?” I encourage you to consider which repository you’ll interact with the most. Don’t overthink this: At the end of the day, so long as you’re flexing your creativity you will experience the benefits and your tools need to serve you vs. the other way around.

Conclusion

It’s only fitting that we conclude this article by coming full circle. In the same way that the Master and the Novice are separated only by relativity, our article ends with answering a question with an answer that will only beg another:

What do the Master and Novice have in common?

In my mind, it’s something like this:

Both know what they know.

Both know what they don’t know.

Neither don’t know what they don’t know.

And both sacrifice who they were in order to become who they’re meant to be.

The prescription for the Master and Novice alike, whether lifelong 10th degree black belt or day 1 green horn - are the same: Epistemic humility, open-mindedness, a life long commitment to seek out the wisdom of others, a childlike joy in exercising creativity, and a fearless willingness to confront the limits of their comfort zone.

If you made it to the end, I thank you for your time and leave you with an invitation to stand on the shoulders of giants by taking these principles, stowing the anchor of ego and setting sail on your own uniquely personal journey into the beautiful unknown.

I’d say I see you when you get home, but for better or worse this is not a journey from which one ever returns - each step you take leaves who you were further and further in the rear view mirror, and the new eyes from which you see the world creates a new reality. Just as Frodo returned to the Shire from Mount Doom a new Hobbit, and that new Hobbit created a new Shire, so too will you and your environment interact in an endlessly beautiful feedback loop of growth and change.

For our parting words, I give you the timeless wisdom of Immortal Technique:

“From now on, it can never be the same as before, because the place that I'm from doesn't exist anymore”

Are you a sales person (a) wondering how your organization’s outbound program stands up to your competitors or (b) vetting the opportunity to work for a new company?

If so - this article was written for you.

When I speak to sales reps about working at companies they would have never joined in hindsight, they all express one variation or “If I would have known they were like that, I never would have signed on”. I care deeply about every single one of you, and today’s article is about doing everything possible to make sure you NEVER have to say this.

Let me be blunt with you: You have a finite career. Knowledge workers tend to be more lackadaisical about this than, say, athletes, but the reality is you only have so many years of work within you, and as a subset of that only so many of your best years. You simply cannot afford to work at a company that is not giving you their best, can’t get their act together and NGMI (not gonna make it).

In today’s article, we will use Everett Rogers' Diffusion Of Innovation model as a way to either evaluate your existing opportunity or a prospective opportunity. This is a conceptual and practical model built from working with dozens of organizations on their outbound programs, and gives you an actionable framework to vet any organization.

Strap in, because it’s about to get bumpy.

The Stages of Outbound Maturity

Laggards:

Our first stop on today’s tour is the land of the luddites - if it were possible to use a rotary phone, these companies would be handing one out to their sales people. You can identify these organizations by workflows like reps dialing from their personal cellphones, emails being sent out one by one in Google/Outlook etc. Ask a rep for call notes at one of these companies and they'll nod thoughtfully before going on a scavenger hunt at their desk, hurling an astonishing variety of deal toys, awards, print outs and stationary before holding aloft a faded and crumpled post-it note.

Ironically, the left tail-right tail bell curve meme holds true here

At a minimum, these orgs are not overthinking outbound and more resistant to the siren song of the Sales Industrial Complex. Their workflows leave them no choice but to slow down, and when they eventually reach prospective customers their percentage of meaningful conversations is usually pretty high. Reps at these organizations are usually of the old school "get out and shake hands" variety, meaning they've got the "pale blue collar" (H/T Justin Michael) work ethic necessary to be successful and to their benefit often can't operate technology well enough to even conceive of sales reps hiding behind keyboards.

Visit a sales floor for one of these companies and you'll find a legion of grizzled reps hitting the phones - even if it may take them 4 hours to make 50 dials because they're looking up phone numbers from an excel sheet and punching them into their cellphones. Make no mistake - these organizations need major help and aren't within shouting distance of the adult's table, but they're much easier to move the needle for than the majorities, who as we will discuss next are in the Goldilocks quick-sand of suckitude

Late Majority:

This is the peak of the outbound Dunning-Krueger mountain. Orgs in the "late majority" category can be easily identified via a single question: "What does your outbound strategy look like?" If the answer is the components of a tech stack, there's a strong probability that the organization sits in here. If it wasn't bad enough that leadership at these companies have bought into the Sales Industrial Complex hook, line and sinker, the real tragedy is that their reps have too. Born into a world where they know no differently, these reps will ask questions like "should I use 'REENAGEMENT GHOST NO SHOW SEQUENCE 10.6(a)' or 'REENAGEMENT GHOST NO SHOW SEQUENCE 10.6(b)SIGMA' to get that no show back on my calendar?'"

Visit the (very expensive) sales floors of one of these companies and the most noise you'll hear is top 40 leaking from somebody's AirPods as they "research" (read: doom scroll) on LinkedIn, or the top popping on an artisanal craft cruelty-free organic microbrew soda at the ping pong table. Cold calling on the floor may as well be a violation of the Geneva convention, and "call booths" sit on the periphery of the landscape, where knuckle-dragging reactionaries with the temerity to interrupt prospects during the work day can carry out their shameful activities in isolation.

Early Majority:

Having invested enough money into sales enablement to fund a Southeast Asian coup d'etat, organizations often graduate from the late majority to the early majority with the realization that they have absolutely nothing to show for it, and that the world is more likely to get another Game of Thrones book before they're able to pay back their ridiculously inflated CAC.

Unfortunately, these organizations have not gone as far as the early adopters, meaning the answer is still, for the most part, a better mouse-trap. At this stage, you'll see reps putting in the effort and making dials, as well as a general awareness that channel-specific tools will out-perform omnichannel dinosaurs.

Having woken up from the fantasy that knowing what color All Birds your prospect wore during breakfast at Dreamforce 2005 is the holy grail of customer acquisition, the Early Majority are investing in a quality data provider and tracking top-line inputs to their outbound machine, emerging from the lab with the startling insight that more input is loosely correlated with more output.

For the most part, the alchemy that turns inputs into the desired outputs remains a mystery, and "leadership" at these organizations usually looks a lot more like "wishes and demands"

Early Adopters:

These organizations are the ones who can be said are starting to "get it". Rather than demanding activity for its own sake, the early adopters are starting to demystify the black box with RevOps. They keep up to date with industry experts like Gerry Hill, Ryan Reisert, Chris Beall, Justin Michael, Greg Meyer, Christian Retek, Joey Gilkey and Justin Middleton - implementing their findings to introduce granularity and specificity to each of their outbound channels.

These orgs have the digital maturity to conceptualize and operationalize each outbound channel from the perspective of an engineer, with each stage meticulously broken down so leadership can identify efficiency bottle necks that prevent their reps from having success. BDR leadership conversations will revolve around topics like connect rate, meeting scheduled rate, sales acceptance rate etc.

If an organization has channel-specific benchmarks to quantify rep efficiency and dedicates resources to identifying and resolving roadblocks they likely fall within this category.

A key indicator of an Early Adopter is a prioritization of data quality over outreach tools - these organizations understand where the biggest levers in their outbound process are and pull them with confidence, and will make decisions like reducing their team head count to invest in Phone Ready Leads to enable 1 rep to achieve the outcome of 3 reps

Innovators:

Innovators can be distinguished from early adopters by the point of contribution vs. consumption. Where an early adopter implements the findings of a subject matter expert at face value and "knows" doing so will improve their outcomes, innovators recognize that conclusions are only valid inasmuch as the assumptions and context are as well, and will endeavor to run their own experiments - asking questions that may or may not have practical application purely for the sake of asking the question.

An Early Adopter question might be: "What is my connect rate?", whereas an innovator will ask: "For my data set, what is my connect rate given a line type and data provider?”, rather than "What is my show rate?", an innovator will ask: "For the meetings scheduled to have been held so far, what is my show rate if we schedule X days out vs. Y, and where is the point of diminishing returns for driving a meeting ask?"

Like with all things, there are diminishing returns: For the most part, being an Early Adopter will put you ahead of 99% of sales reps and organizations. Innovators do what they do because the idea of not knowing pains them deeply, and the delight of finding out is all the motivation they need.

The Road Ahead:

I will be releasing a series of articles henceforth called "The Black Ops Files". These articles are unapologetically for the innovators and will take you behind the scenes of some of the research I do, including interviews with experts on topics like:

• Phone Deliverability - The Next Frontier

• Reachability vs. Receptivity

• The Best Time To Call (Your) Prospects

• Diagnosing Your Cold Calling Script - Gates, Flows and IF/THEN

Critically, these articles will show you how to do your OWN research, so you too can be an innovator.

