This greater risk tolerance may come in part from the fact that the Level 4 investor does not view his identity as at risk in a given investment, and instead sees interacting with the markets as an occasion for rapid feedback on his own development. The philosopher Paul Tillich defines power as “the drive of everything living to realize itself,... See more

Level 4 investors relate to other market participants, their employees, and their investors as chess pieces in a game of their own invention, a game that is “for” them.

Robert Greene notes that the “Master” is observing not just “the moves of the pieces on the chessboard but the entire game, involving the psychologies of the players, their strategies in real time, their past experiences influencing the present, the comfort of the chairs they are sitting in, how their energies affect each other — in a word,... See more

Keeping score in dollars extracted from the market, rather than whether a piece of analysis was correct, is one of the most effective strategies for maintaining the optimal “grip” on your investment ideas. While any fixed identity may constrain someone’s viewpoint, the identity of “I am great at making money” allows greater flexibility than “I am... See more

The small minority of managers who reach this level are truly “absolute return”-oriented: they define success in terms of what they believe they can achieve over decades, not relative to what others are achieving at a given moment.

Most managers take in capital in excess of what their game permits them to manage in a world-class way. Only someone with the confidence born of a long-time horizon can resist the urge to make more money in the short term while risking mediocrity in the medium term. It is only as managers transition into level 4, that their skills allow them to... See more

But from a higher balcony one might view even excellent process and results as actually just the best at a given level.

nstead, they’ve come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot.