Letter to a Friend Who May Start a New Investment Platform - Graham Duncan Blog

the people around you will either protect or infringe on the climate within your skull.

Many high achievers are compulsively exploring the world in search of something — some for truth, some for power, others for beauty — and I think it’s a disservice to yourself and your future partners to not orient your platform around the piece of investing that you really love. Embrace your funk.

Your primary objective should thus be to maintain the right filters for people and ideas so that the delicate ecosystem in your head is as resilient and flexible as possible

Start-ups of any kind are awash in ambiguity. It’s the founder’s responsibility to hold that ambiguity for everyone, which is often a lonely job.

If you can find the thing you do for its own sake, the compulsive piece of your process, and dial that up and up, beyond the imaginary ceiling for that activity you may be creating, my experience is the world comes to you for that thing and you massively outperform the others who don’t actually like hitting that particular ball.

Beyond deliberately architecting the people who surround you, the best way to control your mindset is to “own” the way you speak to yourself, what sports psychologists call your “self-talk”

I think of as each of us having built up an intangible asset over the previous chapters of our lives, a distributed reservoir of credibility that is held in trust by your friends, mentors, and former colleagues. Your task is now to convert that intangible asset into a tangible asset

What are you compulsive about? Is it possible to put that at the center of the platform’s activity?