Winning Streak Vibes
One of the joys of being diversified is that nothing – knock on wood – is all going wrong at the same time. The frustrating corollary to that is that nothing is ever all going right at once either. At Permanent Equity, when some of our portfolio companies are up, others are down; fortunately that volatility has been net positive to date.
With that as background, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that one of our portfolio companies hasn’t exactly been lighting up the tape lately. Then they reported a profitable month not long ago, prompting me to joke to the team that if they kept that up, they’d jeopardize their not-for-profit status. But working together to set some straightforward goals and rigorously benchmark against them, one month became two, then recently three.
When something like that happens, that’s my cue to drop the Undertaker GIF in the relevant Slack channel – the one where he sits up from the mat. But after I did that, our CLO Taylor one-upped me with Lou Brown from Major League: “We won a game yesterday. If we win one today, that’s two in a row. If we win tomorrow, that’s called a winning streak. It has happened before.”
The point is that momentum is often underrated. Vibes – even if unquantifiable – are real. Because they function to update your emotional Bayesian priors.
So if you find yourself in a situation where things are going in the wrong direction and you can’t arrest the decline, strip everything back to basics and try to force one good outcome. Then celebrate that win because good begets good. Then, suddenly, you’re back on your feet, sitting up from the mat, on a winning streak.
Have a great weekend.
– Tim
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