Notes towards becoming a better investor

“I believe that life is fragile yet simultaneously relentlessly resilient”. If we can come to terms with how relentlessly resilient we are (even in the face of imposter syndrome which can tend to drive more resiliency and innovation), we can come to terms with building, measuring, learning, and building better/doing better.

Learning to lean into my weirdness has taken many shapes. Mostly it’s looked like embracing what comes to me naturally: I’ve always been much more interested in understanding people than ideas, get immense gratification from building lasting relationships, and consider it a lifelong goal to improve my discernment and refine my taste. This often shows up in how I spend my time: I rarely take pitch meetings (if a founder is fundraising already I probably didn’t get there early enough), always have a creative project I’m actively working on, and spend a significant amount of time striving to understand and translate myself to the page. Cultivating a view of the world that no one else has is an edge I consider critically important to Moth’s success, as well as something that requires continual cultivation and critical refinement.

• Deeply getting to know the person you have always been instead of endlessly reinventing yourself is “how” to stop seeking validation from everyone around you. I love the title of David Lipsky’s DFW biography for this reason: “Although of Course You End Up Being Yourself.” Jenny Slate has a great tweet about the feeling at the beginning of this process: “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”

This article describes the origins and contributions of the naturalistic decision

making (NDM) research approach.