- Find a voice recorder and record your stream of consciousness through the sequence of two to three trades or decisions.
- Do this in sequence
- Write down five to ten memories from before you were 18 years old.
- From that list, pick three that stand out from the rest. Maybe they still have an emotional charge, maybe you even think of them every once in a while.
- For these three memories, write the story of what happened, in the form of a kind of news report on who, what, where, why, and when.
- Take these stories and look at them from a different point of view. Ask what the other people in the story were feeling or what it seemed like they were feeling.
- Last, write down how the situation made you feel in the moment and what you told yourself about the situation.
- Then set the writing and the recordings aside for a few days or weeks. Just let both simmer in the back of your mind.
- Keep a bedside notebook and jot down your thoughts and feelings from your dreams right away. What matters is the sequence of feelings and emotions in the dream; or, in other words, those feelings that you wake up with in reaction to the events in the dream.
- Now summarize the following using the data of your memories
- What do I expect for myself?
- How do I expect things to turn out?
- How do I seem to feel about myself?
- What kind of labels do I talk about myself with?
- What fears come up?
- How do I react to others?
- How do I react to being told something other than what I want to hear?
- Go back to your trading recordings and summarize what feelings came up during your decision-making moments. We are looking for the themes and feelings that repeat themselves across market and decision sequences. Compare his information with what you discovered in the previous steps. What seems similar? If it doesn’t immediately click, let it rattle around in the back of your brain for a few weeks.
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rssThe Narrative as Valuation
Aswath Damodaran writes:
If one extreme of the numbers/narrative spectrum is inhabited by those who are slaves to the numbers, at the other extreme are those who not only don’t trust numbers but don’t use them. Instead, they rely entirely on narrative to justify investments and valuations. Their motivations for doing so are simple.
1. Story telling is a powerful attention getter/keeper: Research in both psychology and business point to an undeniable fact. Human beings respond better to stories than to abstractions or numbers, and remember them for longer. After all, the Harvard Business School has taken story telling almost to an art form with its cases, tightly wound narratives that are supposed to convey larger lessons.
2. Unrestrained creativity: “Creative” people through the ages have always fought back against any restraints on their creativity, especially those imposed by those that they view as less imaginative than they are.
3. The Creative Superiority Complex: Just as numbers people intimidate with mounds of numbers, good narrators can browbeat “bean counters” with superior story telling, especially if they can back their stories up with personal experience.
Don’t trade off storytelling. Just don’t do it.