Thread by @AgustinLebron3

1/ One of the strongest predictors of success in trading and in life, I think, is working at the appropriate level of meta. 👉

2/ Most often the failure mode is not going high enough in meta-level.

For example, when faced with problems and challenges, the weakest interns asked for help solving the problem.

The strongest asked for help in how to *think* about the problem.

3/ For them, improving their mental schema about a domain was the important thing. Once they had a good mental model, the rest was merely *work*.

And we all know work is easy.

4/ In my current life talking to CTOs, I see the exact same thing over and over again.

- The really good CTOs are looking for help framing the problems they have.
- The marginal ones want someone to tell them how to solve their problems.
- The bad ones want to buy a solution.

5/ We know this is true in math too. Lots of interesting results and proofs happen when you generalize and abstract the problem.

Category theory is perhaps the greatest example of this.

6/ Of course, there is the rare person who makes the opposite mistake. They live in too high a level of abstraction. Solving the overly-meta problem takes too long or is just too hard, and doesn't get you any tangible results.

Not many of you out there but you know who you are.

7/ But for most of us when faced with a tough problem, it's usually useful to ask meta questions:

- What is this a special case of?
- What *kind* of problem is this?
- What mental structures are useful to think about this?
etc.

What else? Any other good meta questions?

/END