Finding Potential, Then Watching It Grow

I bought my first real stock position in 2013, years before people around me were talking about investing as something normal to do with spare income. I didn't have a system yet, just a hunch that a particular company was worth more than the market was pricing it at, and I remember how anticlimactic it felt to eventually be right. Nothing dramatic happened. The price just crept upward, slowly, over years, long after the moment that actually mattered, the moment I decided to buy, had already passed unnoticed by everyone except me.

People talk about finding potential like it's a kind of prediction, seeing the future before anyone else does. I don't think that's actually what it is. What I was doing in 2013, and what I still do now with stocks and, since 2018, with crypto, isn't forecasting. It's recognizing something that's already true and currently underpriced, whether that's a business with real fundamentals nobody's paying attention to yet, or a technology solving a real problem before the narrative around it has caught up. The future doesn't need predicting. Most of what eventually becomes obvious was already visible, if you were willing to look past whatever story the market was telling itself that week.

This is the same instinct I've written about before, the diagnostician's habit of looking at symptoms and evidence rather than headlines and stories. But finding potential asks something a little different of that instinct. Diagnosis is mostly about ruling things out until only one explanation survives. Finding potential is closer to noticing a signal buried inside noise that most people have already decided to ignore, because on the surface it looks unremarkable, or worse, looks like it's failing.

Finding the potential turned out to be the easier half. What actually tests you is everything that happens after, the long unglamorous stretch where nothing looks like it's working yet. A position sits flat for a year. Nothing about it moves, and nothing about it explains itself. The temptation in that stretch is always to conclude you were wrong, to sell, to redirect your attention toward whatever looks more exciting right now. Crypto in 2018 taught me this harder than stocks ever did, because the swings are so violent that patience gets tested daily instead of quarterly. I watched people abandon genuinely sound positions during ordinary volatility, and I watched other people hold onto genuinely broken ones out of stubbornness, mistaking patience for something it isn't. The skill was never holding on no matter what. It's telling the difference between a plateau and a mistake, and that difference is almost never obvious from the outside while you're inside it.

The distinction I've come to rely on is this. A plateau is what happens when the underlying thing you found is still true and simply hasn't been recognized by anyone else yet. A mistake is what happens when the thing you thought you found was never actually there, and you're now just waiting for a fact to become true through sheer hope. The only way to tell them apart is to keep checking the original evidence, not the price, not the mood, not how it feels day to day, but whether the specific reasons you found potential in the first place are still standing. If they are, the plateau is just time doing its slow, boring work. If they're not, no amount of patience turns a mistake into a win.

I've mostly talked about this in terms of money so far, because that's where I first learned it and where the lessons are cleanest to describe. But the exact same instinct, and the exact same discipline of patience once you've found something worth believing in, showed up again in a completely different part of my life, one that had nothing to do with markets at all. That's where I want to go next.