In my conversation with Bill Gurley he talked about this too. He called it bedrock. When he first learned investing, he read 'Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street. A Random Walk Down Wall Street. All the Buffett letters, Ben Graham, and Howard Marks.' "In order to be great,... you want to learn all the bedrock principles you possibly can but then, once you know those have the independence of thought and the confidence to innovate on top of those principles." Studying the history and knowing the pioneers is the closest thing to a cheat code you're gonna get.show more

@bgurley Great point!

@bgurley This is arguably more valuable than a formal degree. The challenge is the signal: the self-taught get screened out at first pass. Call it the Good Will Hunting problem. Solving it will unlock so much opportunity.

@bgurley The bedrock idea is more than a reading list. It creates a shared language for judgment. What test tells you someone has moved from repeating principles to making independent decisions?

@bgurley Understanding the rules of engagement is the first step to achieving outperformance in any domain. From there, it’s sheer volume in the lab. There’s no substitute for experience. Expedite the feedback loop, hone pattern recognition abilities, and continue iterating.

@bgurley Principles first, independent thinking second.

@bgurley The funny thing is, most investing “breakthroughs” are rediscoveries. Read the greats early enough, and you realize the edge isn’t having more information — it’s remembering the principles everyone else gets bored with.

@bgurley This is why a short canon beats an endless feed. For a creator building an offer, I’d keep a one-page “bedrock notes” doc: core principles, examples, and decisions it changes. It becomes a filter for new advice.

@bgurley the hard part comes after the reading: deciding which lesson was a durable constraint and which was an answer to a market, technology, or distribution channel that no longer exists. copying the conclusion can be another way to miss the lesson.

@bgurley The strongest research habit here is turning conversations into a repeatable learning loop: capture the claim, test it against observed behavior, then update the decision rule. That keeps old lessons useful without treating them as dogma.