The note below is a modified version of the prologue from the Merchant Adventure Guidebook, which is our internal book of principles, policies and procedures.
The purpose of the Merchant Adventure Substack is to invite readers along and both provide a window into what we do and also a platform for dialog and learning as we do it. The internet is a doorway to a long tail of talent and knowledge, and our hope is to learn and find new opportunities over time by opening that door.
PROLOGUE
….it occurs to me that there is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
…. Not easy to find the balance, for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur….
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
- Sarton, May. Journal of a Solitude
These writings are about being a merely decent investment professional. Each section offers some perspective, and if you are open to it, some insight on our way of investing. There are many ways to successfully invest – so these posts aren’t some sort of truth, or a general-purpose guide to investing in any fashion. They are specific to us. But our hope would be that our perspective may also be of use to others.
Learning any specific skill means developing certain habits of mind. The posts will describe the habits of mind essential to our investment process. Different posts will describe many of the same habits from different perspectives. We will repeat ourselves but we hope not to become repetitive.
The habits of mind described in the following pages are tools for “seeing” the present from a shared perspective and operating with shared processes. It may be that all we need to achieve excellence isn’t to have the “correct” perspective, but just that we have a shared perspective and shared processes.
Learning to see from different perspectives is not easy. It requires heroic efforts to develop the habits of mind described and apply them daily in our work. And at the end of that heroic effort, we will only be doing decent or acceptable work.
To paraphrase Sarton, one must think like a hero to do the work of a merely decent investment analyst.