Insight
Valiante: Rebuilding confidence in slumps requires stacking small wins
“And so step one for anybody in crisis, honestly, whether it's a golfer, PM, people in private markets, venture capital firms, and it's what you said, alluded to earlier, runners, it's like, let's start finding small wins. Things that we know we can, and then c…”
Insight
Valiante: The Human Brain Did Not Evolve for Modern Investing or Athletics
“Natural selection doesn't work as fast as changes in society. So I always say this to golfers, your game, your brain did not evolve for you to be a PGA tech golfer or hedge fund manager. Your brain did not evolve with the intention of you being a professional …”
Insight
Valiante: Anxious People Create Their Own Anxiety by Over-Indexing on the Future
“Forethought tends to lead to people over-indexing to the future. So essentially what we start asking is, what if questions? What if I, what if this plane crashes? Oh my god. We know that people who are anxious are, live in the future. They create their own anx…”
Insight
Dr. Gio Valiante: Success requires learning how to fail productively
“The fact of the matter is failure is woven into the fabric of success. It's not how do you avoid failure. That's the wrong question. The right question is how do I fail or how should I fail in ways that lead to the type of skill development and belief system t…”
Insight
Dr. Gio Valiante: Mastery-oriented individuals respond to failure with curiosity
“When mastery oriented individuals fail, The reaction is curiosity.”
Opinion
Dr. Gio Valiante: Tiger Woods maintained a purely mastery-oriented mindset
“Tiger Woods, when you watch the way he handled his career and his approach to it was a purely mastery oriented mindset. It was, you know, get a little bit better every day, like make better mistakes.”
Insight
Valiante: Ego-driven success is fragile because it requires unbroken confidence
“The only way to be ego oriented and be successful is you better never lose your confidence. Cause what we know is confidence is a variable. Sometimes we're more confident than others. If you're ego oriented and you lose your confidence, that's where the embarr…”
Assertion Partly supported
Valiante: Winless PGA golfer broke 215-loss streak by changing emotional reactions
“I had a golfer on the PGA tour who was over 210. He had gone for like seven or eight years and never won on the PGA tour. And so one of the things we started to do is replace his reactions... Seven years, no wins. O for 215, and he won 15 days later.”
Insight
Valiante: A sense of humor is a primary indicator of psychological health
“One of the things we know in psychology is sense of humor is one of the greatest tells of psychological health and well-being. One of the keys to psychological health is to be able to laugh at things that are funny.”
Insight
Valiante: Elite performers across all fields rely on identical core principles
“At the tail end of the curve, successful people Are generally having the same conversations, different parlance, different language, you know, you have to know different things in the markets versus engineering versus academia versus a particular sport. So the…”
Insight
Valiante: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics captures almost all modern success literature
“If you want to aggregate every success book ever written, go read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Like, there's not a whole lot happening that, that Aristotle, you know, didn't already write about in Nicomachean Ethics.”
Assertion Supported
Valiante: Jeff Bezos created $800B in wealth for other people
“Jeff Bezos has created eight hundred billion dollars of wealth for other people.”
Assertion Supported
Valiante: People who lose the ability to feel emotions make worse decisions
“When human beings get localized brain damage where they can't feel emotion, their decision making is not better. It's worse, in fact.”
Opinion
Valiante: Ken Griffin won by building a meritocracy, not via trading talent
“I don't think anyone would tell you that Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel, is like a prodigious trader, but he's built a business system and a business model that's the ultimate meritocracy, and, you know, you hire to effectively compensate for the deficien…”
Insight
Valiante: Changing your environment transforms behavior more effectively than changing your mindset
“More often than not, if you want to be somebody else, change your environment, like change where you are. And by changing your environment and or the people around you, all of a sudden, the way the dominoes start to fall is, is you're a better version of yours…”
Insight
Valiante: Resilience and Delayed Gratification Outweigh Raw Intelligence for Long-Term Success
“And when you put it as a variable and psychological model, it tends to wash out you know, things like, you know, ability or intelligence. Like it's more important in the course of the life cycle. Right up there with delayed gratification, which is another very…”
Insight
Valiante: Outsourcing routine to automaticity frees capacity for decision-making
“The degree to which you can outsource this stuff to routine and auto sort of go into automaticity that creates space for actual decision-making and quote unquote thinking. And so process is a way to get an advantage.”
Disclosure
Valiante spends 15 minutes every Friday auditing his unconscious thoughts
“Every Friday, at the end of the day, I take 10 or 15 minutes and I ask myself a simple question. I say, What are my attachments that have attached themselves to me that are interrupting my thoughts that I didn't put there by conscious choice? And what am I thi…”
