Growing up, I played a lot of baseball. I hated every minute of it, but my parents made me do it anyway. From the time I was about 10 until I turned 13 or 14, it was baseball every week; games and practice in the spring, all-day "torture camp" in the summer (lots of lap-running), and winters at an indoor practice facility "heated" to about 50 degrees. The only relief I got was in the fall, and only because I played a different sport—soccer—where it wasn't one strikeout after another.

In spite of playing sports—maybe because I grew to dislike baseball so much—the value of teamwork was lost on me; I never learned it studying, practicing my instrument, or in any of my summer jobs. And at University of Illinois, where many classes used force-fit grade distributions—top 25% As, next 25% Bs, etc—the lesson was clear: your mission is to out-work and out-study the rest of the class, by yourself.

So it's probably no surprise that I wasn't much of a "team player" coming out of college. Through graduate school and into my time in Seattle, my role models were hedge fund guys and traders, people who made money by making big bets, and being right. Something appealed to me about studying the hell out of something, thinking independently, and getting paid not because someone liked your smile, but because you were right. That you could do this by yourself or with 1-2 others made it all the more appealing.

I think this attitude—making money by being right—is something that comes naturally to people with scientific training, which I picked up in graduate school. Like trading, science requires intellectual honesty, an ability to see things for what they are, irrespective of how you want them to be. There's a reason they call it investment research: just like the scientific kind, it requires a lot of study, quantitative analysis, and a commitment to truth. It's not hard to see why so much of high finance, especially the less sales-driven and more numerical parts, favor people with scientific training; the mindsets are just so similar.

These days, since moving to San Francisco, traders impress me less. In the last seven years, I've co-founded a startup that got sold, gotten married, and done a lot of hands-on investing and consulting; I've learned a lot about partnerships, relationships, and trust. Traders may get wealthy from "beating the system", but leadership—military, political, civic, commercial—is what builds great societies and lasting institutions.

These days, it's not Nassim Taleb, Steve Pavlina, or The Zurich Axioms that inspire me; it's Seneca, Good to Great, and Tesla; stories of military and political leadership, not the aloof neutrality of places like Switzerland.