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Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...
This week was about recognizing what actually compounds. Not through conformity, not through forcing one approach to replace all others, but through understanding how different obsessions, timescales, and perspectives inform each other without needing to compete. A go-go beat lives inside Fugazi. A long-term investor and a transactional trader can sit across from each other and both walk away smarter. Mini-cultures thrive when they stop demanding to be monoculture. Two opposite approaches to the same problem aren't a threat - they're evidence of depth.
The week started with music and ended with markets and culture. In between, we watched referrals teach us more than rejections ever could, we flipped scripts instead of following them, and we watched what happens when you dare to do something for the first time. That refusal to choose between different ways of being - that's the throughline.
AND… Happy Valentine’s Day. My wife and I were at a wedding with a bunch of favorite people last weekend and - life is beyoooteeful. You know what love is.
You can't really understand Fugazi without understanding go-go. A Mustard Plug cover of "Waiting Room" triggered this whole musical archaeology - tracing the lineage back from jump blues (Louis Jordan, 1948) through Chuck Brown's go-go variation, landing on how Fugazi borrowed the pocket, the call-and-response, the way tension builds and releases. They didn't name it. They just absorbed it from the D.C. scene they were cooked in and made it their own. The genius isn't in inventing something wholly new; it's in recognizing what works in one space and letting it inform what you build in another.
Quote from the Personal Archive - when different genres teach each other
"You hear that heartbeat-type walking tempo too, right? That's called pocket. Fugazi's pocket is totally different from Chuck Brown's, but that's the whole point - how they each hold their groove in a totally different but strangely related way, and Fugazi learned how to hold theirs by watching someone else's."
Guru knows how to stand out. Not by doing the same thing everyone else does. You flip the script. Figure out what the opposite is, make sure it's good (and you have taste, so you know), then do that instead. Whether you're a tax lawyer or a rapper, the principle holds. The world wants you to apologize for your obsessions. This post says: don't. Build something distinctive because you're not trying to be what everyone expects - you're trying to be what only you can actually make.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the permission you've been waiting for
"You know I flip / you know I flip the script." - Gang Starr
Most advice says listen to buyers for product feedback and non-buyers for objections. That misses something bigger. Non-buyers can tell you what didn't resonate, sure. But they can never give you the language of love that fuels referrals. The people who actually refer you - the ones who can't help but tell their friends - those are your real marketing teachers. They're the ones who know what it feels like on the other side. A referral-driven business lives or dies on understanding that distinction. You're not listening to rejection. You're listening to the people who felt what you made so deeply they had to share it.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the conversation that teaches marketing
"If you want to improve your marketing, really listen to the people who bought and then referred a friend to buy."
Lindsey Vonn crashed at the Olympics this week. No gold medal. No redemption arc. Just 5 inches too tight on her line and a complex tibia fracture. But she also said something that changes how you think about trying: "Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself." Then Matt introduced Bogumil and Tony - two people who'd never met - on Just Press Record. No script, no guarantee it would work, just the willingness to let something happen. That's where the real dares live. Not in the outcomes. In the willingness to show up and see what happens.
Quote from the Personal Archive - what happens when you dare greatly
"I tried. I dreamt. I jumped." - Lindsey Vonn
Tony told a story about a client who wouldn't sell something because they thought they'd never be able to buy it back. The market's not going to close, he said. You can reverse course. And that insight - that optionality makes impatience acceptable - flips how you think about patience as a virtue. When you know you can change your mind, you're freed from the need to be cautious. You can be bold and still be thoughtful. You can act decisively and still stay open. The real skill isn't choosing the right path and sticking with it. It's knowing you have options and using them without guilt.
Quote from the Personal Archive - when reversibility changes everything
"It's not like you can't buy it back - the market's not going to close, you can't be afraid of THAT part."
Bogumil spent 20+ years building a practice around one idea: forgotten money held patiently compounds into generational wealth. But the real wisdom lives in the three questions he poses. When a stock gets too expensive, where do you go? (The seller's dilemma.) Do you own a business or a price? (You own fundamentals, not quotes.) Are you accomplishing what you actually want to accomplish, or what you think you should? (There are a thousand ways to make money - fit matters more than method.) These aren't theoretical. They're the questions that separate people who build something that lasts from people who chase metrics and burn out.
Quote from the Personal Archive - when you have to know when to stop doing the thing that made you successful
"Where do I go? Like, do I sit?"
Tony's wired differently. Transactional. In the moment. He doesn't understand why people hold onto losing positions out of fear they can't buy back in - because to him, the market opening again is obvious. But he's also figured out something most traders never do: build a business by choosing your people and serving them one subscriber at a time. And he's identified the universal fear nobody talks about directly: knowing when to let go. Not just of positions. Of identities. Of what made you successful when it's time to move on. The people who win long-term aren't the ones without fear. They're the ones who've made peace with it - who know the market opens again tomorrow.
Quote from the Personal Archive - the architecture of actual freedom
"Well, have you traded it all around it? And he's like, 'no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't sell anything. I can't sell any of the position.' You know? And I'm like, why not?"
The Bad Bunny halftime show reached 128 million viewers. The TPUSA/Kid Rock counter-show reached 6 million. The difference wasn't politics. It was whether you tried to force your mini-culture to replace everyone else's as the new monoculture or whether you celebrated what makes you different while letting others do the same. Bad Bunny didn't sand off his edges. He just put it all out there - raunchy, proud, creative - and let people take what they wanted. That 21x difference in viewership wasn't an accident. It was the difference between coercion and celebration. Mini-cultures don't need to compete. They compound when they coexist.
Quote from the Personal Archive - how to win when monoculture is gone
"He celebrated mini-culture without demanding it become THE culture."
Where Else I Showed Up This Week
The whole week has been about this: how different frameworks and perspectives compound when they stop competing. This showed up on Excess Returns twice.
First, Neil Howe and Ben Hunt sat down together to talk about where we are in the current cycle and what it means for markets, inflation, AI, capital flows, and generational shift.
Generational theory (Neil's Fourth Turning framework) meets real-world trading strategy (Ben's Epsilon Theory lens). A long-term investor's perspective on capital flows and structural forces shaping productivity and growth - it's the same principle as Bogumil and Tony sitting across from each other. Different approaches don't cancel each other out. They make each other sharper.
Then Nir Kaissar came on to challenge the consensus on what investors may be missing - interest rates, AI timing, concentration risk, the convergence of big tech around AI, private credit risks, small caps, all of it.
Nir's spent 20 years running strategies and changing his mind about what actually matters. He's flipping the script on the consensus - not because he's contrarian for the sake of it, but because the data points differently when you're really looking. That's what this whole week is really about: the willingness to see what's actually there instead of what everyone expects to be there. Whether it's go-go informing Fugazi, mini-cultures thriving without demanding monoculture status, or traders questioning whether the conventional wisdom on rates and AI really holds up.
Personal Archive Prompts
What obsession have you been apologizing for that's actually pointing you toward something distinctive?
ARE YOU MEASURING YOURSELF AGAINST SOMEONE ELSE'S TIMELINE, OR BUILDING YOUR OWN?
Who in your life thinks totally differently than you do, and what have they taught you by refusing to think like you?
what would you do if you knew you could reverse course?
BUILD A NETWORK THAT INCLUDES OPPOSITES. WHO CHALLENGES HOW YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR WORK?
What are you holding onto because you're afraid of how you'll feel in the space after you let it go?
IF YOUR MINI-CULTURE STOPPED TRYING TO BE THE MONOCULTURE, WHAT WOULD YOU ACTUALLY MAKE?
As always, I did my part, now it's your turn to write some reflections in your own Personal Archive.
(then, be sure to let me know where you're keeping it, I'm in search of the others too)
ps. Claude helped me organize and synthesize these thoughts from the week's posts. If you are curious how I use AI, read this post: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules
