Soros's Back
Why one of history's most analytical investors trusted his spine over his models
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
- William James
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
- T.E. Lawrence
In July I stepped away from my usual routine. Shut everything down, packed up our bags and went to California for a month to see my parents and travel across the American West.
Breaking my daily norms and habits made me realise (once again) how uncreative my life can be and how much of a creature of habit I am. Routine is comfortable and easy. It requires little thought.
This made me reflect on creativity and intuition and where it’s gone in my life and in society.
The Knowing
Let’s begin with T.E. Lawrence.
In July 1917, Aqaba was about as safe as a Turkish garrison could be. Its heavy guns pointed out to sea, where any sensible attack would come from, and the landward approach was covered by the Nefud, a stretch of desert so vicious that military planners treated it as a wall. Nobody defends against a wall.
T.E. Lawrence came through the wall. He led a small force on camels across the Nefud in high summer, gathered allies among the tribes as he went, and took Aqaba from behind, where the guns couldn’t turn to face him. The garrison barely fought.
What interests me is his CV. Lawrence held no meaningful rank and had done nothing to impress the army establishment. He’d spent his twenties walking across Syria to survey crusader castles, digging at an archaeological site on the Euphrates, reading medieval poetry. And somewhere in those years of slow, apparently useless attention, he picked up something the career generals never had. The Germans call it Fingerspitzengefühl — fingertip feel. He could sense what the desert would allow. When he was asked afterwards how he knew the crossing could be done, he gave reasons, but the reasons had come second. The knowing arrived first, and it lived somewhere below his neck.
Internal and External Bureaucracies
Having until recently worked in corporate bureaucracies for 27 years, I think a lot about generals and the archaeologist, because I think it describes something true about creative work generally, and because modern life has quietly arranged itself to produce generals.
Adam Mastroianni has a theory about why culture feels stale, and it starts in an odd place — with how safe everything has become. For most of history, ordinary life carried enough involuntary danger that a bit of voluntary risk barely registered. As the involuntary kind receded, our sensitivity to the optional kind grew to fill the space.
His line about it:
“The same impulse toward stability that ensures people avoid smoking cigarettes on the playground might also prevent that same individual from growing up to be a breakthrough, boat-rocking scientist.”
Layer on top of that what he calls the polite, soft panopticon. Everyone is visible now, all the time, and reputations have to survive for decades. Under those conditions, deviance — the raw material of every cultural breakthrough there has ever been — gets sanded off early, usually by the person themselves, usually before anyone even asks.
I see this with millennials and my kids even more, their lives are lived online and are far more visible than mine was in the 80s and 90s. That’s the pressure from outside.
The pressure from inside is certainty. I learned this first through investing, where the lesson is expensive. Markets belong to a class of system in which the future genuinely cannot be computed from the past, and in systems like that, piling up information stops helping much earlier than anyone wants to believe. Past a certain point it mostly manufactures confidence and those feedback loops are ugly and compound fast.
Yet most of us love living in our own bubbles of belief and identity, let me give you some examples: “AI Bull”, “AI Denier”, “Commodity Bull”, “Believer in American Exceptionalism”, “China Is Bad"“.
How often do we change the certainty of our identity?
Seeing More
Howard Gardner counted eight or more distinct intelligences; schools examine roughly two of them. The musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal and intuitive kinds go untested, which in an institutional sense means they go unseen. Anthony Seldon pushed this thought somewhere darker — that a share of human depression traces back to talents that were never recognised, never valued, never even noticed. A capacity that can’t be scored stops officially existing, first in the school and eventually in the person carrying it.
Comfort from without, certainty from within, measurement everywhere. Each one narrows the aperture a little. Together they’ve narrowed it a lot.
So what is the thing being narrowed?
For a long time I assumed perception worked like a camera — light comes in, the brain develops the film, you see what’s there. The past two decades of neuroscience have been unkind to that picture. What the brain actually does is guess. It generates a running prediction of the world from the top down, then checks the prediction against whatever the senses report, correcting as it goes. Anil Seth describes experience as a controlled hallucination, which sounds destabilising until it starts explaining things you’ve watched happen your whole life. Two people walk out of one meeting having attended, for all practical purposes, two different meetings. A person you know changes noticeably depending on the room. Even the feeling of being a self, the sense that someone is in here having the experience, appears to be one more prediction the brain maintains because it’s useful.
I find this liberating rather than unsettling, for one reason. If perceiving is already an act of composition, then creativity was never a separate faculty granted to a lucky few. It’s the ordinary machinery of experience with the gain turned up. The question stops being how to generate ideas, a question that always made me feel like a broken vending machine, and becomes something more like a farmer’s question — what am I feeding the composer?
The composer, it turns out, doesn’t take instructions from the top floor. Antonio Damasio has spent a career tracing consciousness to its sources, and his conclusion inverts the org chart most of us carry around. Awareness doesn’t begin in the wrinkled cortex where we do our proud abstract thinking. It begins far lower, in the brain stem, with feeling — the raw registration of a body existing in a world. The cortex came later and works for the older system, as a tool. Feelings, in Damasio’s account, are the language the body uses to get the brain’s attention.
Curiosity = Love
Curiosity is a word in our body’s language, and I’d argue it’s the most valuable one. I don’t mean the trait people list on dating profiles, and I don’t mean the twitchy hunger for novelty that dissolves the moment the tab closes. Real curiosity is quiet. It survives the novelty wearing off. It’s the question that keeps returning on the walk home when you have no reason to be thinking about it at all. Its impostors are easy to unmask once you know the test — anxiety about missing out spikes and decays, ambition performs best in front of an audience, discipline needs constant enforcement. Curiosity just hums along, unbothered, asking for nothing except your attention. My working theory is that it’s the nervous system reporting where the next version of you is located.
The strangest thing I’ve come to believe about this pull sits in my notes in one line. The word for it, when it’s aimed at a question, is curiosity; when it’s aimed at a person, we call it love. I no longer think those are two things. You can watch a relationship die on exactly this mechanism — the day one person privately decides they have the other fully figured out, the aliveness starts draining, and what remains flatlines into knowledge. Fields of work go the same way. So do cities, instruments, friendships. Staying curious about something and loving it may just be one activity described at two distances.
Which suggests where the machines fit. The models now have intelligence, speed and memory in quantities no human will ever touch, and none of it comes with the felt experience of not knowing. Nothing pulls at a language model on its walk home. Whatever else gets automated, that pull hasn’t been, because feeling it appears to require a nervous system — and it’s the pull, at every step, that decides what’s worth making.
Follow the pull long enough and something strange happens to skill itself. Robert Greene spent years studying how masters in every field actually develop, and the arc he found runs through a long apprenticeship of rules, drills and imitation until, somewhere past the ten-thousand-hour mark, the rules go invisible. Intuition, in his account, has nothing vague about it — it’s high-speed pattern recognition, a biological supercomputer that skips the lag of deliberate reasoning because the patterns have been driven below the level of words. Lawrence’s fingertip feel was a decade of desert compressed into something faster than thought.
What Would Soros Say?
My favourite example comes from the least mystical arena on earth. George Soros, one of the most analytical investors who has ever lived, used to close positions when his back hurt. He said so plainly. The pain arrived before the reasons did, and he’d learned to treat it as data — decades of market pattern-matching surfacing through the only channel fast enough to carry it.
If creativity runs on a signal you receive rather than a plan you impose, the practical question becomes one of stance, and I know of two. A sculptor arrives at the stone with a vision and imposes it. A gardener walks the beds studying what’s already coming up, and gives it what it needs.
I first worked this out with respect to my kids, and I wrote it down at the time: my job is not to shape them, my job is to see them — to notice what lights them up when nobody is watching. The behavioural genetics on this is simple, with something like seventy per cent of the variation in temperament arriving with the child. That number gets read as fatalism, and I read it as relief, because it doesn’t shrink the job so much as clarify it. Less moulding, more noticing.
It took me longer to see that the same stance applies to everything a person makes. An essay drifts away from its outline, a company develops appetites its founders never planned, a career keeps bending toward some activity you’ve never once put on a CV. The sculptor fights these developments. The gardener gets interested in them. And no garden grows in isolation anyway — Philip Shepard makes the point that separating yourself from your influences is like trying to separate a wave from the ocean.
The Art of Removal
Jung would add that some of what’s growing has been deliberately buried. His shadow contains everything we exiled from ourselves to stay acceptable, and the unwelcome news is that the exiled material includes rejected potential, since the strangest parts of a person are usually the generative ones. Culture prunes deviance from the outside; we finish the job ourselves, from the inside, years before anyone asks us to. The gardener’s discipline is to stop pruning long enough to find out what the strange shoots wanted to become.
As for daily practice, nearly everything I trust on the subject is subtractive. Shepard’s claim is that bodies attune to the present moment naturally, whenever we stop stuffing them with noise and tension, which would mean presence is a return rather than an achievement. Somewhere along the line, he argues, we migrated upward, out of the belly and into the head, and started trying to live from our leaves while cutting away our roots.
Stephen D’Souza organises the un-muffling into three arts, each one an art of removal — not doing, which creates space; not knowing, which means sitting inside uncertainty without lunging for an answer; and not being, which loosens the ego’s grip on the outcome.
Maria Popova describes what happens in the space this opens up. Her observation is that the best ideas arrive after we stop trying to coax the muse, when fragments of experience are left to drift around the unconscious until they click into combinations nobody engineered. Boredom, in this reading, is background processing. Sleep is part of the job. The drifting fragments do have to come from somewhere, though, which is where the reading and wandering earn their keep — hoard analogies, not facts, as the note in my vault puts it, since facts have a half-life and analogies are forever. Lawrence’s off-syllabus library was the hoard that took Aqaba.
Josh Waitzkin, who reached the top of two unrelated disciplines, adds the guardrail — get away from the noise so you can detect the ripples. A signal this quiet is drowned by almost anything — feeds, metrics, other people’s opinions of work they haven’t seen. It only speaks to people who’ve built somewhere silent enough to hear it.
Joseph Campbell told his students to follow their bliss, and the advice has been misread for fifty years as permission to do whatever feels pleasant. He meant something with more spine in it. Bliss, in the useful reading, is an intersection — the place where the pull I’ve been describing meets something the world actually needs, where the work only you would think to do turns out to be work someone is waiting for. David Perell puts the same thought commercially: become the only person who does what you do. The paradox he’s noticed is that specificity travels — the more particular the work gets, the more universally it seems to land, and the harder it becomes for anyone, or anything, to copy.
The generals had the same maps Lawrence had. Better ones, probably, along with the rank, the resources and the certainty. What they didn’t have was ten years of following an unfashionable pull through country nobody important considered worth attention, and so the desert that was a wall to them was a door to him.
You have some version of that country. There’s a question that keeps coming back to you on walks, one you’ve probably filed under hobbies, or someday, or things I’ll get to when the serious work is done. I’d pull the file. That question is your nervous system telling you, in the only language it has, where the door is.
Come, let’s walk through that door together.
“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
If this pulled at something, tap the heart and pass it on to the person it made you think of.
Well said Ahmed. I like the Soros's approach with back pain being part of the risk management.