The one year's experience as a trader has taught me many things. Very little of this has been financial or market related insight. A significant part of it has been a tour de force in System 2 thinking. But most of the new things I've learnt have been on the softer side - an aspect that I've woefully failed at, both at college and thereafter. This is about one of those things.
As a person, I've always had a tendency to deep dive. You could spin this positively as attention to detail, last mile, perfectionist - or negatively as anal, irritating or other oft misused medical terms like ADHD or OCD. My way of looking at it is "depth first" as opposed to "breadth first". A "depth first" approach would grab the biggest problem around and beat the devil out of it, while other problems linger. A "breadth first" approach would try to solve problems in a smarter, more parallel manner, accepting the fact that 50% of 10 challenges is probably better than 5 completely unknown, unsolved problems and 5 beaten-to-death trophies.
Fact is, society notices "depth first" approaches more than "breadth first". For example, we are more likely to go wow! when we hear of Sachin Tendulkar paying attention to the direction of grass blades at Centurion as opposed to, say, MS Dhoni's ability as a captain to deal with a hundred off-field issues like media, selectors, fans in addition to actually worrying about the match at hand.
I also think our childhood conditioning of problem solving (basically math and math-like subjects at school) is "depth first". Solving a math problem is pretty digital - you're either right or wrong. Few exam graders would award the same grade to the following 2 students :
Many people, including me, tend to get around this challenge in a lazy fashion. You're already very good at something, so just get better and better at it. Till the point where you can tackle all your problems serially in a "depth first" approach , and yet there is no problem left unsolved.
That's where trading (and I suspect many other businesses) changes things. You can never get good enough at something, and no problem is ever completely solved. In fact , all problems in trading, by definition, evolve to render their solution insufficient. Any "depth first" approach would keep you locked in for large periods of time on singular issues, and that time spent yields very little dividends as the problem statement changes with time. Not paying attention to other problems meanwhile, is potentially more expensive, especially if you don't know how many marks those other problems will score or cost you.
So, what sort of person are you - deep diver or water treader?
As a person, I've always had a tendency to deep dive. You could spin this positively as attention to detail, last mile, perfectionist - or negatively as anal, irritating or other oft misused medical terms like ADHD or OCD. My way of looking at it is "depth first" as opposed to "breadth first". A "depth first" approach would grab the biggest problem around and beat the devil out of it, while other problems linger. A "breadth first" approach would try to solve problems in a smarter, more parallel manner, accepting the fact that 50% of 10 challenges is probably better than 5 completely unknown, unsolved problems and 5 beaten-to-death trophies.
Fact is, society notices "depth first" approaches more than "breadth first". For example, we are more likely to go wow! when we hear of Sachin Tendulkar paying attention to the direction of grass blades at Centurion as opposed to, say, MS Dhoni's ability as a captain to deal with a hundred off-field issues like media, selectors, fans in addition to actually worrying about the match at hand.
I also think our childhood conditioning of problem solving (basically math and math-like subjects at school) is "depth first". Solving a math problem is pretty digital - you're either right or wrong. Few exam graders would award the same grade to the following 2 students :
- Student A who solves 7 out of 10 problems in an exam, but solves all 7 perfectly
- Student B who tries all 10 problems, final answers being wrong everywhere , but more than half the steps in all problems are along the right lines
Many people, including me, tend to get around this challenge in a lazy fashion. You're already very good at something, so just get better and better at it. Till the point where you can tackle all your problems serially in a "depth first" approach , and yet there is no problem left unsolved.
That's where trading (and I suspect many other businesses) changes things. You can never get good enough at something, and no problem is ever completely solved. In fact , all problems in trading, by definition, evolve to render their solution insufficient. Any "depth first" approach would keep you locked in for large periods of time on singular issues, and that time spent yields very little dividends as the problem statement changes with time. Not paying attention to other problems meanwhile, is potentially more expensive, especially if you don't know how many marks those other problems will score or cost you.
So, what sort of person are you - deep diver or water treader?
