M D Scott

Follower of Jesus
Futures Trader

[David M. McIntosh @DavidMMcintosh]

Democrat James Talarico is a woke weirdo.

Kick him to the curb where he belongs, Texas.

[Tim Tebow @TimTebow]

Sympathy keeps its distance.
Compassion gets in the foxhole.

One of our core values at the @tebowfoundation is "we hurt when they hurt." It's not comfortable. But it's worth it — because the people around you don't need someone who feels bad for them. They need someone who shows up.

Who around you needs you to just show up today?

[M D Scott @MDSCME]

https://t.co/S3U3Fnu7sF

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.

Chess works that way. Most things do not.

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

Love this so much ✝️❤️✝️

[Modern Dad @ModernxDad]

He just met women for the first time🤯

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

I come back to this speech once in a while....

[Wealth Director @wealth_director]

Overthinking is how smart people stay unhappy.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

The most powerful thing you can offer God isn't perfection—it's praise when it hurts the most.

Hebrews 13:15 calls it a “sacrifice of praise”—because real worship costs something. It’s easy to shout “Hallelujah” on the mountaintop… but when you’re in the valley, broken, doubting, grieving, and still lift your hands or whisper “You are worthy”?

That’s the moment God’s heart leaps.

A pastor who lost his wife to cancer stood in church the very next day with hands raised. When asked how, he said:
“Worshiping God through pain is a gift I can only give Him on this side of eternity. In heaven, there’s no more pain—so no more sacrifice of praise like this.”

Pain makes praise precious. It’s the offering Heaven can’t receive.

In your hardest season right now—what would it look like to offer Him that sacrifice today?

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Iranian women over the decades

[Tim Tebow @TimTebow]

Instead of asking, “Why is this happening to me?”
What if you asked, “God, what do you want me to learn through this?”

I’ve had seasons that felt like dead ends.
Some humbled me.
Some hurt.
But looking back, I see God shaping me through every twist. How about you? Where has life shifted in ways you didn’t expect, and what is He teaching you through it?

[The happy trader @happytrader_1]

This is the best trading advice ever

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

12. Do the thing you fear

"The ability to confront the fear of failure and move towards your fears rather than away from them, that's what makes you unstoppable."

"Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain."

"When you develop the habit of courage, eventually you find you're not afraid of anything. Your whole world opens up like a sunrise."

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

11. Double your rate of failure

"Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, was asked: how can I be successful faster?"

"He said: simple. Double your rate of failure."

"The more you fail, the more likely you are to succeed. It's the fear of failure that kills us, not failure itself."

[Johnny B. Good @Cat5SMASHICANE]

Trust me. This one is definitely worth the time. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🔥

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

Best male status symbols

· Fit body
· Well read
· Optimistic
· High energy
· Loving home
· They have a quest
· Lives with integrity
· Avoids drama and gossip
· Surrounded by family and friends
· Kids love spending time with them
· Makes money doing something he believes in

[Today In History @historigins]

One of the greatest lecture in the world

[Trader Theory @tradertheory]

This is why trading is one of the most difficult jobs in the world:

[Michael Batnick @michaelbatnick]

Wild market. We haven't seen anything like this since the dotcom bubble burst.

Over the last 8 sessions, 115 stocks in the S&P 500 have decline 7% or more in a single day.

The average drawdown when that happens is 34%. Right now we're 1.5% below the all-time high.