Sometimes we get lucky enough to hear a mental model or framework at the perfect moment when it sounds pure and true and we can adopt it as our own.
Here is one that I adopted about a year into Exponential ETFs as we started to accept our struggles and limitations as a young company:
Great founders are deterministic. Create your own outcome, never get deterred, and force the universe to bend to your will.
It is powerful stuff if you can internalize it.
Here is another one:
Great founders are nimble. Always listen to customer feedback, always keep your tentacles out for new opportunities, don’t be afraid to pivot and move quickly and decisively when opportunity comes.
Also powerful stuff if you can internalize it.
Thing of it is, these two frameworks are mutually exclusive. You can be deterministic or you can be opportunistic, but once you set a marker and once you know your outcome, they can not co-exist.
Unless they can.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of deterministic thinking. It started after listening to Jim O’Shaughnessy excellent Infinite Loops podcast. This was an episode with Sahil Lavingia and there are also discussions of probablistic v deterministic with Max Arbitrage and Rohit Krishnan.
History is written by the winners, and it is easy for winners to tell themselves and others stories about how they forced their success on the world through will, hustle, and deterministic thinking. So I tried that framework on, even wore it around town for a little bit. But we are who we are, what I am is a probabilistic thinker.
My father was an actuary and a genius in the most literal sense of the word. And he taught me and my brothers probabilistic thinking from before we could talk. He wouldn’t have called it that, he would have just called it logic or truth or the right thing, but it was how he saw the world and how he taught us to see the world. Empirical evidence, probabilities, and the laws of mathematics are everywhere and once you have been taught to see them every decision must - MUST - be based upon them.
So the only way I could reconcile my new framework was to reject the dichotomy. Become both probabilistic and deterministic. It can be done.
And that brings me back around to the two contrasting frameworks of deterministic versus opportunistic, and the question of how they can co-exist.
A driver on a journey knows their destination. The driver is deterministic - they might not know if there will be traffic and if they’ll stop off for coffee, but they do know exactly where they are driving to. And when they encounter a road closure, an empty tank of gas, a reason to stop, detour or change directions, well there isn’t much need to overthink it. And that makes the driver no less deterministic.
And that right there is how I am trying to look at life. Deterministic in my outcome, yet opportunistic to ensure I am always following the best path. Probabilistic in approach and deterministic about destination.
With the rigidity to be undeterred by setbacks, and with the flexibility to listen and pivot.
When we get where we’re going it won’t matter much how we got there.
Great writing as always Phil!
Great writing as always Phil!