In a world often driven by practicality and immediate results, "The Black Ops Files" will be a clarion call to bring curiosity, play and creativity back to business development. Seek out answers not because you must, but because you can. and embrace thrill of venturing into the unknown. Be like Richard Feynman, who said that he would rather have "questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned"

I hope to see you there.

Against my better judgment, I perused Twitter to see what people were saying about the play:

• "DANIEL JONES IN HIS PRIME LMAOOOO"

• "Jones is so bad, bro"

• "Everyone who was in on the decision to pay Daniel Jones over Saquon Barkley needs to be fired"

As humans, we have an inextricable, biological imperative to seek patterns. In our earliest days, being able to quickly sort prey from predator, foe from friend and "yummy!" from "yo don't eat that, bro..." usually meant the difference between life and death. If you're here reading this, it's in some part a testament to your ancestor's pattern recognition. Kudos.

In broad strokes, this serves us better than not, but the billion dollar question looms over every data point:

Is the phenomena we observe part of a larger trend (something)? Or is it a singular data point in a sea of infinite data points (nothing)?

According to Pro Football Reference, Daniel Jones has attempted 1900 passes over the course of his career. 64% of them have found their intended target (1200). 3.3% of his attempts have resulted in a touchdown (62), while 2.1% have been interceptions (40)

In other words, if you look at DJ's entire career so far, on any given pass attempt, he is empirically more likely to throw a touchdown than an interception.

And yet that doesn't stop people from extrapolating what this interception - in a pre-season game, no less - "must mean" for his career, the Giants as an organization, and the judgment of the people who signed DJ "over" (interestingly implying a binary, mutually exclusive decision) a player at a different position.

All from one throw.

Alas, this article isn't about football; for what we have to discuss is much, MUCH more interesting.

Among the tools we have in our toolkit to disambiguate signal and noise, one stands out in particular: Statistical independence (or lack thereof, i.e: Statistical dependence).

According to Robert Hogg in Introduction to Mathematical Statistics, a statistically independent event is one in which "the occurrence of one event has no effect on the probability of the occurrence of the other event". Think of flipping a coin - the probability of getting heads (50%) is the same no matter what occurred last.

A statistically DEPENDENT event, on the other hand, is one in which "one event occurring is influenced by the occurrence of another event". If you're playing poker and two Aces hit the flop, that influences the probability of, say, a King getting drawn (because there are now two fewer cards in the deck).

If this was the end of our story, it would be a simple narrative indeed - To come back to Daniel Jones, every athlete knows about the importance of "having short memory", and logically, nobody would argue that one throw has absolutely anything to do with the next, much less confer to a singular data point predictive qualities over an entire career.

Clearly, we have an open and shut case of statistical independence.

Or do we?

Applications of statistical models to humans have always had questionable veracity. Football players are not coins, nor decks of cards, and sports media, forever extrapolating and grasping at straws to find meaning where there might not otherwise be any, will doubtless replay the error over and over. Pundits wringe their hands opining on what a statistically independent event "must mean" for the future. Such scrutiny can and does harm a player's confidence, and what in a vacuum may have been a statistically independent event, in the real world may well instead become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

For corroboration, we turn to a domain different but no less competitive - the stock market.

In "The Alchemy of Finance", George Soros explicates upon what he calls "The Theory Of Reflexivity", summarized by the following concepts:

Cognitive Function: Market participants form perceptions and make decisions based on their (Author's Note: definitionally limited) understanding of the market.

Manipulative Function: These decisions and actions, in turn, affect the market, which can reinforce the original perception.

Soros elaborates: "My conceptual framework, which I call reflexivity, holds that market participants are not merely passive observers but active agents whose decisions help shape the very reality they are observing."

In other words - objective information takes on meaning in the hands of subjective humans, and the actions they take based on their interpretation of information becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.

What's the point of all this and who cares?

In short, ascribing meaning to the information around us is a choice, and so too is the decision on whether the happenings of the world around us affect us positively or negatively. Armed with this power, one can begin to actively practice "Pronoia" - the belief that the Universe is out to do you good. We may never, nor should we ever, seek to eliminate the part of us that recognizes patterns, but in a sea of infinite data points we can make the choice to interpret information in a way that those patterns help guide us to take action in a way that betters our lives and those of the people around us.