Finding Potential, Then Watching It Grow

In part one, I wrote about finding potential in stocks and crypto, and about how the harder skill isn't the finding, it's the patience required afterward, the ability to tell a plateau apart from a mistake while you're still inside it. I said the same instinct showed up again somewhere that had nothing to do with markets. That somewhere was 2019, the year I went from being evaluated as a young diagnostician myself to being one of the people responsible for training and leading the next batch coming up behind me.

Spotting potential in a person is harder than spotting it in a stock, if only because a stock doesn't have bad days that have nothing to do with its fundamentals. The team members who ended up mattering most weren't always the ones who looked most impressive early on. Some of the sharpest people I trained were quiet in group settings and easy to underestimate if you were only paying attention to who spoke up first in a meeting. Some of the ones who interviewed the most confidently turned out to need the most patience later, not because they lacked ability, but because confidence and competence don't actually arrive on the same timeline, and it took me a while to stop mistaking one for the other.

The plateau I described with investments has an almost exact equivalent with people, and it's just as easy to misread. Someone can go months making the same category of mistake, and the temptation is to conclude they've hit their ceiling, that you found less potential than you thought you did. But just like with a position that's gone flat, the actual question isn't whether progress is currently visible. It's whether the original reasons you believed in them are still standing. Are they still asking better questions than they were three months ago, even if the answers aren't there yet. Are they still owning a mistake honestly instead of getting defensive about it. Those are the fundamentals. The finished output is just the price, and like any price, it lags behind the fundamentals by a wide and unpredictable margin.

I remember one team member in particular who nearly didn't make it through an early rough stretch, someone whose reports kept coming back needing real revision, who I could tell was starting to doubt whether this line of work suited them at all. Nothing about that stretch looked like potential. It looked like someone who might not be cut out for it. But the questions they were asking in private, the ones that never made it into their formal reports, kept getting sharper even while the reports themselves stayed rough. That's the exact signal that mattered, the same kind of signal I'd look for in a chart that hadn't moved yet. A year later, that same person was catching things in an audit that I would have missed myself. Nothing about their raw ability had changed in that year. What changed was that the ability finally had enough time and enough repetition to show up in the output, not just in the questions.

I've carried this into the business side of my life too, into how I think about hiring, mentorship, and the teams I've been part of building since. Most business advice about people treats performance like something you either see immediately or don't, hire fast, protect the bar, move on quickly from anyone who isn't delivering yet. There's real wisdom in that. Plenty of hires never had the fundamentals to begin with, and no amount of patience fixes that. But that advice, applied without judgment, quietly punishes exactly the kind of early rough patch that most genuine potential passes through on its way to becoming visible. The skill isn't patience without limit. It's the same skill from investing, checking the fundamentals instead of the price, and being honest with yourself about which one you're actually looking at.

Finding potential, in a market or in a person, is really just the willingness to notice something true before it's obvious. Watching it grow is the much harder discipline of staying convinced of what you noticed, long after the excitement of noticing it has worn off, without letting that conviction curdle into stubbornness when the fundamentals genuinely change. I learned this first with a stock in 2013 that took years to prove me right, and I relearned it with a person in 2019 who took about as long. Different subjects, same lesson. The finding is the easy, exciting part everyone wants to talk about. The growing happens later, slower, and mostly unwatched, and that's exactly why so few people are still paying attention when it finally shows up.