Different Kinds of Smart

Capital Thinking • Issue #167 • View online

The smartest investors of all time went bankrupt 24 years and 1 month ago (September 23,1998) this week. They did it during the greatest bull market of all time.

“The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are. There are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.”– Jeff Bezos

From The Collaborative Fund Blog:

The story of Long Term Capital Management is more fascinating than sad. That investors with more academic smarts than perhaps any group before or since managed to lose everything says a lot about the limits of intelligence.

It also highlights Bezos’s point:

There are many kinds of smarts. We know – in hindsight – the LTCM team had epic amounts of one kind of smarts, but lacked some of the nuanced types that aren’t easily measured.

Humility. Imagination. Accepting that the collective motivations of 7 billion people can’t be summarized in Excel.“Smart” is the ability to solve problems.

Solving problems is the ability to get stuff done. And getting stuff done requires way more than math proofs and rote memorization.

No kidding.

Find out about “more” kinds of smart here:

*Featured post photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash