Be the Architect of Your Self-Measurement

Taken from BLDGBLOG: The Architecture of Self-Measurement

I first read this book way back in middle school – and there is a point to all this, so bear with me. I then re-read it, borrowing it from a friend out of sheer desperation for anything published in English, living abroad for the first time about ten years ago – and I was genuinely stunned to find that the book said literally the exact opposite of what I'd remembered it saying. It was like being confronted with a distorting mirror, or an old set of photographs – a very visceral, even embarrassing, way of realizing how much a person might change. Given time, how different are your sources of significance.The idea here is that you'd pick a building somewhere in the world, something outside your normal sphere of experience, and you'd visit it every few years. [...] You show up; you've set the whole day aside, like going to see a very long film. Or running a marathon. And you proceed to ride the elevators and escalators. You sit down at certain windows. You stand there in the corner just looking around. You go into rooms you once knew.

Maybe I've been reading too much TraderFeed lately, or just channeling Dr. Brett, but I can't help but relate this to investing as well. And I mean investing as a whole universe of opportunity: beginning with amateur knowledge of mutual funds and bonds, moving to equities; exploring derivatives, commodities, forex, and then on to advanced strategies of spreads, arbitrage, Black-Scholes; venture capital, private placements, real estate, etc. etc.

Mutual funds just don't seem that advantageous anymore. Executing strangles, and condors, and reading the Greeks just become second nature. You force yourself to develop and trade on new strategies, new analysis, new products.

As Dr. Brett mentions in Enhancing Trader Performance, self-evaluation is arguably the most important aspect of learning and growing as an investor. You have to be the architect of your self-measurement.